Symposium: The Impact of Religion on Global Affairs, 1998: Introduction

Those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.” With these trenchant words of warning, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger, speaking at SAIS in the fall of 1996, concluded the first in a series of lectures examining “The Impact of Religious Conviction on the Politics of the 21^st Century.”

Even two years ago, the thrust of Professor Berger’s presentation - that in world “as furiously religious as it ever was,” secularism was in headlong retreat - not only qualified as provocative, but, to some listeners, may even have bordered on the outlandish. That a professional school of international affairs like SAIS should host a two-year project to consider the political implications of resurgent religiosity may also have seemed unorthodox if not quirky.

In 1998, Professor Berger’s thesis no longer seems so outrageous. Even among foreign policy professionals beguiled by the “rise and fall of Asia,” economic globalization, and the so-called global agenda, assertions of religion’s relevance to international relations today are unlikely to raise many eyebrows. That even in an age of cultural upheaval, economic globalization, and rapid technological change religious dogmas and faith-based institutions will play powerful roles in shaping the international order may not yet have achieved the status of conventional wisdom. But it has at least become non-controversial.

Yet despite this growing awareness of religion’s importance as a force in politics, both domestic and international, institutional efforts to incorporate religion into professional education have lagged. In professional schools of international relations, religion remains an orphan. At SAIS, for example, there is no chair of religion and international relations - nor is there likely to be in the foreseeable future. Religion figures, if at all, only on the margins of the courses offered by the school’s various academic departments. Whereas other subjects of emerging importance in international affairs - topics such as international finance or regions such as Southeast Asia or Central Asia, for example - rightly find a permanent niche as part of the school, religion remains, thus far at least, an afterthought.

When it comes to preparing students for careers in international relations, we have yet to determine where and how - if at all - religion ought to “fit.” Thus, the considerable value of this symposium: along with initiatives such as the lecture series that Professor Berger inaugurated, it continues a process of probing and exploration from which something like a coherent understanding of religion’s role in international politics may yet emerge. We are hardly past the point of knowing what it is that we don’t know. Prolonged and deliberate incubation may well be in order.

In any symposium, the proper measure of success lies not in whether or not the result achieves consensus, but in whether it provokes and challenges. It should identify the key issues and draw the lines between opposing perspectives. A symposium stirs the pot and turns up the heat.

Based on those criteria, the contributors to this imaginatively conceived symposium have succeeded admirably. Readers will no doubt differ in identifying particular highlights, but for me the real value of this exercise is that the symposiasts have shown considerable courage in advancing daring propositions that demand further research and analysis.

Thus, despite the headline-grabbing impact of religious extremists willing to resort to violence, we are told that the real role of religion in international politics lies in the work of faith-based organizations who labor diligently and without fanfare as “militants for peace.” In an era of government retrenchment and of declining international support for development, we learn that religious organizations are “moving to the forefront of the development field.” Faith-based groups may be uniquely suited to promote the cultural transformation that, in the eyes of some observers, is a precondition for economic takeoff.

We are asked to contemplate “the strong correlation between political freedom and religious belief,” a correlation that if true, turns on its head a central premise of the Enlightenment. Where freedom does not exist, we are asked to consider that religious institutions may well serve as “surrogate means” of incorporating the public into...