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Nedilsky, “Converts to Civil Society: Christianity and Political Culture in Contemporary Hong Kong”

Next month, Baylor University will publish Converts to Civil 5561Society: Christianity and Political Culture in Contemporary Hong Kong, by Lida V. Nedilsky (North Park University). The publisher’s description follows.

Lida V. Nedilsky captures the public ramifications of a personal, Christian faith at the time of Hong Kong’s pivotal political turmoil. From 1997 to 2008, in the much-anticipated reintegration of Hong Kong into Chinese sovereignty, she conducted detailed interviews of more than fifty Hong Kong people and then followed their daily lives, documenting their involvement at the intersection of church and state.

Citizens of Hong Kong enjoy abundant membership options, both social and religious, under Hong Kong’s free market culture. Whether identifying as Catholic or Protestant, or growing up in religious or secular households, Nedilsky’s interviewees share an important characteristic: a story of choosing faith. Across the spheres of family and church, as well as civic organizations and workplaces, Nedilsky shows how individuals break and forge bonds, enter and exit commitments, and transform the public ends of choice itself. From this intimate, firsthand vantage point, Converts to Civil Society reveals that people’s independent movements not only invigorate and shape religious community but also enliven a wider public life.

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Kopelson, “Faithful Bodies”

Next month, New York University Press will publish Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic by Heather Miyano Kopelson Faithful Bodies(University of Alabama).  The publisher’s description follows.

In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather Miyano Kopelson peels back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of “white,” “black,” and “Indian” developed alongside religious boundaries between “Christian” and “heathen” and between “Catholic” and “Protestant.”

Faithful Bodies focuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists’ interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans’ eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

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Mecham & Hwang (eds.), “Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World”

This month, the University of Pennsylvania publishes Islamist Parties and Political 15245Normalization in the Muslim World, edited by Quinn Mecham (Brigham Young University) and Julie Chernov Hwang (Goucher College). The publisher’s description follows.

Since 2000, more than twenty countries around the world have held elections in which parties that espouse a political agenda based on an Islamic worldview have competed for legislative seats. Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World examines the impact these parties have had on the political process in two different areas of the world with large Muslim populations: the Middle East and Asia. The book’s contributors examine major cases of Islamist party evolution and participation in democratic and semidemocratic systems in Turkey, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Collectively they articulate a theoretical framework to understand the strategic behavior of Islamist parties, including the characteristics that distinguish them from other types of political parties, how they relate to other parties as potential competitors or collaborators, how ties to broader Islamist movements may affect party behavior in elections, and how participation in an electoral system can affect the behavior and ideology of an Islamist party over time.

Through this framework, the contributors observe a general tendency in Islamist politics. Although Islamist parties represent diverse interests and behaviors that are tied to their particular domestic contexts, through repeated elections they often come to operate less as antiestablishment parties and more in line with the political norms of the regimes in which they compete. While a few parties have deliberately chosen to remain on the fringes of their political system, most have found significant political rewards in changing their messages and behavior to attract more centrist voters. As the impact of the Arab Spring continues to be felt, Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World offers a nuanced and timely perspective of Islamist politics in broader global context.

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Bean, “The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada”

This August, Princeton University Press will publish The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada by Lydia Bean (Baylor University). The publisher’s description follows.bookjacket

It is now a common refrain among liberals that Christian Right pastors and television pundits have hijacked evangelical Christianity for partisan gain. The Politics of Evangelical Identity challenges this notion, arguing that the hijacking metaphor paints a fundamentally distorted picture of how evangelical churches have become politicized. The book reveals how the powerful coalition between evangelicals and the Republican Party is not merely a creation of political elites who have framed conservative issues in religious language, but is anchored in the lives of local congregations.

Drawing on her groundbreaking research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada–two in Buffalo, New York, and two in Hamilton, Ontario–Lydia Bean compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics in congregational settings. While Canadian evangelicals share the same theology and conservative moral attitudes as their American counterparts, their politics are quite different. On the U.S. side of the border, political conservatism is woven into the very fabric of everyday religious practice. Bean shows how subtle partisan cues emerge in small group interactions as members define how “we Christians” should relate to others in the broader civic arena, while liberals are cast in the role of adversaries. She explains how the most explicit partisan cues come not from clergy but rather from lay opinion leaders who help their less politically engaged peers to link evangelical identity to conservative politics.

The Politics of Evangelical Identity demonstrates how deep the ties remain between political conservatism and evangelical Christianity in America.

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Sherkat, “Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identities”

This August, NYU Press will publish Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identities by Darren Sherkat (Southern Illinois University). The publisher’s description follows.

More than anywhere else in the Western world, religious attachments in America are quite flexible, with over 40 percent of U.S. citizens shifting their religious identification at least once in their lives. In Changing Faith, Darren E. Sherkat draws on empirical data from large-scale national studies to provide a comprehensive portrait of religious change and its consequences in the United States.
With analysis spanning across generations and ethnic groups, the volume traces the evolution of the experience of Protestantism and Catholicism in the United States, the dramatic growth of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and the rise of non-identification, now the second most common religious affiliation in the country. Drawing on that wealth of data, it details the impact of religious commitments on broad arenas of American social life, including family and sexuality, economic well-being, political commitments, and social values.
Exploring religious change among those of European heritage as well as of Eastern and Western European immigrants, African Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, Changing Faith not only provides a comprehensive and ethnically inclusive demographic overview of the juncture between religion and ethnicity within both the private and public sphere, but also brings empirical analysis back to the sociology of religion.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Laïcité in Rome

S. Nicolas des Lorrains

This week, CLR Forum is in Rome, where we’re co-hosting our third international conference, “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values,” on June 20-21. For people interested in law and religion, Rome is an endlessly fascinating place. On practically every corner, you stumble upon evidence of the long relationship–sometimes cooperative, sometimes antagonistic–between church and state.

Here’s an example. The photo above shows the façade of the Church of San Nicola dei Lorensi, behind Piazza Navona. San Nicola one of a handful of historic French “national” churches in Rome–churches that historically have served as homes for pilgrims from France. The Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, on the other side of the piazza–the one with the famous Caravaggios–is a more well-known example. As the name suggests, San Nicola was the church for pilgrims from the region of Lorraine. It was built in the 17th Century, but must have fallen into grave disrepair over the centuries, because it was completely restored in the last decade.

Note the placard above the doorway in the photograph: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” This, of course, is the motto of the French Republic–the laïc French Republic. The motto is meant to capture the secular nature of the Republic and the separation of church and state. It’s not an insult, necessarily, but it definitely connotes a rejection of the Catholicism of the old regime. So what is the motto doing over the doorway of an old Catholic church in the heart of Rome?

The answer is, as far as I can tell, is this. San Nicola is owned by a French governmental organization called “Les Pieux Etablissements de la France à Rome et à Lorette,” administered by the French ambassador to the Holy See. According to its website (in French), the organization exists to maintain the historic French national churches, welcome French-speaking pilgrims, and organize cultural events that promote France in Rome.

This isn’t as strange as it may first appear. As readers of our 2010 symposium on laïcité know, the French government owns many church buildings in France, all that existed as of 1905, the date of the Law on the Separation of Churches and the State. Notwithstanding the commitment to laïcité, the 1905 law gives the French government title to church property; the government allows religious bodies to use the property at its discretion. At the time of enactment, the Third Republic required churches to affix signs with the republican motto on their doorways–to demonstrate, I imagine, that there was a new sheriff in town. Most of these signs have now disappeared, though you can still occasionally find them. I remember seeing one on the Church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris a few years ago.

It isn’t strange, then, that the French government owns and maintains San Nicola today. According to the website of the French ambassador, San Nicola was restored in 2005 partly with funds from the Regional Council of Lorraine–that is, with public money. During the work, someone–a secularist council member? an embassy staffer?–must have decided it would be a good idea to restore the republican motto as well. So there it is today, a witness, to those who know the story, of the profoundly complicated relationship between religion and the state in France–and in Rome, too.

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Halkin, “Jabotinsky”

This May, Yale University Press published Jabotinsky: A Life by Hillel Halkin. The publisher’s description follows.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) was a man of huge paradoxes and Jabotinskycontradictions and has been the most misunderstood of all Zionist politicians–a first-rate novelist, a celebrated Russian journalist, and the founder of the branch of Zionism now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. This biography, the first in English in nearly two decades, undertakes to answer central questions about Jabotinsky as a writer, a political thinker, and a leader. Hillel Halkin sets aside the stereotypes to which Jabotinsky has been reduced by his would-be followers and detractors alike.

Halkin explains the importance of Odessa, Jabotinsky’s native city, in molding his character and outlook; discusses his novels and short stories, showing the sometimes hidden connections between them and Jabotinsky’s political thought, and studies a political career that ended in tragic failure. Halkin also addresses Jabotinsky’s position, unique among the great figures of Zionist history, as both a territorial maximalist and a principled believer in democracy. The author inquires why Jabotinsky was often accused of fascist tendencies though he abhorred authoritarian and totalitarian politics, and investigates the many opposed aspects of his personality and conduct while asking whether or not they had an ultimate coherence. Few figures in twentieth-century Jewish life were quite so admired and loathed, and Halkin’s splendid, subtle book explores him with empathy and lucidity.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Drakeman, “What’s the Point of Originalism?”

A very interesting new piece by Don Drakeman here. One of its interesting features is a recent survey of public attitudes about originalism–three of the key questions concerning (1) how many favor original understanding (to encompass original meaning and original intention) as compared with non-originalist methods of interpretation; (2) of those that do not favor original understanding, how many nevertheless believe that original understanding should be a factor that is considered in constitutional interpretation; and (3) how many prefer original intention as compared with original meaning (the questions are put with greater nuance than I am conveying here).

While the survey is interesting, there are three other contributions that the piece makes that I found pretty neat.

First, the titular question. The idea here is that “the point”–or at least one point–of originalism is to persuade the public of the court’s decisions, and more generally of the court’s legitimacy in rendering those decisions. The point is a purely pragmatic one. But it may be the fundamental point.

Second, the historical claim about the writing of majority opinions. We are accustomed to judicial opinions. Indeed, around this time of year, we are fixated on them, as if the opinions themselves had some sort of independent constitutional power. But they don’t. Opinions are not constitutionally mandated. The Constitution speaks in terms of “the judicial power” and judicial “offices.” But there is no constitutional reason that the court could not exercise its power and fulfill its office simply by rendering judgment. And so it did before the Marshall Court. Drakeman notes that opinion-writing for the court is really a Marshall-era innovation–devised in order to give rhetorical efficacy and (further) legitimacy to the court. Majority opinions are vehicles for the court to exercise its power as an institution (opinion writing generally is a different issue).

Third, I appreciated the idea of the distinction between a theory of constitutional interpretation and a theory of constitutional explication. What Drakeman is doing is explaining why originalism does matter as an approach to giving meaning to the Constitution: it keeps the Supreme Court in business. He is not arguing that originalism is the correct intepretive approach or that it ought to matter (or that the public is right to believe that it matters). Put another way, the paper is a positive account of originalism’s value. I think that sort of account of originalism’s worth might be very appealing, or at least very interesting indeed, from a Catholic perspective.

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Al-Arian, “Answering the Call”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt by Abdullah Al-Arian (Georgetown University). answering the callThe publisher’s description follows.

When revolutionary hero Gamal Abdel Nasser dismantled and suppressed Egypt’s largest social movement organization during the 1950s, few could have imagined that the Muslim Brotherhood would not only reemerge, but could one day compete for the presidency in the nation’s first ever democratic election. While there is no shortage of analyses of the Muslim Brotherhood’s recent political successes and failures, no study has investigated the organization’s triumphant return from the dustbin of history.

Answering the Call examines the means by which the Muslim Brotherhood was reconstituted during Anwar al-Sadat’s presidency. Through analysis of structural, ideological, and social developments during this period in the history of the Islamic movement, a more accurate picture of the so-called “Islamic resurgence” develops-one that represents the rebirth of an old idea in a new setting.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s success in rebuilding its organization rested in large part on its ability to attract a new generation of Islamic activists that had come to transform Egypt’s colleges and universities into a hub for religious contention against the state. Led by groups such as al-Gama’ah al-Islamiyyah (The Islamic Society), the student movement exhibited a dynamic and vibrant culture of activism that found inspiration in a multitude of intellectual and organizational sources, of which the Muslim Brotherhood was only one.

By the close of the 1970s, however, internal divisions over ideology and strategy led to the rise of factionalism within the student movement. A majority of student leaders opted to expand the scope of their activist mission by joining the Muslim Brotherhood, rejuvenating the struggling organization, and launching a new phase in its history.

Answering the Call is an original study of the history of this dynamic and vibrant period of modern Egyptian history, giving readers a fresh understanding of one of Egypt’s most pivotal eras.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

History Goes On

At the Liberty Law Blog, my friend John McGinnis has posted a very perceptive criticism of Francis Fukuyama’s recent essay on the 25th anniversary of his famous article, “The End of History.” That extremely influential article, which Fukuyama wrote in the heady days of 1989, argued that liberal democracy owned the future. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many commentators believed this. All other forms of social ordering had failed and nations across the globe seemed to be falling in line. Cultural differences that once mattered no longer did. From Bangkok to Ankara to Moscow, everyone wanted to be a liberal democrat. And even if they didn’t, the logic of liberal democracy was inescapable and its appeal irresistible.

Not everyone at the time felt this way, of course. The late Samuel Huntington wrote a great book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” that responded to Fukuyama and argued that old cultural patterns would remain relevant. For example, Huntington wrote, profound cultural differences divide Western and Orthodox Christian civilizations, and divide those civilizations from Islamic and Hindu civilizations. For writing this, Huntington was disparaged as a know-nothing by leading academics and commentators–the People Who Knew Better.

Twenty-five years later, Huntington appears to have made the better bet. The world hasn’t turned out as Fukuyama predicted. To his credit, John writes, Fukuyama concedes this. But he still maintains that liberal democracy is the only plausible system for modern society. John responds–correctly, in my view–that Fukuyama is wrong. There is an inherent tension between the two components of liberal democracy: liberalism, which privileges the individual, and democracy, which privileges the community. Different societies resolve the tension differently, depending on historical, geopolitical, and cultural traditions, including religious traditions. Russia and India provide powerful recent examples.

From the belief that everyone in the world should share your values, it’s an easy leap to the conclusion that everyone in the world does. John’s essay is a helpful correction. History goes on.