Securing the Sacred: Religion, National Security, and the Western State

Introduction: Religion as a National Security Enigma

Introduction Religion as a National Security Enigma After 9/11, religion reappeared as a national security enigma in the West. For many, the events of that day had an irreducibly religious dimension . For reasons of national security, the sacred could no longer be ignored. On the other hand, it remained unclear exactly how to engage with religious ideas and actors without undermining the legitimacy of the secular state, creating new insecurities for all. This is the paradox, I argue, that states face regarding religion and national security in a post–9/11 world. This book is about how three secular states—Britain, France, and the U.S.—perceive the relationship between religion and national security and grapple with it in their own ways, both at home and abroad. Official national security strategies, presidential and prime ministerial speeches, internal documents, and confidential meetings provide a wealth of evidence that after 9/11 all three governments engaged in wide-ranging efforts to encourage religious reform, especially within Islam. Similar efforts, however, led to different outcomes—some successful, others not. What can account for these similarities and differences, and what can scholars of religion and International Relations learn from these cases? I find that when secular states engage with religious actors for purposes of national security at the domestic level of analysis, religious communities are often alienated because questions of social and political loyalty become bound up with “correct” interpretations of their religion. The secular state cannot avoid here the appearance of manipulating religious belief for its own national security ends, thus straining its legitimacy. Abroad, it is easier to 2 ✦ Securing the Sacred separate matters of political loyalty from the promotion of certain interpretations of religion over others; as with the case of the U.S., encouraging the development of certain interpretations of Islam can be outsourced to reliable state allies who can back up their programs of religious restructuring with coercive force. In the final analysis, religion is easier securitized at the international , rather than the domestic, level of analysis. In any case, however, secular states frame religion as a matter of national security at their peril. Religion in Global Politics: The Wider Context For most of its existence, the modern study of global politics proceeded under the assumption that international politics is high politics: the realm in which great powers, measured by material capability, compete with each other for security and survival. Religious beliefs may impact the personal predilections of policymakers, exacerbate a distant communal conflict, or retard the progression of a “Third World” society toward socialist or capitalist modernity. By and large, however, religious actors and beliefs did not and should not have a significant role to play in international politics. For religion had been banished from interstate relations since the age of Westphalia : religion as a reason for war, conquest, or intervention in the affairs of others was the preserve of an early modern Europe struggling to emerge into our more enlightened times. Modern states have since come into being, and the most powerful of these have escaped religion’s volatility and fashioned a world less savage. Reinforced intellectually by sociological theories of secularization that underpinned Western social science for the greater part of the 20th century, this “Westphalian” narrative solidified as common sense in the scholarship and practice of international politics (Philpott 2002; Carlson and Owens 2003; Thomas 2005). It was not until the end of the Cold War, and slowly even then, that scholars began to turn their attention to the role that religion plays in international affairs. By the early 1990s a number of scholars began to perceive that collective obsession with Cold War politics had allowed religion to remain hidden from view. If one looked closely, however, one could detect that a “longing for an indigenous form of religious politics free from the taint of Western culture”—that is, free from both communism and Western free-market capitalism—had been brewing around the world all throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Juergensmeyer 1993, 1). A new generation of activists in Egypt, India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, disenchanted with the promises and Introduction ✦ 3 premises of competing Western ideologies, instead sought a new ethnic and religious nationalism that “view(ed) religion as a hopeful alternative, a base for criticism and change” (2). To be sure, the rise of religious alternatives to Western intellectual constructions was not unique to these decades. In his famous 1968...