In God’s name? The politicisation of religion and potentially deadly consequences
charts the politicisation of religion and the potentially deadly consequences.
The bitter divisions, the bloody conflict, the sectarianism, bigotry, and pervasive mistrust that have been so much a part of the fabric of the North since partition were fuelled in large measure by a phenomenon we have come to a new appreciation of in the post-9/11 age — political religion.
This might be best defined as the harnessing and exploitation of religion for political ends — the hijacking of religion to serve secular objectives and goals.
In its crudest — and one of its deadliest forms — it was best exemplified by the Rev Ian Paisley and Paisleyism, especially between the publication of the first edition of the scurrilous Protestant Telegraph in April 1966 and the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998.
But it also had its ‘green’ variety, as Martin Dillon, a BBC reporter who covered the North for 18 years, reminded us in his book, God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism. “Catholicism, nationalism, and republicanism are interconnected… The folk tradition of the gun in both communities carries with it a moral crusade in defence of the respective traditions,” he wrote in 1990.
And throughout the 19th century, in the long struggle for independence from British rule, it was nationalism that sustained and legitimated the campaigns for Catholic emancipation, land reform, and Home Rule.
Outside of Ireland, there were other, later examples of religion being co-opted on the side of nationalist causes.
“The success of religious nationalism since the latter part of the 20th century has surprised many commentators who believed that religion no longer had political significance in an era of nation states,” according to Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University.
“In 1979, for example, the increasingly secular state in Iran was overthrown by Islamic nationalists.”
“Religious nationalism is also a potent force in many other Islamic countries, as well as in India (Hinduism), Israel (Orthodox Judaism), and the former Yugoslavia (Roman Catholic Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, Islam).”
But it wasn’t until the 21st century that we witnessed the emergence of a political religion with a trans-national agenda. This is radical Islam, seeking the establishment of a universal caliphate.
Political religion has a very long history, but in its 21st century manifestations, it has assumed a virulent form of intolerance, misogyny, and oppressiveness that blossomed into a hatred of those who profess a different faith.
The latter are often categorised and ostracised (or worse) as heretics or infidels or blasphemers. The “return” of the Deity on the global stage (it would be a mistake to assume that the growing disenchantment with and disengagement from institutional religion in Ireland necessarily signifies a loss of faith in God) has been accompanied by a protean phenomenon with a very dark side — the rise and rise of political religion.
On 9/11, that dark side showed itself with fearful consequences.
The title of the 2009 book by the editor of the Economist and its Washington bureau chief — God Is Back — captured an important if unexpected truth about Western society.
It was unexpected because God’s obituary, famously penned by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 when he declared “God is dead”, had come to be regarded as a defining characteristic of Western culture, especially in the aftermath of two devastating world wars.
Nietzsche had used the phrase to give expression to the notion that the 18th century Enlightenment had “killed” the possibility of belief in God; he sought to encapsulate the consequences of the Enlightenment for the centrality of the concept of God and belief in God within Western European civilisation which had been essentially Christian in character since the time of the Emperor Constantine.
“Ever since the Enlightenment, there has been a schism in Western thought over the relationship between religion and modernity,” John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge point out in God Is Back.
“Europeans, on the whole, have assumed that modernity would marginalize religion. Americans, in the main, have assumed that the two things can thrive together. For most of the past 200 years, the European view of modernity has been in the ascendant.”
"They go on to tell us that “everyone who was anyone in European public life agreed that religion was dying — and that its effect on politics was ebbing”.
The European idea, they say, that you cannot become modern without throwing off religion’s yoke, had a massive influence all around the world.
Most trend-setting books in the 1990s saw the world through secular lenses.
The big game changer was 9/11. Images of the shocking attacks by planes hijacked by 19 young Muslims on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC will live forever in the memory of all those who witnessed them on television. Viewers could hardly believe what they were seeing.
The geopolitical consequences of those attacks have been immense and far-reaching. The earth may not have stood still on 9/11, but the terrible events of that day altered dramatically the way we look at the world today, at global affairs, and at religion in particular.
In her preface to the second edition (2009) of Religions in the Modern World, Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University, summed up the changed appreciation of religion:
“When the first edition was sent to the publishers in early 2001, the subject of religion in the modern world was still considered marginal by many people. In the intervening years, that situation has changed out of all recognition. Like it or loathe it, religion is back on the agenda again.
What has changed the most is thus the way we look at religion, and how seriously we take it. Religion is no longer dismissed as a private pastime, but it taken more seriously as a public and political force.
Religion has now entered the global age and breaks down frontiers. And it is now seen in many quarters — not least in policymaking circles in the world’s major capitals — in a new light.
More than ever before, religion is politically important today, and aspects of globalisation have undoubtedly contributed to this.
“From the local to the global level, religion is — more than ever —— an important and hotly debated part of modern life in the 21st century,” according to Malory Nye, author of Religion: The Basics.
What 9/11 also did was reopen — with a new urgency — the old debate about religion and terrorist violence. This is a debate with a long pedigree; we need only think of the Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the “wars of religion” that raged in the 16th and 17th centuries in the aftermath of the Reformation.
This is also a debate that has a particular pertinence to the Irish situation, due especially to the Troubles, which lasted from 1968 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, causing more than 3,000 deaths. Mark Juergensmeyer of the University of California, in a preface to the paperback edition of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, highlighted the central issue.
“Perhaps the first question that came to mind when television around the world displayed the extraordinary aerial assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, was why anyone would do such a thing?
“When it became clear that the perpetrators’ motivations were couched in religious terms, the shock turned to anger. How could religion be related to such vicious acts?”
At first glance, any link between religion and violence seems incongruous. Yet since the 9/11 attacks, the world has become acutely aware of what the novelist JG Ballard has called the “sinister fusion of religion and politics”.
For those of us accustomed to believe that religion is a force for good and a promoter of peace, and politics a means of creating a just and equal society, proof of the toxic and even lethal mix of the two has come as something of a shock.
This may be due to complacency, indifference or even ignorance on our part.
Did too many of us in the West accept that religion was somehow “neutral” when it came to politics, or that religion even occupied a separate sphere — and that the twain ne’er shall meet? Why would we ever think that religion might be “political” or that politics would harness or exploit or subvert religion for its own ends?
It began, some would argue, after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312AD, when Emperor Constantine, emerging victorious after fighting under the sign of the Cross (instructions received in a dream), bestowed great favours on Christianity, making it in effect the official (state) religion of the Roman Empire.
Attributing his victory to the Christian God, he forged a new alliance between altar and throne, between Church and State, marking the birth of political religion.
Its most modern — and extreme — manifestations are al-Qaeda and its offshoots and affiliates, Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and ISIS (or ISIL or Islamic State, and also the Taliban, though this movement is rooted in another branch of militant Islam known as Deobandism.
All the others are rooted in Wahhabism, named after its founder, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1791). This is a fundamentalist, puritanical and militant version of Islam that is the official or state religion of Saudi Arabia. The Deobandis, however, share many of the beliefs of the Wahhabis.
The “politicisation” of religion is almost as old as religion itself. Rulers have always been cognisant of the importance of having religion on their side, not because of any innate regard for religion (at least not in all cases) but because of its utility value.
Accordingly, over the centuries they have plotted and schemed and pursued associations and alliances to gain the advantages and benefits that would accrue from winning over religion.
Emperors, kings, princes, sultans, despots and tyrants have sought to harness, utilise, exploit and yoke religion for their own purposes, to advance their causes, to legitimise their regimes, to sanction their policies, or to pacify the masses.
Democratically elected leaders have also turned to religion with the aim of using it to bestow extra authority of the office of president or prime minister or Taoiseach and to bolster their programmes for government, or to underpin and divinely enhance their constitutions and charters of rights.
Conversely, down the ages, religious leaders — popes, patriarchs, archbishops, rabbis, ayatollahs and evangelical preachers — have shown a readiness to form alliances and pacts with states, governments, leaders of political movements and even dictatorships.
But these alliances were often entered into in the hope or with the intention that the state might confer privileged status on one particular religion above others, or in the expectation that the state might use its legislative apparatus to enforce a particular system of faith-based morality.
For secular leaders, the primary desire when entering an alliance with a Church or a religious organisation is, more often than not, the quest for “legitimacy”.
This pursuit of legitimacy was very much to the fore when the government of the newly-created Irish Free State sought to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
The appointment of a Nuncio to Dublin would have enhanced the standing of the government in the eyes of the public and also added a new element of legitimacy to the new State, especially within the international community.
In 1937, this was also a concern of Éamon de Valera when he despatched the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe, on a secret mission to Rome with a draft copy of the new constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) which was due to be put to the people for ratification by way of a referendum later in the year. Dev was hoping that Pope Pius XI would endorse the draft, thereby lending it important legitimacy for the voters of Catholic Ireland.
But the classic and most potent example of a legitimacy-producing-alliance in the 20th century, and one that would have huge long-term consequences in the 21st, occurred in 1932 and led to the creation of Saudi Arabia.
“The historic compact between the House of Saud and the House of Abdul Wahhab, an itinerant mid-18th century preacher in central Arabia, has been the foundation stone of Saudi rule,” explained David Gardner, international affairs editor of the Financial Times.
“Abdul Wahhab and his heirs, in exchange for clerical control of education and justice, have cloaked the House of Saud with legitimacy, playing up the royal role of guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.”
It is surely one of the great ironies of post-Second World War history that the US made Saudi Arabia a key regional partner in the Middle East.
Yet it is Saudi Arabia, where the Wahhabi clerical establishment sets the moral agenda, which has spent billions of petro-dollars exporting its virulent anti-Western brand of Islam, so we finish up on 9/11 where 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, as was Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the attacks.
Some terrible things have already happened in this century in God’s name, and who is to say that more will not follow?
That’s the frightening reality of the “dark side” of political religion in the 21st century.
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