Religion and Power: No Logos Without Mythos

281 Pages·2014·1.519 MB·English

by  Dawkins, Richard, Habermas, Jürgen, Martin, David

Religion and PoweR
At last, a book from a leading sociologist about the real relations between religion, politics and
violence. It sets the standard for future discussions.
Keith ward, University of oxford, UK
Not since the writings of R.H. Tawney have the sociological and moral imaginations been joined
in such an eloquent defence of both reason and religion. Martin not only commits us to the most
rigorous of reflections on religion and power, he also demands we engage with the power and
authority of religion.
adam Seligman, Boston University, USa
The complicated and very varied relationships between faith and power can only be understood by
making comparisons between different societies and at different points in their history. This is the
great strength of David Martin's analysis. His knowledge is wide and he compares with great skill.
It is a refreshing change from the ignorant and purely ideological analyses provided by our born-
again atheists in which faith inevitably renders malign the exercise of power and anyway must give
way to a brave new secular and enlightened world. David Martin has shown both that religious
convictions and religious institutions continue to be directly and indirectly important in shaping
the uses of power and that the consequences of this vary both by which religion we are considering
and by the way faith is embedded in and interacts with other aspects of the social order. In this
latter respect faith is no different from secular political beliefs and values. Truly a masterpiece of
comparative sociology.
Christie davies, University of Reading, UK
This book offers new insights into the evolution of religion, and its complex relations to modern
nationalism and politics, relations characterized by both borrowing and opposition. Attempts to
mark a neat separation between religion and the secular do more to obscure what is going on in
our world than clarify the moral issues we face. David Martin’s careful analysis casts floods of light
on the real world, in which no group is pure, and all honest agents have to face dilemmas, often
agonizing. There is much more in this broad and stimulating book, including reflections on the
continued significance of sacred spaces in contemporary cities, and their relations to each other.
Charles Taylor, Mcgill University, USa
There are few more contentious issues than the relation of faith to power or the suggestion that
religion is irrational compared with politics and peculiarly prone to violence. The former claim
is associated with Jürgen Habermas and the latter with Richard dawkins. in this book david
Martin argues, against Habermas, that religion and politics share a common mythic basis and
that it is misleading to contrast the rationality of politics with the irrationality of religion. in
contrast to Richard dawkins (and new atheists generally), Martin argues that the approach
taken is brazenly unscientific and that the proclivity to violence is a shared feature of religion,
nationalism and political ideology alike rooted in the demands of power and social solidarity.
to Izaak
Religion and Power
no logos without Mythos
david MaRTin
London School of Economics, UK
© david Martin 2014
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
david Martin has asserted his right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
Published by
ashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Martin, david, 1929–
Religion and power-no logos without mythos / by david Martin.
pages cm
includes index.
iSBn 978-1-4724-3359-6 (hardcover ) – iSBn 978-1-4724-3360-2 (pbk. )
– iSBn 978-1-4724-3361-9 (ebook) – iSBn 978-1-4724-3362-6 (epub)
1. Religion and politics. 2. Religion–Philosophy. 3. Political science–Philosophy. i. Title.
Bl65.P7M348 2014
201'.72–dc23
2013051044
iSBn 9781472433596 (hbk)
iSBn 9781472433602 (pbk)
iSBn 9781472433619 (ebk – PdF)
iSBn 9781472433626 (ebk – ePUB)
IV
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry ling limited,
at the dorset Press, dorchester, dT1 1Hd
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Secularisation, Secularism and the Post-Secular:
The Power Dimension 7
PART 1: RelIgIon, WAR AnD VIolenCe
2 The Problematic 33
3 The Rhetorical Issue of Sentences about Religion and Violence 45
4 Modes of Truth and Rival narratives 57
5 The Rival narratives 69
PART II: RelIgIon AnD nATIonAlISM, RelIgIon AnD
PolITICS
6 The Political Future of Religion 79
7 nationalism and Religion: Collective Identity and Choice 99
8 Charisma and Founding Fatherhood 115
9 Religion and Politics 141
10 Religion, Politics and Secularisation 155
11 no logos without Mythos 173
vi Religion and Power
PART III: RelIgIon, PoWeR AnD eMPlACeMenT
12 The Historical ecology of european and north American
Religion 183
13 Inscribing the general Theory of Secularisation and Its
Basic Patterns in the Space/Time of the City 203
14 england and london 225
15 Moscow and eurasia: Centre and Periphery, ethno-religion
and Voluntarism, Secularisation and De-Secularisation 245
Index 261
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1, ‘Secularisation, Secularism and the Post-Secular: The Power
Dimension’, was given at Moscow State University in September 2013 and
at Heidelberg University in July 2013. It was translated into German, and
published in Russian and English in Religion, State and Church in Russia and
Worldwide (Fall 2013).
A shortened version of Chapters 2–5 was published as ‘Religion und Gewalt’,
in Transit: Europäische Revue 43 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 137–58. Chapter 5 was
originally a short paper given in Vienna for the IWM conference on secularism
in June 2012, chaired by Charles Taylor, at the Institut Français, Vienna.
Chapter 6, ‘The Political Future of Religion’, was prepared for a conference
arranged by Villa Gillet, Lyons, in November 2012, and published on its website.
Chapter 7 on ‘Nationalism and Religion: Collective Identity and Choice’ was
given as the Ernest Gellner Memorial Lecture for 2013, at the London School
of Economics (LSE) in April 2013, and published in Nations and Nationalism
i 20:1,January 2014.
Chapter 8, ‘Charisma and Founding Fatherhood’, was given at the nationalism
conference of April 2011 at the LSE, and published in a shortened version in
Vivian Ibrahim and Margit Wunsch (eds), Political Leadership, Nations and
Charisma (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) as Chapter 3, pp. 40–51. I am grateful
to Routledge for permission to reprint.
Chapter 10 was published as ‘Religión, política y secularización: comparaciones
entre Europe del Oeste y del Este’ in Rodrigo Muñoz, Javier Sánchez Cañizares
and Gregorio Guitián (eds), Religión, Sociedad Moderna y Razón Práctica
(Pamplona: EUNSA, 2012), pp. 15–31. It was also translated into Ukrainian
for the purposes of the University of L’viv during my visit there in 2011.
viii Religion and Power
Chapter 11 was given at the Ernst-Troeltsch-Gesellschaft Kongress in Munich
in October 2011.
A shorter version of Chapter 13 was given at a conference on post-secularity
held at Groningen University in 2009 and published in Arie Molendijk, Justin
Beaumont and Christoph Jedan (eds), Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious,
the Political and the Urban (Leiden and Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2010), pp. 345–62.
I am grateful to Brill for permission to reprint.
Discussions related to the argument of this book are to be found in my two
articles for the 2014 Wiley-Blackwell volumes on World Christianity edited
by Michael McClymond and Lamin Sanneh: one deals with secularisation in
Europe and North America and the other with Christianity, Western music and
the return of the sacred.
Introduction
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
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).