Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, Volume 2: Religion and Politics (Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion)

350 Pages·2011·1.53 MB·English

by  Patrick Michel

Religion and Politics
Annual Review of the Sociology
of Religion
Editors
Enzo Pace, Luigi Berzano and Giuseppe Giordan
Editorial Board
Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa)
Anthony Blasi (Tennessee State University)
Roberto Cipriani (Università di Roma Tre)
Xavier Costa (Universidad de Valencia)
Franco Garelli (Università di Torino)
Gustavo Guizzardi (Università di Padova)
Dick Houtman (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)
Solange Lefebvre (Université de Montréal)
Otto Maduro (Drew University)
Patrick Michel (CNRS and EHESS, Paris)
Ari Pedro Oro (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
Adam Possamai (University of Western Sydney)
Ole Riis (Agder University)
Susumu Shimazono (University of Tokyo)
William H. Swatos, Jr. (Augustana College)
Jean-Paul Willaime (EPHE, Sorbonne)
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (University of Leipzig)
Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University)
Fenggang Yang (Purdue University)
Sinisa Zrinscak (University of Zagreb)
VOLUME 2
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/arsr.
Annual Review of the
Sociology of Religion
Volume 2: Religion and Politics
Edited by
Patrick Michel
Enzo Pace
LEIDEN • BOSTON
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISSN 1877-5233
ISBN 978 90 04 20928 2
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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Fees are subject to change.
CONTENTS
Preface: Religion and Politics .....................................................................vii
Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace
Articles
PART I
THE RECOMPOSITION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN
RELIGION AND POLITICS, AND THE NEW FEATURES
OF THE GLOBAL RELIGIOUS SYSTEM
Religious Pluralization and Intimations of a Post-Westphalian
Condition in a Global Society .................................................................3
Peter Beyer
Resurgent Religion in Politics: The Martyr, the Convert and
the Black Knight of Apocalypse ............................................................30
Enzo Pace
Religious, Political and Global ...................................................................48
Patrick Michel
Complicating the “Clash of Civilizations”: Gender and Politics
in Contemporary Kuwait .......................................................................64
Alessandra L. González and Lubna Al-Kazi
The “Social Integration” of Religious Groups in Society:
A Social Mechanism Approach .............................................................85
Jörg Stolz
PART II
RELIGION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC,
STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Christian Religion in the West: Privatization or Public
Revitalization? .......................................................................................119
John Roeland, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers,
Willem de Koster, Peter Mascini, and Jeroen van der Waal
vi contents
The Cultural Foundations of Islamist Leadership in Morocco ...........135
Mohammed Maarouf
The Protestant House Church and Its Poverty of Rights
in China .................................................................................................160
Zhaohui Hong
Rethinking the Role of the Catholic Church in Building
Civil Society in Contemporary China: The Case of
Wenzhou Diocese ................................................................................177
Shun-hing Chan
PART III
RELIGION AND POLITICS BETWEEN
COMMUNITARIANISM AND POLICY OF IDENTITY
India: The Politics of (Re)conversion to Hinduism of Christian
Aboriginals ............................................................................................197
Christophe Jaffrelot
Religion and Politics: The Italian Case ..................................................216
Franco Garelli
The Reciprocal Instrumentalization of Religion and Politics
in Brazil .................................................................................................245
Ricardo Mariano and Ari Pedro Oro
The Reinvention of Cuban Santería and the Politics of Identity ........267
Elena Zapponi
A Secular Cancellation of the Secularist Truce: Religion and
Political Legitimation in Australia .....................................................287
Marion Maddox
Note
The Concept of Implicit Religion: What, When, How, and Why? .....309
Edward Bailey
List of Contributors ..................................................................................326
Index ..........................................................................................................333
PREFACE
RELIGION AND POLITICS
Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace
Over the past thirty years, religion has increasingly played a relevant
role, both on a national level and in international affairs. Since 1978,
with the Iranian Revolution, there has been an acceleration in the events
occurring after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the rise of political Islam up to
its senile disease of terrorism, the crucial part played by Pope John Paul
II in seconding the final collapse of the Soviet system, the emergence of
neo-Hindu movements ever more aggressively against religious diver-
sity, and a parallel growth in the new Christian Right Wing in the USA
could all be listed on the agenda of the social sciences, as well as on the
agenda of international affairs. All these events have been interpreted as
symptoms of God’s “return” or “revenge”, a religious revival all over the
world. Is it a restoration of the sacred canopy? One the most prominent
scholars of secularization, Peter Berger, who biased a generation of soci-
ologists in the West (and elsewhere, if we consider the Marxist version of
his theory in the former Communist regimes), has himself dismantled
his earlier assumptions (Berger, 1999; 2008). Meanwhile, all over the
world, religion is a vital force in the life of individuals and societies –
only Europe still seems to be a sort of exception (Davie, 2002), reversing,
in a sense, the old American exception. Around the world, but not in
Europe (usque tandem?), people are furiously believing and practising
religion, according to Peter Berger once again (1999). This explains why
scholars who paid little attention to religion in the past, and particularly
those who did not specialize in the social sciences of religion, have
turned to focus more and more on analyzing the key factor of religion in
society. Economists and political scientists, scholars of international
relations and students of marketing have considered religion as a useful
password for understanding social and economic processes, political
conflicts and the circulation of commodities in societies shaped by
diverse religious identities. We are therefore faced not only with a huge
quantity of books, articles and surveys, edited by social scientists of reli-
gion, but also with a varied and sometimes plethoric production outside
the traditional confines of the sociology or anthropology of religion.
viii patrick michel and enzo pace
We are indeed witnessing an increasing interest in the topic of religion,
sometimes associated with the issue of risk. The Risikogesellschaft (Beck,
1986; 1997) is the ideological or theoretical frame that enables us to
understand the mutual attraction between the religious theme and the
risk society. Religion immediately brings to mind fanaticism, ethnic
conflicts, violence, terrorism; it represents a new threat to democracy,
peace and world order. At the same time, religion has become a pressing
issue on the political agenda. The continuing reference to security in the
politicians’ rhetoric, sometimes linked to migration policy, but also to
fears of terrorist attacks by so-called radical Islamic groups, confirms
the above considerations. In the absence of other topics for mobilizing
and polarizing public opinion – it’s the case of the collapse of dictator-
ship or authoritarian regimes, falling down dramatically in Tunisia or
Egypt in the hot winter of 2011 – the religious risk has worked, and
continues to do so, despite evidence all over the world that the radical
politico-religious movements have failed (Roy, Volk, 1988; Roy, 2010;
Pace, 2004). The attempt made by politicians to reframe the policy of
social cohesion in a neo-nationalist light (one land, one language, one
religion = one political community), demising any kind of multicultur-
alism, facilitating instead a return to assimilation shaped by fear of the
other (culture, religion, language, and so on), is very often associated
with a restoration of the primacy of religious discourse in the public
sphere. It is not just a return of religion in the public sphere (Casanova
1994), but the exploitation of religion by politics to reconstruct a social
cohesion in the absence of ideological resources.
The main goal of the second issue of the Annual Review of the
Sociology of Religion (ARSR), devoted entirely to religion and politics, is
precisely to question the sense of a reconstruction of the mutual and
simultaneous relations between these two spheres of social life. What
does this process mean and where is it taking us?
We take a pragmatic stance: observing religion as a macro-indicator
of a transformation in the political domain. Our hypothesis is as
follows: instead of supporting the idea of the return of religion to the
public domain, we prefer to argue that its new social visibility and role
as a protagonist in politics is evidence of the crisis being experienced
by politics. In particular, this crisis concerns one of the most impor-
tant constitutive elements of politics: the capacity to imagine a new
world, what Hannah Arendt calls the miracle of the incipit (Arendt,
1973), i.e. the narrative capable of creating a universe of believing
that gives identity to people and, at the same time, infuses hope in social
preface: religion and politics ix
change. In the contemporary world, all the great narratives of the
20th century have disappeared. This means that all the conditions for
mobilizing a collective belief in the miracle of politics no longer exist.
Politics is consequently continuing to lose its credibility, its reliability.
Politics gets into trouble when it attempts to manage its autonomy, its
legitimating mechanisms, and its effectiveness all together. Its autonomy
is limited by the global market and global migrations, which tend to
reduce its sovereignty over a given national territory. The traditional
legitimating mechanism, based on the recognition of a national identity,
has become more and more precarious nowadays in many societies with
high levels of cultural and religious diversity: I can feel like a new citizen
in a nation to which I do not belong historically. Last but not least,
the effectiveness of politics is faced with such a strong differentiation
between people by race, gender, sexual orientation, religious diversity,
that its decision-making process suffers a sort of paralysis.
Religion, on the other hand, seems to be able to play a crucial part on
the public stage and in the political arena, both when it comes to redefin-
ing the role of politics and involving religion in this process, and when
politics makes religion instrumental to its own ends, mobilizing salva-
tion goods (Stölz, 2008) to recreate a mechanism for its own legitimation.
To sum up, therefore, when politics becomes less dependable, religion
can mobilize to make people believe in the effectiveness of politics despite
the deregulation processes underway in society, and despite the wide-
spread decline in the sense of belonging to a political community.
By appealing to religion, politics reveals its internal difficulties, relat-
ing both to the lack of any utopian prospects of a new world, and to the
resurgent forms of Millenarian and Messianic movements that very
often extend their religious utopia into the political sphere. When poli-
tics agrees to support such movements, it is indeed seeking new grounds
for its legitimation. The challenge for politics is to find a password so as
to enter the movement of society, to grasp the arcane of social change,
convincing people that they form a society, not just a segmented, frag-
mented jumble of various individualist interests and strategies. For poli-
tics, referring to religion means defining its relationship with the
movement of society, managing the main devices for either controlling
or rejecting that movement. In the latter case, politics tends to use
religion to promote a new vertical sociability, splitting society into
pure/impure human beings, loyal/disloyal citizens, friends/enemies (on
the inside and on the outside). It also tends to reconstruct the myth of
the origins of a nation and of national identity, applying a sort of dual