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The Secular State Under Siege The Secular State Under Siege Religion and Politics in Europe and America Christian Joppke polity Copyright © Christian Joppke 2015 The right of Christian Joppke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2015 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, 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. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6541-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6542-9(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joppke, Christian. The secular state under siege : religion and politics in Europe and America / Christian Joppke. – 1 pages cm ISBN 978-0-7456-6541-2 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6542-9 (paperback) 1. Religion and politics–Europe. 2. Religion and politics– United States. 3. Religion and state–Europe. 4. Religion and state–United States. 5. Secularism. 6. Islam. 7. Christianity. I. Title. BL65.P7J67 2015 322′.1094–dc23 2014025938 Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com Contents Introduction: Religion as Structure and as Actor 1 1 Religion in Social and Political Theory 5 2 Secularization and the Long Christian Exit 42 3 Challenge to the Secular State (I): The Christian Right in America 86 4 Challenge to the Secular State (II): Islam in Europe 128 Conclusion: Islam and Christianity in the Secular State 172 Notes 188 References 205 Index 222 v Introduction Religion as Structure and as Actor A small book on so big a topic as “religion and politics” is no minor undertaking. I tackle it from a historical and institutional perspective, with a dual focus on Western Europe and North America, Christianity and Islam. This is still vast enough, but already less than everything. A historical-institutional perspective largely excludes behaviorism, such as the correlating of voting patterns or partisan identification with religious orientation, and so on, which has preoccupied much of the American political sociology of religion.1 The regional focus on the West also excludes, now regrettably, the rest of the world, such as the Middle East or South-east Asia, where religious conflict may be far more dramatic and central to political life than in the temperate zones – this part of the world simply is beyond my competence (also linguistically). I arrive at this topic as a long-standing student of the nation-state and its contemporary transformation in the West, especially if related to migration and multiculturalism. After the “challenge to the nation-state,” to quote an earlier book of mine (Joppke 1998), now there is a “challenge to the secular state.” One part of this story is academic, and it is astonishing to see how many fellow intellectual travelers of mine made similar moves.2 But the other half of this story is in the real world, where even in the secularized West “public religion” has had a mighty 1 2 INTRODUCTION come-back, to the degree that it had ever disappeared (the first to register this is Casanova 1994). Partially, but not exclusively, the revival of public religion is a result of international migration and the arrival of new religions into Western societies that challenge established arrangements between religion and the secular state. A historical and institutional perspective takes “religion” both as structuring principle and as actor, as a structural force that has shaped the modern world like perhaps no other force and as a claims-maker within this world that religion helped bring about. On the structural side, religion (more precisely: Christianity) has shaped modern political life, including party systems, public institutions, and state structures and national identities, in the most profound yet often unacknowledged ways – Carl Schmitt (2005 [1922]) even argued famously that the lexicon of basic political concepts (such as “sovereignty”) consists largely of secularized theological concepts. No one has articulated the unmatched structuring powers of religion in human history more succinctly than Tocqueville: “There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates” (1969 [1835–40]: 442–3). Tocqueville, of course, was the unmatched theorist of liberal democracy, and he provocatively argued that in a democratic society religion was even more important than in feudalism for bringing about trust and cohesion in society: “[I]f [man] has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe” (p. 444). Turning Tocqueville around, however, there is good reason to argue that liberal democracy itself, in which – pace Toc- queville – religion no longer is the central motive force and legitimizing principle and where society has become secularized (a key term thor- oughly scrutinized in this book), could have arisen only in a Christian, and no other religious, context. At the same time, there is much variation in the relations between state and religion as the latter walked out of politics, being different in Europe (where church and state once were rival forces) and in America (where no such rivalry ever existed). Within Europe, religion–state relations differ in Protestant and Catholic or mixed countries, with a whole variety of church–state regimes, all compatible with the strictures of secularism, and with the peculiar presence of Chris- tian Democratic parties in some countries but not in others. In short, religion (or rather Christianity) as structuring principle of even secular and secularizing societies needs to be acknowledged, and it will be done in this book in broad yet comparatively refined brushstrokes. On the other side, religion is also an actor that appears in secular contexts with specific claims. Of particular interest here are new