Introduction
Today, religion is used to regulate physical spaces, communication networks, and content and national/local discourses in many parts of the world. Religion as a regulatory force is circulated through capillaries of everyday collective life, especially through education, media, and community living. Individuals make sense of and interact with the world from within the interpretive boundaries established in and through the use of these capillaries of collective life. As the ideology of religious politics is circulated through and populates the central meaning-making systems of the society, an individual is socialized as a religious subjectâhe/she is disciplined to further the dominance of a particular ideology of governance and conduct in a society.
The raison dâetre of the ideology of religious politics is to produce power relations that enable a particular religious community to establish its cultural, political, and economic dominance in the state. This phenomenon results in the marginalization of the minority communities and causes a rift in the everyday interactions and affective associations of individuals from different religious groups. It is, therefore, crucial to define religion as a dominant regulatory force and examine how, instead of remaining a matter of private faith, it is circulated, reinforced, and reified through both social structures of governance and individual practices.
To develop a set of analytical practices useful for understanding how religion is imbricated with the structures of governance and acts as a regulatory system for disciplining individual bodies, we have deployed Foucaultâs theory of governmentality.
Formation of a Religious Subject: Governance and Conduct
In this section, drawing from Foucaultâs work on governmentality, we identify the whole range of available techniques, practices, and discourses used to regulate the conduct of religious subjects. Analyzing this broad complex of thought, practice, and experience helps us examine governmentality as a theoretical force influencing the formation of a religious subject. Governmentality is defined as the theoretical force for examining how power (religion as a regulatory force in this work but other powers behave similarly) is diffused through everyday experiences; it is enacted through our participation, granted to, and exercised by individuals and institutions and not only the state. This is to say that for Foucault, power is embodied and enacted by a set of diverse forces, operating from a range of sites, rather than through state structures alone. Power is, thus, understood to be constitutive rather than simply coercive. Instead of simply limiting individualâs ability to act (coercive), religion as a form of power and regulatory force enables subjects to act in particular ways and conduct themselves according to the prescribed religious guidelines (constitutive).
According to the theory of governmentality, there exists a semantic link between the governing, or what Foucault calls the âgouvernerâ (macro-forces of power), and the modes of thinking and action adopted by individuals (micro-forces of power). Before we plunge into unpacking this argument, let us first understand the difference between the macro- and micro-forces of power.
- 1.Macro-forces of power: At the macro-level, we examine the larger structures of governance1 such as the law making/implementing systems, media and communication technologies, government policies and plans, public infrastructure, national and local discourses influencing public sentiments, international policies/relations, and other systems established to regulate the conduct of the entire population. These systems of governance create guidelines and disciplinary mechanisms for the masses.
- 2.Micro-forces of powerâAt the micro-level, we examine the ways in which these meta-narratives and macro-systems of governance influence the everyday, associational experiences of individualsâhow individuals interpret the guidelines of conduct coded by the larger regulatory forces for the entire population and shape their everyday practices accordingly.
According to this theory, when individuals work in conjunction with the governing structuresâmedia, politics, education, and religionâand devise guidelines regulating their everyday interactions and practices such that the ideologies operating at the macro-level get reinforced, a dominant rationality emerges. Dominant rationality is the meaning-making system extensively used in a society. It is constituted of techniques of discipline created to enable individuals to regulate how they conduct themselves and others every day defined as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, technologies of the self are a group of techniques that â⊠permit individuals to affect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls so as to transform themselves in ways that allow them to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortalityâ (1997). Individuals use self-regulation strategies designed by individuals to govern their conduct in accordance with religious guidelines. These self-regulation strategies are called technologies of self.
Let us use an example to explain how the regulatory forces at the macro-level shape the technologies of self used by individuals to regulate their conduct (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Macroâmicro-analysis
Issue: Travel ban on Muslim immigrants from specific countries issued by the United States of America |
Analysis |
1. Macro-level: The executive order 13769 was in effect from January 27, 2017 to March 16, 2017 when it was superseded by the Executive Order 13780. Under this order, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was suspended for 120 days and included denying entry to Syrian refuges indefinitely. Under this order, the state was also instructed to suspend admission to citizens of countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) which failed to meet the adjudication standards under U.S. immigration law for 90 days. Promoting the ideology of religious discrimination in publicâpolitical spaces as the dominant narrative (national and local discourse), deploying communication technologies and educational institutions to promote, validate, and reinforce this ideology, and creating laws to regulate the conduct of the masses in accordance with the politico-religious guidelines help in disciplining the population as a whole |
2. Micro-Level: Individuals are socialized in and through these social institutions that promote the ideology of religious discrimination. As a result, individuals enact their religious identities by practicing forms of conduct that reinforce the dominant ideology. For instance, this executive order and the dominant ideology of discriminating against the Muslims in America emboldened violent practices due to the perceived political and legislative empowerment of the extremist elements in the state. In its most extreme form, this ideology manifests in the individual acts of bullying, racist attacks on Muslims, and the general all-encompassing Islamophobia in the world |
It is important to note that bullying, racist attack, systemic exclusion, and other forms of extreme and violent acts are only one of the many techniques of disciplining the conduct of the âreligious subjectâ. Individuals devise several guidelines to conduct themselves, especially in relation to the religious other, and participate in reifying the dominant ideology of religious discrimination. These self-regulation techniques are defined as the technologies of self |
As is illustrated in the example here, regulatory power and the dominant ideology infiltrate and constitute the self through various disciplinary techniques that shape and influence the everyday experiences of individuals (Foucault 2003). This is possible because the technologies of the self are developed under the dominant order and are standardized rules that include power differentials (Lemke 2001).
This gives rise to an interpretive realm or a meaning-making system with fixed horizon of possibilities. Within this realm, minor variations in interpretation and conduct are accommodated to the extent that these interpretive and/or experiential elements donât challenge the authority of the dominant ideology. The limits of this horizon of possibilities are fixed through the process of normalization wherein the state provides a predetermined guideline on what can be considered as normal conduct. Through the process of normalization, differences or deviance are identified and mitigated as threats for the healthy function of the society (Lallement 2014). The deviant individual is disciplined and/or...