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  • Religion and Global Affairs: Disregarding Religion
  • Paul Marshall (bio)

The apparent growth in religious influences is likely due to the fact that analysts are only now noticing what was always there. Heretofore religion has been widely ignored, or else treated as the sublimation of ethnicity, psychology, “culture,” or economics. In fact, it plays an independent role in forms of government, conflict, political change and democracy. Religious freedom currently merits much more attention as a factor in human rights and democracy.

I do not know if religion’s influence is increasing. This is not because I think current analysts exaggerate it but because earlier analysts ignored, downplayed or redefined it. This occurs even in discussions of the United States itself. Every few years we have announcements of a religious resurgence. But, as Peter Berger remarked, not referring to Native Americans, “America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes,” a nation of fervent faiths overlooked by self-styled rationalists. Occasionally a Swede visits Indian land and comes away surprised. Meanwhile, in the U.S., religious commitment continues its slow, steady, decades-long climb.

Examples of discounting religion elsewhere include Joseph Lelyveld’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning book on South Africa, Move Your Shadow, which describes the museum of Credo Mutwa, a sangoma, witch doctor. Partly because he thought that taking Mutwa’s project seriously pandered to white prejudice, Lelyveld described it in terms of as “cultural wounds” and “lost values.” However, as Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart recounts:

[I]n that year some 10,000 sangomas and inyangas were practicing in greater Johannesburg, consulted at least occasionally by 85 percent of all black households...its business tycoons hired diviners [End Page 13] to advise them on deals...Soweto’s newspapers and magazines frequently offered accounts of zombies raised, sorcerers sniffed out, ritual murders...In 1985, eighty-four evil witches or sorcerers were burned or stoned to death in the Northern Transvaal alone. They were victims, one assumes, of lost cultural values.

When in 1997 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad railed against speculators, “we are Muslims, and the Jews are not happy to see the Muslims progress...,” the Los Angeles Times described him as “race-obsessed.” Perhaps the Times took its cue from analyses of the former Yugoslavia wherein “Bosnian Muslims” and war between Orthodox, Catholics, and Muslims are routinely described as “ethnic.” In contrast, one religious leader in the country itself told David Little “here religion is nationality, religion is ethnicity, religion is everything.”

A 1998 New York Times editorial on Indonesia referred to “tensions between Indonesia’s Muslim majority and Chinese minority.” The Economist headlined a story about attacks on 25 churches and a temple in east Java after a Muslim heresy trial as “Race Riots.” The Economist’s 1996 review of Russian works noted the pervasive influence of Orthodoxy on the culture. It outlined Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov’s claim of a political and religious battle between Russia and the West dating from the 1054 schism between Rome and Byzantium, and described his hopes for the restoration of a “third Rome” on a Byzantine model. The same issue contained an article, presumably by westerners, on “Russian Exceptionalism” asking “Is Russia Different?” It resolutely ignores religion. Despite ruminations on Russian geography and the Russian soul, the word “Orthodoxy” does not even appear. 1

This myopia is not limited to press accounts. Much political analysis has an introverted focus on Enlightenment culture, as though this constituted the common opinion of humankind, or the common opinion of reasonable humankind, or at least the common opinion of Americans. Consequently, movements overseas are assimilated to Enlightenment categories. Hence, Islamic or Hindu militants are described as “right-wing,” whatever that might mean. But most such activists have detailed plans for economic controls of a kind usually thought of as “left-wing”. And what is a “right-wing” or “left-wing” view of whether a Hindu temple should be put on the site of the Babri mosque? When the vocabulary of left and right has run its tired course, we are left with that old standby, “fundamentalist”- a word dredged from the American past and of [End Page 14] dubious provenance and meaning even...

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