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Turner, “The Religious and the Political: A Comparative Sociology of Religion”

9780521675314This June, Cambridge University Press published The Religious and the Political: A Comparative Sociology of Religion by Bryan S. Turner (CUNY). The publisher’s description follows.

While the relationships between ethics and religion, and violence and politics, are of enduring interest, the interface between religion and violence is one of the most problematic features of the contemporary world. Following in the tradition of Max Weber’s historical and comparative study of religions, this book explores the many ways in which religion and politics are both combined and separated across different world religions and societies. Through a variety of case studies including the monarchy, marriage, law and conversion, Bryan S. Turner explores different manifestations of secularization, and how the separation of church and state is either compromised or abandoned. He considers how different states manage religion in culturally and religiously diverse societies and concludes with a discussion of the contemporary problems facing the liberal theory of freedom of religion. The underlying theoretical issue is the conditions for legitimacy of rule in modern societies experiencing global changes.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Nones Across the Globe

Image from Patheos

The third largest religious affiliation in the United States is “None.” Roughly one-fifth of adult Americans tell surveyors that they have no religious affiliation at all. The rise of the Nones, which began in the 199os, is perhaps the most important development in American religious life today, raising difficult questions for traditional religious institutions and the legal system as well.

We shouldn’t think of the Nones as a uniquely American phenomenon, though. (Only Americans would be tempted to do so, probably). Here’s an interesting report from The Weekly Number, a religion website, on the percentages of Nones worldwide. The overall percentage of Nones across the globe is lower than in the US: 16%. They are distributed very unevenly. Almost 80% live in the Asia-Pacific region. About 60% live in one country, China. The entire continent of North America, by contrast, accounts for only five percent of Nones worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, Nones make up about two percent of the population. In the Middle East and North Africa, religiously unaffiliated people are even scarcer, comprising less than one percent of the population.

One might expect that, as China continues to rise, Nones will become an even more powerful global force. But here’s another interesting statistic. Unlike in the US, where Nones are disproportionately young, as a global population, the Nones skew old. The median age of Nones (34) is significantly higher than the median age of the overall global population (28). Who knows? Perhaps the rise of the Nones among America’s youth will be offset by the much-noted rise of Christianity among young people in the global South.

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Rosenberg, “Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion”

imageIn August, Oxford University Press will publish Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion by Jordana Rosenberg (U. Mass.).  The publisher’s description follows.

The Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century was characterized by two major, interrelated phenomena: the onset of capital accumulation and the infusion of traditions of radical religious rapture into Enlightenment discourses. In exploring these cross-pollinations, Critical Enthusiasm shows that debates around religious radicalism are bound to the advent of capitalism at its very root: as legal precedent, as financial rhetoric, and as aesthetic form. To understand the period thus requires that we not only contextualize histories of religion in terms of the economic landscape of early modernity, but also recast the question of secularization in terms of the contradictions of capitalism.

Posted on by Dan Crane · 3 Comments

Religious Literacy Training for Law Students?

When law professors grouse behind closed doors, one of their favorite topics is how law students lack fundamental knowledge and skills they were supposed to get in high school and college.  According to prevailing wisdom, law students don’t know how to write a proper sentence, are ignorant of the most basic historical facts, have no concept of economics, and couldn’t construct a syllogism to save their lives.

Much of this is curmudgeonly hazing of the young by the old that is a regularized and institutionalized rite of one’s transition from youth to age.  “In the good old days, we actually learned things in school.”  Having passed the forty-year mark and hence being an official curmudgeon, I shall indulge in a little whining of my own.  My complaint is the lack of basic religious literacy among law students.

To be fair, this is not just a phenomenon of law students or the young more generally. A 2010 Pew survey found an appalling lack of religious knowledge in the United States, which is by many measures a highly religious country. More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as a leader of the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews didn’t know that Maimonides was Jewish.  Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ.  (Interestingly, atheists and agnostics scored higher than religious adherents in the survey).

It’s my sense that the mainstream of the American educational system eschews teaching about religion, not necessarily out of hostility, but out of a fear that religion is too hot and divisive a topic to handle in polite company.  The demise of universal Sunday School or Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Ledewitz on “Pro-Religion Equality”

Here’s an interesting paper by Professor Bruce Ledewitz (Duquesne) which engages with some of the recent ‘is-it-special?’ scholarship about religion and connects to the ‘hallowed secularism‘ themes that Bruce has been developing for several years in other work: The Vietnam Draft Cases and the Pro-Religion Equality Project. The abstract follows:

There is currently unfolding among secularists and liberal religious believers an equality project that argues that secular commitments of conscience are as worthy of protection as are the commitments of traditional religion. This movement is symbolized by Brian Leiter’s recent book, “Why Tolerate Religion?” but it has many other adherents today as well. This movement seeks either to substitute conscience provisions for existing religious exemptions from law or at least to add conscience exemptions to them. As religious believers have pointed out, the likely consequence, and perhaps even the goal, of this effort is the weakening of exemptions for religion rather than the strengthening of conscience exemptions for all. That is why I call this movement the Anti-Religion Equality Project. The State is the ultimate beneficiary of the Anti-Religion Equality Project.

This paper proposes an opposing equality project, the Pro-Religion Equality Project, which would expand the meaning of religion in existing religious exemptions to include many, and certainly the most passionately held, commitments of secular conscience. There is nothing new in this Pro-Religion Equality Project. The Supreme Court already expanded religious exemptions in the Vietnam draft cases, Seeger, Welsh, and Gillette, which held that conscience commitments occupying a place in the life of the nonbeliever parallel to the place of God for the traditional religious believer deserve exemption from law as religious. While Leiter aims to subsume religion under the mantle of conscience, the Pro-Religion Equality Project subsumes conscience under the rubric of religion.

Expansively interpreting religion exemptions is a better path than creating conscience provisions for a number of reasons. Because conscience is so easily invoked, conscience protection can only be weakly enforced, thus undercutting liberty for all. That result not only fails to protect religious liberty, it understates the significance of conscience claims that share the depth and breadth of traditional religious commitments and are of equal significance. Such secular conscience claims should be robustly protected and including them in existing religious exemptions helps ensure that result. In contrast, conscience claims that are idiosyncratic and lightly held should be excluded from exemptions from general law altogether and the expansion of religion exemptions tends to accomplish that.

As in the Vietnam era, nonreligious exemption claimants today will resist inclusion in religious exemptions because they do not consider themselves to be religious. But even this objection shows the advantage of the Pro-Religion Equality Project over its competitor. For conscience is understood to be an individual judgment and the promotion of conscience exemptions supports the view that deeply held moral commitments are personal and subjective. In contrast, religion sounds in truth and the expansion of religious exemptions will ignite a needed societal debate about religion, reason, relativism and nihilism.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Meddeb, “Islam and the Challenge of Civilization”

In classical Islam, the Muslim community, or umma, is both a spiritual and political entity, the body of believers that lives, but also rules, by God’s law. Obviously, this conception of Islam is in some tension with contemporary Western pluralism. Lately, some Muslim scholars in the West–Abdullahi An-Na`im and Tariq Ramadan, for example–have offered conceptions of Islam that separate the spiritual from the political. These progressive versions fit better with Western ideas about citizenship, but have encountered resistance from tradition-minded Muslims.

Next month, Fordham University Press will publish a translation of a new book by one such scholar, Abdelwahab Meddeb (University of Paris-Nanterre). Meddeb’s book, Islam and the Challenge of Civilization, looks for inspiration to the Sufi tradition. The publisher’s description follows:

Abdelwahab Meddeb makes an urgent case for an Islamic reformation, located squarely in Western Europe, now home to millions of Muslims, where Christianity and Judaism have come to coexist with secular humanism and positivist law. He is not advocating “moderate” Islam, which he characterizes as thinly disguised Wahabism, but rather an Islam inspired by the great Sufi thinkers, whose practice of religion was not bound by doctrine.

To accomplish this, Meddeb returns to the doctrinal question of the text as transcription of the uncreated word of God and calls upon Muslims to distinguish between Islam’s spiritual message and the temporal, material, and historically grounded origins of its founding scriptures. He contrasts periods of Islamic history—when philosophers and theologians engaged in lively dialogue with other faiths and civilizations and contributed to transmitting the Hellenistic tradition to early modern Europe—with modern Islam’s collective amnesia of this past. Meddeb wages a war of interpretations in this book, in his attempt to demonstrate that Muslims cannot join the concert of nations unless they set aside outmoded notions such as jihad and realize that feuding among the monotheisms must give way to the more important issue of what it means to be a citizen in today’s postreligious global setting.

Posted on by JCPW

Perovic (ed.), “Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France”

Sacred_SecularThis May, Bloomsbury Publishing will publish Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France edited by Sanja Perovic (King’s College). The publisher’s description follows.

The opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘modernity’ has long held the status of a self-evident truth. Recently, however, there has been a growing realization that religion has not died out and may be more compatible with modern society than previously assumed.This development is particularly striking in France where laïcité has long been the official doctrine.

How did religion become opposed to the secular and modern? If distinctions between sacred and secular are less adequate than commonly believed, how do these two categories interact? Addressing these questions, this book explores the persistence of religious categories on the cultural landscape of early modern France. France was the birthplace of Europe’s first secular state and the centre of two movements considered indispensable to secularization – the Enlightenment and Revolution of 1789. As such France is vital for understanding how religious antecedents informed modern political institutions and ideals. By uncovering the role of religion in shaping categories most often associated with modernity this book offers a new perspective on the master narrative of secularization.

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Failinger, Schiltz & Stabile (eds.), “Feminism, Law and Religion”

This July, Ashgate Publishing will publish Feminism, Law and Religion edited by Marie A. Failinger (Hamline University School of Law), Elizabeth R. Schiltz (University of Saint Thomas School of Law), and Susan J. Stabile (University of Saint Thomas School of Law). The publisher’s description follows.

With contributions from some of the most prominent voices writing on gender, law and religion today, this book illuminates some of the conflicts at the intersection of feminism, theology and law. It examines a range of themes from the viewpoint of identifiable traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, from a theoretical and practical perspective. Among the themes discussed are the cross-over between religious and secular values and assumptions in the search for a just jurisprudence for women, the application of theological insights from religious traditions to legal issues at the core of feminist work, feminist legal readings of scriptural texts on women’s rights and the place that religious law has assigned to women in ecclesiastic life.

Feminists of faith face challenges from many sides: patriarchal remnants in their own tradition, dismissal of their faith commitments by secular feminists and balancing the conflicting loyalties of their lives. The book will be essential reading for legal and religious academics and students working in the area of gender and law or law and religion.

Posted on by JCPW

Hefner, Hutchinson, Mels & Timmerman (eds.), “Religions in Movement”

ReligionsinMovementThis month, Routledge published Religions in Movement: The Local and the Global in Contemporary Faith Traditions edited by Robert Hefner (Boston University), John Hutchinson (London School of Economics), Sara Mels (UCSIA, Belgium), and Christiane Timmerman (University of Antwerp). The publisher’s description follows.

There has long been a debate about implications of globalization for the survival of the world of sovereign nation-states, and the role of nationalism as both an agent of and a response to globalization. In contrast, until recently there has been much less debate about the fate of religion. ‘Globalization’ has been viewed as part of the rationalization process, which has already relegated religion to the dustbin of history, just as it threatens the nation, as the world moves toward a cosmopolitan ethics and politics. The chapters in this book, however, make the case for the salience and resilience of religion, often in conjunction with nationalism, in the contemporary world in several ways.

This book highlights the diverse ways in which religions first and foremost make use of the traditional power and communication channels available to them, like strategies of conversion, the preservation of traditional value systems, and the intertwining of religious and political power. Nevertheless, challenged by a more culturally and religiously diversified societies and by the growth of new religious sects, contemporary religions are also forced to let go of these well known strategies of preservation and formulate new ways of establishing their position in local contexts. This collection of essays by established and emerging scholars brings together theory-driven and empirically-based research and case-studies about the global and bottom-up strategies of religions and religious traditions in Europe and beyond to rethink their positions in their local communities and in the world.

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Yilmaz on Muslim Secularism

Ihsan Yilmaz (Fatih University) has posted Towards a Muslim Secularism? An Islamic ‘Twin Tolerations’ Understanding of Religion in the Public Sphere. The abstract follows.

Since the mid-1920s, the top-down homogenization and secularization policies of the hegemonic Kemalist elite have aimed at socially engineering secularist nationalist Turkish citizens. The acronym LAST (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni, Turk) describes this ideal citizen typology. The state has also tried to monopolize Islam and has attempted to construct a state version of Islam (Lausannian Islam), marginalizing, vilifying and even criminalizing other Islamic interpretations. Nevertheless, non-state Islam and civil Muslim actors have not disappeared from the Turkish public sphere. One of these influential actors is the counter-hegemonic Turkish Islamists. They demand a role for Islam in the political realm, in a binary opposition to the assertively secularist Kemalists. Another influential actor, the intellectual leader of the largest faith-based movement in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, offers a third way between these two extremes on state-religion-society relations.

This paper endeavors to show that an interpretation of Muslim secularism that inhabits religious and secular worlds simultaneously, that is in critical engagement with them and that blurs conventional political lines on the hotly debated issue of state-religion-society relations is possible.

This understanding of ‘Islamic twin tolerations’ challenges the artificially constructed binary oppositions. It also resonates with the Habermasian (2006) ‘religion in the public sphere.’ It argues that the faithful from all religious backgrounds can legitimately have demands based on religion in the public sphere and in the final analysis; it is the legislators’ epistemic task to translate these demands into a secular language in the legislative process.