Workshop 16: Religion, Democracy and Civil Liberties: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Ramifications
Abstract
Religion has left its previously assigned place in the private sphere both in Europe and in many other parts of the world, including the Middle East, becoming politically active in various ways and with assorted outcomes. This necessarily involves a remodelling and re-assumption of our understanding of religious actors’ public roles. This is because theories of secularisation had long condemned religious actors to both social and political marginalisation. The expectation was that as countries and societies modernised they would lose their religion; this didn’t generally happen. Thus, we need to rethink the relationship between religion and politics generally and between religion, democracy and civil liberties, in particular.
Our aim in this workshop is to focus on key debates and main arguments concerning religion, democracy and civil liberties. We take into account the following: (1) it is undesirable to essentialise religious traditions, (2) it is necessary to accept the multi-vocal nature of all religious discourses – which can provide resources for both supporters and opponents of democracy and civil liberties, (3) cultural factors – including religion – are normally of secondary importance in explaining both successful or failed democratisation, as well as continuity and development of democracy, including civil liberties, and (4) the relationship between secularization and liberalism should be critically examined in order to understand that a perceived ‘decline’ of religion does not necessarily entail an increase in liberal freedoms. In short, the workshop aims not only to cover both the main theoretical perspectives on the subject, as currently debated within the academic community, but also a review of the attitudes towards democracy of the different religious and secular traditions.
Description
Civil liberties, democracy and religion:
The key issue to be examined in the workshop is the relationship between civil liberties, democracy and religion.
Civil liberties
Civil liberties are the basic human or civil rights of the individual. In Britain, for example, the Human Rights Act of 1998 guarantees various rights, including: the right to life, freedom from torture, freedom from slavery and forced labour, the right to liberty and security, right to a fair trial, right to privacy, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to marry and have a family.
Civil liberties, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion, have long been of interest to philosophers, political scientists, and scholars of jurisprudence. These ‘human rights’, often considered to be cornerstones of modern democratic societies, have been implicated in many public controversies in recent years, including: the issue of Muslim women choosing to wear headscarves in France, Turkey and elsewhere; Denmark’s infamous ‘Mohammad cartoons’ from September 2005; the British Airways employee who wished to wear a small Christian cross at her neck at her workplace but was not allowed to do so by her employers in 2006; and the banning of minarets in Switzerland in 2009.
Democracy
Democracy was originally a form of direct governance by the citizens of a city (polis) in ancient Greece. In modern times, democracy refers to governance rooted in representative institutions whose officeholders are chosen by the populace through general elections. Attention to the relationship between religion and democracy often focuses on (1) the historical role of religion in directly generating, opposing, and/or sustaining democratic states and movements; (2) the study of religious organisations as mediating institutions that can strengthen civil society and thus reinforce democracy; (3) the influence of democratic political authority upon religious traditions founded on other modes of legitimate authority; (4) democratic and non-democratic forms of governance within religious organisations; and (5) the long-term viability of religion and religious belief in modern democracies characterised by high levels of religious pluralism and/or secularisation.
Four academic debates - which we focus upon in the workshop - stand out concerning the complex relationship between religion, democracy and civil liberties:
• Do religious traditions have core elements which are more or less conducive to improved democracy and civil liberties?
• Are the loudest religious traditions more or less receptive to and encouraging of democracy and civil liberties?
• Do religious actors ever determine the course of democracy and civil liberties?
• Do avowedly secular regimes actually have more in common with religious worldviews than they are willing to admit?
The nature and outcomes of interactions between religion, democracy and civil liberties is a crucial issue in the political life of the contemporary world. Although scholars disagree about their nature and scope, three issues are noted: (1) the possible role of religious actors in helping underpin or support authoritarian regimes, (2) inter-communal clashes, and (3) transnational extremist networks. In today’s Europe, such phenomena represent a dual challenge: first, religious communities must effectively integrate into and with democratic institutions; second, democratic institutions must find ways to accommodate different religions and religious citizens and, consequently, third, policy-makers must work out and implement new policies and forms of cooperation to cope with previously unexpected threats and issues, which in some cases can emanate from or be linked to religious extremist traditions and actors.
The issue of how, or if, religious traditions and religious actors might affect the possibility of successful democratization and, once established, democracy, has long been debated. Four stages can be noted: (1) the post-war period until the 1960s; (2) the decolonisation period in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the third wave of democracy, the 1970s to the 1990s; and (4) the contemporary period of multiculturalism and democratic uncertainty in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.
First, during the decades immediately after World War II, many scholars agreed that political culture – defined here as citizens’ orientation toward politics, affecting their perceptions of political legitimacy – was very important in explaining success or failure of democratisation and democracy. The political culture approach focused on how and in what ways religious traditions and actors to feed into and thus affect a country’s political culture, including citizens’ preference for or against democracy. For example, after World War II, Christian Democracy, in both West Germany and Italy, was an important component in the rebuilding of pro-democracy political cultures after lengthy experiences of undemocratic, totalitarian government.
Second, by the 1960s, both West Germany and Italy had established viable democratic regimes. This was a time of swift and widespread decolonisation in Africa, Asia and elsewhere in the developing world. The theoretical focus in relation to both democratisation and democracy shifted to institutional and economic factors: more robust, more representative institutions coupled with sustained economic growth were, it was claimed, needed if post-colonial were to democratise successfully. As a result, the influence of religion was diminished as democratic success or failure was seen to depend on both state-building and economic development.
Third, during the ‘third wave of democracy’, between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, much attention was paid to the role of religion in democratisation outcomes. The late Harvard academic, Samuel Huntington, claimed that various expressions of Christianity – notably, Protestantism and Catholicism – have a strong propensity to be supportive of democracy, while many other religions, including Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, do not. For example, in Poland, the Roman Catholic church played a key role in undermining the country’s Russian-imposed communist regime, helping establish a democratically accountable government of a country which, in 2004, joined the European Union. The pro-democracy role of the Church was not however restricted to Poland, but extended to various countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Fourth, as a result of migrations and demands of national minorities, democratic states have had to contend with a new reality: multiple, increased demands for equality and recognition, often couched in religious discourses. Thus, the modern order of church-state separation was challenged while at the same time new demands were made from a plurality of religious identities, some new. Often, these challenges have had profound implications for democracy and civil liberties.
In addition, at this time, there was the contemporaneous rise of the Christian Right in the United States of America, and its subsequent considerable impact on the electoral fortunes of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Add to this widespread growth of Islamist movements across the Muslim world, with significant ramifications for electoral outcomes in various countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Morocco; electoral successes for the Bharatiya Janata Party in India from the mid-1990s; and, substantial, sustained political influence for various Jewish religious political parties in Israel. The overall outcome of the third wave of democracy was a rapid growth of religious involvement in politics, an outcome that was not restricted to one or two religious traditions but extended to many of them. But not all of them were necessarily pro-democracy: some were, some were not. Perhaps most controversy attended the debate about the democratic tendencies of political Islam, although there was also a focus in this regard on Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Democratic’ and ‘Undemocratic’ Religions: Debates and Controversies:
Many scholars have focused upon what they have seen as a special affinity between democracy and Protestantism. Other religious traditions, on the other hand, for a variety of reasons, were said to be unlikely to prove supportive of democratic governance. By the late 1980s, however, this argument looked increasingly untenable. By this time, most Protestant countries were democratic, while, as Samuel Huntington pointed out, many contemporaneous ‘third wave’ transitions were taking place in traditionally Catholic countries. For Huntington, The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was the key factor in this change, encouraging many national Catholic hierarchies to adopt political positions critical of authoritarianism. Yet, while Catholicism had changed, Orthodox, Islamic and Confucian traditions still remained for Huntington problematic. Consequently, countries with these traditions to the fore were thought unlikely to democratise. Huntington was not suggesting that religion was the only or even the major factor at work in the change from authoritarianism to democratisation. But he did contend that religion’s place in a wider political cultural context would have some impact for the prospects for successful democratization. Less clear was precisely how the religious factor worked, especially in countries where formal religious adherence was low. One of the goals of the workshop is to examine this issue.
Huntington’s argument was questioned by many. For example, Alfred Stepan pointed to ‘multi-vocality’ – that is, a number of differing voices – that inhabit most religious traditions, as well as their often notable pragmatism: i.e., historic ability to live with a variety of political forms. Others have stressed that even if religious traditions have problems with democracy this has little relevance for political outcomes that have more to do with wider historical legacies, with the nature of the state, with leadership choices, or with levels of economic development. Clearly there is a need to separate out these two issues – a problematic relationship with democracy, and the question of whether this matters – but it might still be argued that if the relationship is problematic then this does impact upon values and attitudes within a society and therefore may impact upon the ability to promote democratic understandings. Even then, however, this would be a time-limited argument which suggests that at certain points in time and in certain contexts religious traditions might work against democracy, but this would be very different from the plainly nonsensical suggestion that some traditions are inherently, and perhaps for all times, incompatible with democracy. It is also worth adding at this point the fact that the real problem for many religious communities has been less with ‘democracy’ than with its liberal prefix. This is because to be liberal can be seen to favour an ‘anything goes’ approach to beliefs and ways of behaving. In passing, we can note that a concern with liberalism is certainly at the heart of contemporary Eastern Orthodox reservations about democracy, even though formally the churches support democratic governance. In addition, more generally, we can note the civil liberties dimension, including, for example, in relation to women’s abortion rights.
Similar things have been said about the role of Islam in societies where it is the dominant religious tradition. Many scholars have argued that there is no single, monolithic or essentialist Islam to which one can refer and that Islamic teachings contain resources that can be – and often are – used to promote pluralistic politics. Moreover, democracy has recently developed in several Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey and Indonesia, while India’s 140 million plus Muslims, plus Europe’s own Muslim communities, have no apparent problem with democracy. Such authors point to various red herrings utilised to promote the view of Islam as inherently anti-democratic, notably the idea that Islam has no tradition of the separation of the religious and the political sphere which tends to underlie contemporary democratic orders. Nonetheless, it might still be argued that there remain elements within ‘actually existing Islam’ – within the tradition as presently constituted and realised – that are problematic for democratic development. On the other hand, others have argued that claimed barriers to democracy in some Muslim countries - the jury remains out on what will happen in Tunisia; will it be 1989 again with Tunisia acting out the Poland role as galvaniser of a more general pro-democracy movement – are primarily linked to certain shared historical social and political features, including: long histories of authoritarian rule; weak and fragmented civil societies and powerful democracy-repressing armed forces. The point is that although some of those features tend to be legitimised in terms of ‘Islamic doctrine’, there is in fact nothing specifically ‘Islamic’ about them.
At the ideological level there remain features of Islam that may be unhelpful for processes of democratisation. For Steve Bruce one fundamental problem lies in the focus on way of life rather than theology, on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, with age old rules about behaviour less susceptible to change than the more metaphorical teachings of Christianity. There is also some suggestion that the greater emphasis given to the community over the individual may be problematic for, while democratic governance can encompass forms of communal or group representation, defining which groups should be represented remains fraught with difficulty. Of particular concern to most observers of Islamic thought and practice are issues relating to individual and minority rights. Whatever the arguments of liberal Muslim thinkers there remain deep ambiguities about the extent to which minority rights are guaranteed, for example, the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries, such as Christian Copts in Egypt, to practice their religion freely. Many of the major thinkers who have influenced Islamist movements, as well as the constitutions and proclamations of Muslim states on human rights issues, tend to hedge guaranteed rights with qualifications when it comes to issues relating to gender, minorities and religious difference. While the populations of these countries generally aspire to human rights protection, those who rule or aspire to rule, and many within the ‘clerical’ elite, would argue that so called universal principles of rights are being imposed from a Western cultural context and have to be adapted to local circumstances and value systems.
The co-existence of modernized cultures with old and new religion, most noteworthy Islam, raises a dual question. First, can religions adapt to the democratic order? But, also, second, can liberal democracy incorporate non-liberal constituencies? Given that this reality is likely to hold for the near future, democracy will be a challenge in religious states but also in secularized states where the liberalism of different constituencies will be tested.
Conclusion:
From this very brief overview of the religious engagement with democracy and civil liberties, we can draw several conclusions, which will inform the concerns of the workshop. First, because the primary focus of religion is on the ‘spiritual’ rather than the temporal, questions of governance have historically remained second order issues for most religious communities, although they have an interest in ensuring that political forms do not encroach on their right to believe and practice. When they have expressed an interest in politics, religious communities for much of recorded history have been sceptical about the benefits of democracy and only since the late nineteenth century have they begun to engage with it in a more constructive fashion. Second, our survey suggests that while all religious traditions have struggled with aspects of the liberal democratic tradition, most have proved able to adapt to the idea of democracy, if not always the reality. At the same time it would appear that at specific historical moments the predominant voice within a tradition incline a tradition to be more or less supportive of democracy. Thus the dominant voice within Catholicism until the mid-twentieth century was instinctively anti-democratic, whereas since then it has proved supportive of democracy – though in both periods there were always a minority taking the opposite view. Others have suggested that contemporary Islam may be undergoing a similar transition – whatever the problems of making such cross-cultural comparisons – with the wider Muslim community moving towards support for democracy whatever the desires of those who want to return to some mythical theocratic past. Finally, democracies have emerged in a variety of religious and cultural contexts, and there is little evidence to support the view that particular traditions must always be antagonistic towards the democratic experiment. What may be true, however, is that believers and secular liberals alike have to face difficult questions about how one accommodates the demands of faith with the commitment to a genuine democratic pluralism and a good standard of civil liberties.
Participants:
Likely participants will likely be drawn from, but not restricted to the 200 + members of the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group, ‘Religion and Politics’, which Jeffrey Haynes convenes.
Type of papers:
Empirical, case study, comparative and theoretical.
Biographical note:
Jeffrey Haynes
Jeffrey Haynes is Associate Dean, Faculty of Law, Governance and International Relations, London Metropolitan University. He is interested in the relationship between religion and democratisation . His most recent books are:
• Religion, Politics and International Relations: Selected Essays, London, Routledge, 2011.
• Religious Actors in the Public Sphere: Means, Objectives, and Effects (co-edited with Anja Hennig), London, Routledge, 2011.
• Religion and Democratizations (editor), special issue of the journal, Democratization, 16, 6 (December 2009). Also published as a book with the same title by Routledge, 2011.
• Religion and Politics: Critical Concepts (four volumes) (editor), London, Routledge, 2010.
• Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (editor), London, Routledge/ECPR Studies in European Political Science, 2010.
• Special Issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (‘Globalization, Religion and Secularization: Different States, Same Trajectories?’, co-edited with Guy Ben-Porat), 11, 2 (June 2010).
Guy Ben-Porat
Guy Ben-Porat is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Policy and Administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is interested in questions of secularization, the influence of economic changes on religious life and multiculturalism in public policy. His most recent books are:
• Guy Ben-Porat and Bryan Turner (eds.), The Contradictions of Israeli Citizenship, Routledge, forthcoming.
• Guy Ben-Porat, Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
• Special Issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (‘Globalization, Religion and Secularization: Different States, Same Trajectories?’, co-edited with Jeffrey Haynes), 11, 2 (June 2010).
• Guy Ben-Porat, Shlomo Mizrachi, Arye Naor and Erez Tzfadia, Israel Since 1980, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Guy Ben-Porat (ed.) The Failure of the Middle East Peace Process?, Palgrave Press, 2008.
• Eiki Berg and Guy Ben-Porat (eds.) Special issue, Nations and Nationalism, 14 (1), 2008.
• Bryan Turner and Guy Ben-Porat (eds.), Special issue, Citizenship Studies, 12 (3), 2008.
Page last updated on 04 September 2018