Religion and Global Affairs: Secular States and Religious Oppositions

In discussing the greater prominence of religion in global affairs, it is important to consider the role of the state. Decline in the values that have sustained modern states, combined with crises that are born of the weakening of the state at the institutional level, have both been caused by religious activism, and opened the door to greater involvement of religion in politics. This paper will consider these arguments with special reference to the cases of the Muslim world and India.

In recent years, religious activism has presented a serious political and intellectual challenge to the prevalent norms and values of the global order. Unwelcome intruders into the world scene, religious activists from the United States to Israel, the Muslim world, East and Central Europe, and Central and South Asia have challenged ruling orders and the values and beliefs that undergird the international system. Their challenge has been so fierce that social scientists and policymakers alike have been compelled to reevaluate the way in which they have conceived of historical change and religion’s role in it.

Religious activism has rejected secular norms, arguing instead for anchoring socio-political institutions and practices in religious values. Beyond this, it has echoed demands for social justice and served as the backbone to movements of dissent in Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. It has become the flag-bearer in liberation movements from southern Philippines to Kashmir to Chechnya, and in struggles for preservation of cultural authenticity from the Middle East to India to Indonesia. Religious activism has led efforts to reduce the powers of the state in the United States, and to dismantle command economies in Israel and India. Finally, it has lent support to demands for ethnic rights from East and Central Europe to South Asia. Religious activism has deeply influenced policymaking wherever it has surfaced. It has even forced states to rethink their foundational values and relations to their societies. What are we to make of this phenomenon, its cultural and political challenges, of the many social roles and political functions that it has assumed, and is likely to assume?

Religious activism has emerged in rejection of secularism and the state apparatuses and institutions which embody it. It is a manifestation of the cultural divide that has separated the values of the state and those of the religiously-inclined population. The rise of religious activism suggests that the heretofore prevalent assumption that religion had either been privatized, or was on its way to becoming privatized, is not valid. As the secular state has faced crises, faltered, or weakened, religion has emerged as the basis for alternate visions of state and its relation to society; and created a nexus between political disgruntlement and cultural tensions that characterize the state’s relations with society.

In popular opinion, the current wave of religious activism was first associated with Islam. After all, no incidence of religious activism has surpassed the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in its global impact, and the followers of no other religion hold Western attention as do Muslims. In explaining religion’s claim to politics, much is said of Islam’s emphasis on the inseparability of faith and politics, its legalism, anti-Western and atavistic bent, and its propensity to resort to violence. More nuanced explanations have viewed Islamic activism as an ideology of dissent that surfaced in the struggle with Western political and economic domination; its roots are therefore to be found in the unsavory experiences of Muslims with imperialism, which also explains its radicalism and rejection of the West. Still, others have seen Islamic activism as the vehicle of empowerment for the lower middle classes on the one hand, and on the other for integration into the larger society of the economically marginal and the socially dislocated whom development has left behind. Similar linkages between religious activism and disgruntled social groups can also be found in India, Israel, and Southeast Asia.

The ubiquitous importance of religious activism today, however, owes to more than social opposition. The global prominence of religion has been facilitated by significant changes in the values and...