The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Politics and Ideology

Jeffrey Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive handbook examines relationships between religion, politics and ideology, with a focus on several world religions — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism — in a variety of contexts, regions and countries.

Relationships between religion, politics and ideology help mould people's attitudes about the way that political systems, both domestically and internationally, are organised and operate. While conceptually separate, religion, politics and ideology often become intertwined and as a result their relationships evolve over time. This volume brings together a number of expert contributors who explore a wide range of topical and controversial issues, including gender, nationalism, communism, fascism, populism and Islamism. Such topics inform the overall aim of the handbook: to provide a comprehensive summary of the relationships between religion, politics and ideology, including basic issues and new approaches.

This handbook is a major research resource for students, researchers and professionals from various disciplinary backgrounds, including religious studies, political science, international relations, and sociology.

Section 1

Core issues and topics

1
LIBERAL RELIGION

Emanuel de Kadt

Introduction

The relationship between religion and ideology deals, above all, with the effects of religion on society and politics. This will be one of the issues I shall deal with in this chapter. A first caveat: though I will be referring, below, to liberal religious people, this piece deals above all with liberal religion. In doing so, it presents those liberal versions of different religions as coherent wholes. Yet what their adherents (liberal religious people) make of those views is another matter: many of them will not follow the code lock, stock and barrel, but will pick and choose what to respect. Another qualification: insofar as I shall be dealing with society and politics, my focus is not on ‘liberal polities’, but on religiously liberal people in such societies; in discussions, these different approaches to liberalism are often not clearly kept apart.¹ I have dealt at length with liberal religion in my book of the same name (de Kadt 2018), and I will try not to repeat myself here. Even so, some overlap is inevitable.

My focus will be on the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.² The liberal versions of these religions are not a recent phenomenon: they have existed as reactions and counterparts to traditional varieties for many decades – no, for centuries. In fact, we can find the earliest reformers, the earliest religious thinkers to open a ‘liberal’ perspective, as far back as the 17th century. They challenged at least some of the accepted tenets of traditional versions, tenets that were felt to be particularly difficult for contemporary people. Such challenges have continued over time.

Distinctive to the early 21st century – in contrast to what might have been expected according to the widespread ideas about the ‘decline of religion’ – is the strengthening, in all three Abrahamic religions, of non-liberal versions, and notably of fundamentalist varieties. Jewish fundamentalists, specifically in Israel, have had substantial influence: official policy towards the Palestinians has been deeply affected by their Judaic superiority complex. Much attention has been paid to versions of Islamic fundamentalism, partly because of their aggressive, often violent, stance towards other religions. Within Christianity, the world-wide growth of Pentecostalism as a reaction to earlier theological liberalism has been widely remarked upon.³ But there have also been reactions within the traditional churches: Richard Cimino describes the Biblical Witness Fellowship as a grassroots Protestant renewal – but renewal, here, away from liberalism and back towards traditional Protestant viewpoints (2001).

All this is likely to have influenced how liberal religion presents the ‘counter-argument’ to this upsurge in fundamentalist views. It would be interesting to know whether liberal religion has grown in response to this ‘turn to the right’ or whether it has been ‘squeezed’. Such an exercise can be attempted for individual countries, where country statistics are available. Yet even there, it would remain a hazardous enterprise, as statistics are not organized according to a scale from ‘liberalism’ to ‘fundamentalism’, nor do they show to what extent different religious congregations may be shifting towards one or the other. What tends to emerge in many countries is an increase in those who declare themselves without religion. By way of example, figures for The Netherlands from 2010 to 2018 show growth in those declaring themselves to be without religion from 45% to 53%, a fall in Roman Catholics from 27% to 22%, and basically steady figures for other denominations, including Islam.⁴ As some of those other denominations can be regarded as being towards the non-liberal side of the spectrum, this does suggest that – at least in one specific country – there is no clear shift either towards the liberal or the non-liberal side.

Most forms of liberal religion share a focus on the here and now, on inner-worldly issues, on the world we live in rather than on the hereafter – issues such as civil rights, racism, women’s reproductive freedom, gay rights, stopping nuclear proliferation or the environmental crisis (Parker 2010). Yet, it is essential to remember that the origins of these contemporary views lie in the 19th century or even earlier. The liberal religion we speak of today is not a recent, or a merely modern-day, phenomenon. More on this shortly.

In the American Protestant churches, such a here-and-now approach has been called Social Gospel Christianity. Side by side with the Social Gospel Christians, we find the Universalists, who are above all concerned with ‘getting along’ with each other and with others. Again, it is the here and now that is the focus: when love prevails, Heaven on earth is thought to be achievable. The Universalists oppose the ‘ultimate division of the saved and the damned’ (ibid:10). Parker, a professor of theology, states: ‘We come to know this world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth (ibid:16). A similar note is struck by John Buehrens in the same volume: ‘Progressive eschatology has the courage to hope for justice, peace, and sustainability in this world. The one we have been given’ (2010:22). Since its emergence within the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s, Liberation Theology, and the adoption of its main principles in many other religions, has focused on the experiences of those who are poor, oppressed and marginalized (Gutierrez 1973).

Traditional religious communities – as opposed to liberal ones – can be seriously oppressive, often by holding out the threat of hell for those who do not conform. As a result, people can develop significant misgivings about organized religion, especially if they have no experience of a more liberal variety. Yet, religious communities can also be ‘communities of resistance’ in unjust dominant cultures, resistance that is rarely effective when attempted by individuals on their own.

Good religious communities convert people to the way of life our society needs to move to: from believing that violence is redemptive to practicing justice and compassion; from going it alone to giving and receiving care from others; from isolating oneself in individualism to sharing work on behalf of the common good.

(Parker 2010:45)

I have no intention, here, of going at length into the historical background of liberal religion, yet a few main points need to be made. The original impulse for liberal religion came from the Protestant side. ‘Modernizers’ in the Catholic Church and within Judaism basically followed their lead, though often without acknowledging this. A significant contributing factor was the rise of biblical criticism in the 19th century: it led to texts, hitherto regarded as sacred, being examined ‘objectively’. All reformist approaches wanted to adapt to the modern world and fully take account of the findings of science; they believed tradition to be something that develops, and they accepted that there was a core to the belief system that should remain untouched and a layer on the fringes, so to speak, that could change. Yet the details here could well be challenged, and issues can and did arise as to how such issues should be settled and by whom. ‘Modernizers’ in religion are fissiparous: modernist congregations tend to split. This is especially so among Protestant liberals. I am not just referring to people with modernist or liberal views but to modernist congregations. Such separate, ‘different’ congregations exist among Protestants and Jews, and to a more limited extent in the Roman Catholic Church; they are considerably more difficult to identify as between different mosques. Yes, there are mosques whose Imams have a more liberal approach to Islam, but while among Jews and Protestants, these liberal approaches crystallized out into separate, progressive movements, and to a more limited extent also among Roman Catholics (especially in the USA, as will be shown below), in Islam, no such crystallization took place.

Another issue that needs to be mentioned is the way in which identity has come to be increasingly intertwined with religion. Especially for immigrants, notably those in Western Europe from Islamic countries, religion has taken on greater importance in how they understand themselves (how they experience their identity) and how they are seen by others. In contrast, religion is likely to be less prominent in the identity of liberals: after all, they have replaced aspects of the traditional and more assertive religious views (‘we know’) with more open-minded and questioning approaches. Liberals are what they are in part because religion plays a less constraining part in their identity make-up and in the way they run their daily lives, as compared to the more traditional believers. Even so, the four dimensions of identity construction, pinpointed by Hervieu-Léger (1999), remain important to liberals. These are (1) communitarian: the distinguishing social and symbolic markers, such as circumcision or practising the five pillars of Islam; (2) ethical: the acceptance of values related to the religious tradition; (3) cultural: doctrine, books, art within the tradition; (4) emotional: the feelings that accompany identity.

I have already suggested that there is much variation in the extent to which people who profess to be of a particular religious persuasion actually follow its directives. In any religious community, there will be those who try to ‘live by the book’, but others will be more easy-going about the extent to which they follow all the prescriptions and prohibitions. This is also the case for those who belong to liberal congregations: their members can be on quite a range of ‘correctness’ on matters such as weekly presence in church or synagogue or the following of dietary restrictions (e.g., many Jews do not eat pork, but are much less concerned about keeping the many other dietary rules – which is true, incidentally, also for many who are members of more traditional congregations). Yet as Frank Opton (1982), a leader of the Unitarian Church in the USA, has emphasized, whatever the actual behaviour of their members, liberal varieties of religion shun indifference and do not promote what might be called ‘religion lite’. They can differ considerably from each other, even within the same religious family, but they take religion seriously and want to be seen to take it seriously.

Let us now consider in more detail the liberal approaches in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I shall begin with Protestantism because it was among Protestants that liberal ideas first took hold.

Liberal Protestantism

It is, of course, problematic to speak of ‘Protestantism’ in this context because of the many varieties of Protestantism, also among liberals. Yes, there are some aspects that are shared by all: their opposition to seeing good deeds as helping to lead to salvation, thought to be only attainable through faith (sola fides); the reluctance to focus on ‘the sacred’; and the widely shared mistrust of powerful Church institutions – all developed in the original ‘stand-off’ from Roman Catholicism. Yet there are considerable differences between the diverse denominations, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals: some of these are liberal, some are fundamentalist, and many are in between, or with a more or less formal range of views. Remember also that the very concept of fundamentalism comes from the Protestant sphere. The contrasts between the extremes are stark.

The roots of liberal Protestantism go back to the 16th century and the followers of Jacobus Arminius in The Netherlands (Klooster 2006). One of the main issues they had with the dominant Calvinists, an issue which reverberates with liberal Protestants today, related to the formers’ view that only the ‘elect’ are saved. Whether you were among those or not was not something you could influence: it was simply an unknowable given. In contrast, the Arminians called the Remonstrants in The Netherlands insisted that salvation solely depended upon a person’s faith or lack of it; if you had faith, you could/would be saved. They were influential outside The Netherlands, notably through John Wesley in the UK, the founder of the Methodist movement. Of importance were also the ideas of tolerance regarding belief (different variants should be able to exist side by side within the same Church) and of freedom of conscience: the Arminians opposed the ‘imposition’ of specific beliefs.

In the 19th century, liberal Protestants had to come to terms with the new insights in science, notably the theory of evolution, and face up to the consequences of raw capitalism. Important figures straddling the 19th and 20th centuries were Walter Rauschenberg (1861–1918) in the USA and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) in Germany. They stressed that theology should be just as open to criticism as other branches of learning and that Christianity needed to be understood in the context of other historical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Religion, politics and ideology
• SECTION 1 Core issues and topics
• SECTION 2 New debates and controversies
• SECTION 3 Country case studies
• Index