Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Religious Politics

Contributors: Helmut K. Anheier & Mark Juergensmeyer

Print Pub. Date: 2012
Online Pub. Date: May 31, 2012
Print ISBN: 9781412964296
Online ISBN: 9781452218557
DOI: 10.4135/9781452218557
Print pages: 1471-1474
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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Hertie School of Governance and University of HeidelbergUniversity of California, Santa

Barbara
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There has been a resurgence of religious politics on a global scale in the post-Cold War
era. In the context of global studies, religious politics often refers to the relationship
of religious actors to the state, the transmission of religious ideas across sovereign
borders, and the harnessing of religious ideas by transnational political actors. In
general, religious politics is a broad term that can refer to any social interaction that
relates beliefs regarding sacred objects to the interests and actions of a political
community (such as a state or a political party).

Religious Authority and Political Authority

A key concern in the study of religious politics is the relationship between political
authority and religious authority. In ancient societies, the former was frequently
legitimized by claims to the latter, with the ruler of a polity acting as a priest and
sometimes as a god or demigod. Examples of this practice could be found in ancient
societies in South America, the Middle East, and Asia. Such arrangements made no
distinction between the temporal and spiritual realms, a belief referred to as monism.

The growth of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions prompted an increasing recognition

of distinct temporal and spiritual realms. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam identified
ultimate authority as proceeding from a single omnipotent and transcendent deity.
Political legitimacy was still premised on religious legitimacy, but in the Abrahamic
traditions, rulers were believed to be held to a higher authority. In pre-exilic Israel,
kings were anointed with holy oil, signifying God's endorsement of their rule. However,
the Jews also understood that a monarch's failure to remain faithful to God could
result in the loss of his political authority. Here, the role of the prophet assumed great
importance. As religious charismatics who stood outside the institutionalized social
structures, prophets could openly criticize political rulers for unfaithfulness to God. After
the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE and the exile, Judaism

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became a diaspora religion and spread across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa,
Asia, and eventually to the Americas, with Jews always existing as a political minority in
the various societies where they lived.

In Christianity, the relationship between religion and politics became closely intertwined
after the Roman emperor Constantine's (reigned 306336 CE) abolishment of official
persecution. This allowed Christianity to spread widely, and by the end of the fourth
century, it had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the
western part of the Roman Empire in the fifth century meant that the Church played
a vital role as a provider of social services, a repository of classical knowledge, and
a socially integrating force. Lacking military force, in 754, the papacy forged a close
relationship with the Franks, who dominated most of western Europe and had converted
to Catholicism during the early sixth century. In exchange for territory in Italy that would
become the Papal States, the pope anointed King Pepin and his heirs Patricians of
the Romans and protectors of the Church. When Pepin died, his son Charlemagne [p.
1471 ] was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800, establishing a
lasting alliance between the Catholic Church and temporal rulers. After Charlemagne's
death, his empire collapsed and the Church forged an alliance with the Franks in the
east under Otto the Great, whom the pope crowned the First Holy Roman Emperor in
962. Despite struggles for control between the papacy and the emperormost notably
the lay investiture controversy of the 12th century in which secular lords appointed
bishopsthe political power of the papacy continued to grow.

During the next three centuries, the papacy extended further into secular politics,
particularly in Italy where the papal court of the late 15th and early 16th centuries
became renowned for political intrigue and corruption. The corruption and worldliness
of the Renaissance papacy fueled the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517
when the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther openly challenged the Church's
sale of indulgences for the remission of punishment for sin. More fundamentally, Luther
challenged the legitimacy of the Church's role as a political actor, arguing in his Doctrine
of the Two Kingdoms and the Two Governments that the Church should not involve
itself in temporal politics (although, he argued, it should continue to guide rulers in their
moral conduct). In doing so, he provided the moral rationale for the sovereign state
a political entity whose power over temporal matters would be supreme within its
territory. Aided by the recently invented printing press, Luther's ideas spread rapidly

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throughout Europe, motivating various other Protestant movements and winning

numerous converts in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, England, Transylvania, and the
Netherlands, including temporal rulers. Faced with widespread heresy and a severe
threat to its political authority, the Catholic Church, acting through the Holy Roman
Emperor, launched military campaigns against rulers of Protestant territories. The wars
between Catholics and Protestants reached their bloody apotheosis during the Thirty
Years' War, a conflagration that engulfed virtually all of Europe. Its conclusion in 1648
by the Peace of Westphalia marked a watershed in the history of international politics.
Under the terms of the peace, the religion in a given territory would be determined by
the ruler of that territory. Westphalia established the principle that the highest authority
in a given territory was its temporal ruler. This was the very definition of the modern
sovereign state.

In the Islamic world, political authority and religious authority were closely linked from
the time of the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad had not only been a religious prophet
but a military leader as well, marshaling his followers from Medina into battle against the
Meccans and defeating them in 630. This paved the way for him to convert the Meccans
from paganism to Islam. After his death in 632, Muhammad's followers debated among
themselves who would succeed him as caliph, the leader of the Muslim community or
ummah. A critical cleavage emerged between those who argued that the caliph should
be selected by some form of consultation among Muslims (later known as the Sunni)
and those who believed that the caliph was divinely chosen by Allah and could only be
chosen by a direct descendant of Muhammad's bloodline (the Sh#'a). The Sunni view
prevailed, and Abu Bakr, a companion of Muhammad, became the first caliph.

As the supreme political and religious figure, the caliph played a major role in
shaping the faith. The third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, compiled all known records of
Muhammad's teachings and produced the canonical edition of the Qur'#n, which was
regarded as the literal word of God. This significant development laid the foundation
for Islamic law (Shari'a), which, in turn, governed virtually all aspects of Islamic society,
making the ulemathe class of Islamic juriststhe primary interpretative authority.
Under the caliphs, the Islamic empire expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula and by its
height in 750 stretched from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the western borders of
India and from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the shores of the Caspian.

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Trade and missions facilitated the spread of Islam to the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa,
and Southeast Asia.

Secularism, Nationalism, and Globalization

In Europe, the rise of the sovereign state coincided with the emergence of secular
Enlightenment philosophies emphasizing the use of human reason and science as an
alternative to religion in order to understand the world. In the newly established United
States, the Enlightenment found a unique [p. 1472 ] political expression in the formal
separation of church and state, which sought to insulate the state from overt religious
influence while allowing full freedom of religious observance in the private sphere and
civil society. The French Revolution (17891799) marked the emergence of popular
secular nationalism as a political force. Because of its close ties with the royalists, the
Catholic Church in France was decimated during the revolution, while in Protestant
Europe, internal church reforms helped to soften the impact of Enlightenment ideas on
religious institutions. The establishment of numerous colonies by European countries
in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries also
facilitated the spread of Enlightenment ideas as well as Christianity, often stoking local
nationalist anger.

The 20th century saw the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires
after World War I and the dismantling of European colonies after World War II, allowing
various nationalist movements, often led by Western-educated elites, to take root.
Many of these movements were decidedly secular in outlook (e.g., Kemalism in Turkey,
Bolshevism and Stalinism in Russia, Nasserism in Egypt, Maoism in China, and
Nehruvianism in India). Yet in certain cases, especially the Middle East and South Asia,
they stimulated a backlash from religious movements eager to preserve society against
what they perceived to be the corrupting influences of secularism and westernization.
Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan sought
to mold the state according to Shari'aa doctrine known as Islamismalthough
until the late 20th century, they tended to remain on the fringe. Another major religious
nationalist movement was Zionism, which sought to restore a Jewish state in the
ancient homeland. This was achieved in 1948 with the establishment of the state of
Israel, which also became a major catalyst for Islamist movements that viewed the

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new state as an invader. In Iran, the overthrow of the shah in 1979 by a radical Sh#'a
movement under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led to the establishment of a theocratic
regime governed by Shari'a.

During the Cold War, religious influences on transnational politics were overshadowed
by the U.S. Soviet rivalry. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 stimulated a
resurgence of religious nationalism in eastern Europe as various ethnic groups fought
to fill the resulting power vacuum, most notably in the former Yugoslavia. In the Middle
East, the continuing dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over territorial claims
served as a catalyst for violent Islamic groups who launched attacks against Israel and
its allies (especially the United States).

The increased ease of travel and communication also significantly shaped the
relationship between religion and politics at the turn of the 21st century. In Europe,
a large influx of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa generated nativist
fears that Islam would change the traditional Christian character of European societies.
This placed obstacles in front of Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. Rapid
communication also allowed religious groups to circumvent the state more easily.
For instance, in China, the repression of Tibetan Buddhism generated a sizable
transnational movement in support of Tibetan independence, heavily facilitated by the
Internet. A prominent example of how globalization has empowered individuals and
small groups was al Qaeda, a transnational Islamic terrorist network that espoused
Salafisma form of Islamic fundamentalism that called for a return to the religious
practices of the age of the prophet Muhammadand called for the destruction of Israel,
the expulsion of the United States from the Middle East, and the establishment of a
caliphate based on Shari'a. Al Qaeda's ability to launch large-scale attacks around
the world (most notoriously the attacks on September 11, 2001, in the United States)
demonstrated its ability to exploit globalizationporous borders, instantaneous
communication over the Internet, and rapid travel.

Jonathan Chow

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See also:

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Caliphate
Enlightenment, The
Global Religions, Beliefs, and Ideologies
Protestant Reformation
Secularism
Shari'a (Islamic Law)
Vatican
Zionism

Further Readings

Casanova, J. (1994) Public religions in the modern world . Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Huntington, S. (1998) The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order . New
York: Touchstone Books.

Juergensmeyer, M. (2000) Terror in the mind of god: The global rise of religious
violence . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Maisel, S. (2009) Islamic history . In P. B. Clarke, ed. , & P. Beyer (Eds.), The world's
religions: Continuities and transformations (pp. pp. 316324) London: Routledge.

Moyser, G. (2010) Religion and politics . In J. Hinnells (Ed.), The Routledge companion
to the study of religion (2nd ed., pp. 445460) London: Routledge.

Norris, P., and Inglehart, R. (2004) Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide .
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Philpott, D. (2001) Revolutions in sovereignty . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

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