Human Rights and Religion: New Thinking

Religion has found its way back to center stage in international politics as well as among an increasing group of scholars in religion and international affairs. Human rights scholars and activists need to pay attention. This new interest in religion exemplified in these four books questions an ideology dear to many hearts: namely, the separation of religion and state, especially when that ideology excludes religion from the public sphere. Secularism, and the concept of religion in particular, are now being identified as concepts so fundamental to the ways Western intellectuals have interpreted their own history that they cannot readily be applied to other histories, cultures, and religions. This re-thinking has important implications for human rights scholarship as well as for advocacy.

There are many reasons why religions, especially world religions, are relevant to the human rights field. Primarily it is because worldwide religions set norms for many of the same ethical fields in social justice as the modern international human rights regime. World religions have also been powerful political forces in their own right, shaping nations and empires. In fact, in spite of secularist ideologies espousing the promotion of separation, the worlds of religion and politics have been entangled throughout history. In particular, the Western version of secularism has been traced by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age¹ to show its many variant iterations over the centuries. Since the Enlightenment, secularism and related theories of church-state relations such as laïcité in France have been used to exclude religions from the public sphere. In practice, however, with the exceptions of states such as China and Russia in their most virulent atheistic periods, this separation has always been less than complete. In most countries today, substantial characteristics reflecting national religious heritages can be found in public spheres. The rise of political Islam, and especially its expansion to the West, have generated a slew of academic studies calling for new approaches to religion in the public sphere. The four books under review seek to move the academic debates forward.

Religion and International Relations Theory brings together eight authors, each of whom takes an issue in international relations theory, ask why its study in the past has ignored religion, and how this might be rectified. The main streams of international relations theory—Realism, Constructivism, and Liberalism—have been based on a secularist view of politics, as has the work of the US and most other diplomatic establishments, including the UN. These approaches to international relations have focused on states and the ways in which they interact. In the practice of international affairs religion has been considered primarily under the rubric of religious tolerance and freedom of religion for persons and institutions. These studies lead the editor, Jack Snyder, to conclude that “religion presents analytical challenges to all three traditional international relations paradigms.”² In fact, the challenge for international relations theory is more than just to include religion. The power and interests of many states are more than matched today by the power and interests not only of some religions, but also by the power and interests of mammoth international commercial activities, not to mention the more ephemeral but significant power and influence of civil society. International relations theory thus needs paradigms that recognize not only states, but all major intergovernmental, nongovernmental (including religion), and commercial forces that shape the international public sphere as well as individual lives. Human rights advocacy and human rights scholarship therefore have to negotiate their place in these two complex and changing tri-polar universes, namely of reality and practice, and scholarship.

The Power of Religion...