Finding God in Global Politics

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published online 4 February 2014International Political Science ReviewMarion Maddox

Finding God in Global Politics  

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Finding God in Global Politics

Marion MaddoxMacquarie University, Australia

AbstractThe literature on religion and international politics has expanded in reaction to the events iconically known as ‘9/11’, said to cast doubt on the ‘secularisation thesis’, which dominated the social sciences’ approach to religion until the 1980s. The four books under review begin by assessing the secularisation premise, before amassing data to demonstrate the ways in which ‘religion’ (however conceived) influences or is suppressed by governments, inflames or mediates conflicts, shapes voter attitudes and political cultures, and so on. With one exception, the authors devote little attention to defining ‘religion’ or to delineating what differentiates it from other categories such as ‘politics’, ‘culture’, or ‘ethnicity’. What ‘religion’ refers to, and how it relates to the ‘secular’, has been the subject of detailed, technical debate within the discipline of religious studies since 1962, but this literature is largely invisible in the four reviewed texts. The result is an enormous body of data which will overturn many enduring stereotypes; but whose usefulness is, in some cases, limited by the fact that the studies ultimately demonstrate that researchers tend to find what they go looking for.

KeywordsReligion, Politics, Secularism, Secularisation thesis, International relations

Books under review

Jonathan Fox (2008) A World Survey of Religion and the State Cambridge University Press. Series Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics. 388 pp. Paperback.

Patrick James (ed.) (2011) Religion, Identity and Global Governance University of Toronto Press. 343 pp. Hardback.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2011) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide Second Edition Cambridge University Press. 375 pp. Paperback.

Erin K. Wilson (2012) After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics Palgrave Macmillan. 222 pp. Hardback.

Corresponding author:Marion Maddox, Professor and ARC Future Fellow, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Email: [email protected]

509419 IPS0010.1177/0192512113509419International Political Science ReviewMaddoxresearch-article2014

Review Article

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Introduction

In the beginning was nineteenth-century sociology, and nineteenth-century sociology begat the ‘secularisation thesis’. The secularisation thesis predicted that, with modernisation, religion would fade, to be replaced by enlightenment rationality, science, scientific socialism, or some blend. This would happen first in the ‘advanced’ societies, but, in due course, in all, thanks to civilisation’s inexorable spread. But then came the last two decades of the twentieth century. Only parts of Europe followed the script. Resurgences of religion elsewhere—and politically-assertive religion, at that—forced the secularisation thesis’s surviving proponents to reconsider their theory.

This is the classic version of ‘the-story-so-far’ that underlies the four texts under review. Each proposes a different version of ‘what happens next’. The four books under review begin by assess-ing the secularisation premise, before amassing data to demonstrate the multifarious ways in which ‘religion’ (however conceived) influences or is suppressed by governments, inflames or mediates conflicts, shapes voter attitudes and political cultures, and so on. However, while they argue for political science to pay more attention to religion, they draw only lightly from the existing corpus of religious studies, whose theoretical insights could deepen the discussion. With the exception of Wilson, the authors devote little attention to defining what they understand the category of ‘reli-gion’ to delineate, or what differentiates it from other categories such as ‘politics’, ‘culture’, or ‘ethnicity’. They bring together a huge quantity of data, overturning many enduring stereotypes and demonstrating several ways in which the categories of religious and secular can be constructed.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s magisterial Sacred and Secular is a revised edition of the original publication from 2004. To the first edition’s exhaustive crunching of 1981−2001 World Values Surveys numbers, the new version adds equally detailed analysis of evidence from the Gallup World Poll of 2007. The authors also add a response to debate that has arisen since first publication. They continue their 2004 argument that, although the ‘secularisation thesis’ needs tweaking, it should not be abandoned. They maintain that people become less religious and there-fore more secular—by which Norris and Inglehart mean less inclined to believe in God, less likely to pray and less given to public religious practice—according to predictable patterns. But, contrary to some versions of the secularisation thesis, these patterns are not (except indirectly) correlated with increased knowledge, such as having more reliable scientific answers to life’s questions. Instead, secularisation correlates with existential security, that is, ‘the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted’ (2012: 4). The poor are more religious (in Norris and Inglehart’s terms) than the rich, the elderly than the young, women than men and the uneducated than the educated (2012: 243).

Sacred and Secular is in four parts. Readers most interested in secularisation theory will con-centrate on Parts One and Four, where the existential security argument is outlined and defended. Part Two helpfully revisits three cases whose existing literature frequently relays unsupported assumptions about secularisation.The persistence of religiosity in America appears at first as an exception to the existential security thesis; but Norris and Inglehart explain it through income inequality, with religion appealing most to those who miss out in the US distribution of wealth. Contrary to some popular wisdom, the authors find no resurgence of religion in post-communist Europe. A chapter on religion and politics in the Muslim world revisits the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ debate, finding the major cleavage between ‘the west and the rest’ to be not in views of democ-racy, as often supposed, but in ‘social values toward gender equality and sexual liberalization’ (2012: 154). Part Three considers secularisation’s consequences in the areas of moral values, social capital and electoral behaviour. I comment further on the moral values and social capital themes below.

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Jonathan Fox’s World Survey of Religion and the State similarly aims for global coverage, with data spanning about half Norris and Inglehart’s timeframe: 1990 to 2002. Fox concludes that reli-gion’s multidimensionality precludes any unilinear interpretation, whether in favour of secularisa-tion or its opposite: real-world phenomena are so complex that ‘both sides of the debate can be correct’. However, ‘if one must choose sides, those who disagree with secularization-modernization theory are probably more correct than the theories’ defenders’ because it is not clear whether the extent of any overall decline ‘is sufficient to call it secularization’ (2008:20).

The body of Fox’s book is organised loosely by region, with chapters devoted to the western democracies, the former Soviet bloc, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Each chapter is divided internally into countries with state-controlled religions; preferential support for one or some particular religions; general state support for religion; moder-ate religion−state separation; near full separation; and hostility between religion and state. Those categories are further subdivided according to treatment of minorities.

By far the most common category is preferential support for one or some particular religions. It is the only category represented in every geographical region. It accounts for more than half of Fox’s sample of former Soviet states and just under half of western democracies and Latin American nations, and is also the single largest category in Asia (although Fox’s ‘Asia’ includes Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, so the overall count partly reflects the trend for the ‘preferential support’ category to predominate in historically Christian societies). The next most evenly-represented categories, although covering much smaller numbers of states, are ‘moderate separation’, ‘near full separation’ and ‘hostility to religion’, which all appear in all regions except the Middle East and North Africa. Fox’s ‘hostility’ category ranges from ‘mild’ (France, Singapore) to systematic (North Korea). Other categories are similarly diverse. ‘Near full separation’, for example, has two representatives among the western democracies: the United States (which allows no direct government funding of religious activities) and the Netherlands (a significant proportion of whose education and health care is provided by government-funded religious organisations) (2008: 133-4). At the opposite end of the scale, in both ethos and distribution, all thirteen of Fox’s ‘religious states’ lie in Asia or the Middle East/North Africa. Again, the category includes a range, from Saudi Arabia, which Fox designates ‘closer to being a full theocracy than any other state in the world’ (2008: 227) to the Maldives, where religions other than Islam may be practised in pri-vate (2008: 196).

In 2007, the University of Southern California’s first annual Religion, Identity and Global Governance conference heard six panels and two keynote addresses, published as Religion, Identity and Global Governance, edited by Patrick James (2011). Its fifteen contributions take as their central premise that ‘religion plays an important role in international relations and foreign policy’. The conference’s view of the secularisation thesis could thus be summarised as moving on from a sociological mistake, and they address three subsequent question clusters. The first is whether, and if so how, an observer can isolate religion from other explanatory factors. Specifically, ‘How do we know when religion is “real” versus a cover for some other factor such as ethnicity or group power?’ (James, 2011: 3). The second question cluster concerns how to use religion to advance the cause of peace and international co-operation (as opposed to fostering violence). The third is how governments, and especially the world’s dominant superpower, should adjust their domestic and foreign policies in the light of ‘religious resurgence around the world’ (James 2011: 3).

If James’s case studies show a disproportionate weighting towards Christian, followed by Muslim, examples, the collection represents a welcome diversity in other respects. In particular, it introduces a variety of ways in which religious people and institutions contribute to international politics—as generators of political ideas, actors in international diplomacy at both elite and grass-roots levels, participants in humanitarian efforts and contributors to national and international

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security and insecurity. Collectively, James’s contributors mount a compelling case that religious organisations and institutions are not only failing to fade away, but are, if anything, becoming more integrally involved in international politics.

Rather than pronounce on whether the secularisation thesis is alive or dead, Erin Wilson’s After Secularism re-imagines both the original issue of the relationship between secular and sacred, and the question of ‘what happens next’, by denaturalising the categories through which the classical secularisation narrative was established. Wilson organises her argument around the observation that religion and politics, sacred and secular, although generally presumed to be stable, fixed and natural categories, are actually ‘socially and historically constructed’, owing their present delinea-tion to ‘familiar and well-established modern divisions between public and private that date back to the Westphalian settlement’ (Wilson, 2012: 43). Wilson identifies four ‘key cognitive moves’ on the part of ‘secularist ideology’ which together ‘seek to establish a permanent binary opposition between the religious and the secular’. The first is to distinguish church and state conceptually, a move she traces to Luther. The second is to enact that distinction in real, separated institutions. The third move is sidelining religion, whose main mechanism, she proposes, is the public/private dis-tinction, with religion aligned to the private. For the first three moves she acknowledges her debt to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), but adds a fourth, ‘the positioning of secularization as a central part of modernization and development, to the extent that it implies that religion is premod-ern and regressive.’ Together, Wilson concludes, these four moves position religion on the negative side of a collection of binaries, along with feminism and aestheticism (2012: 43), which are col-lectively characterised as irrational, uncivilised and dangerous.

Drawing on theology as well as international relations theory, Wilson argues that international relations theory relies on a ‘secularist ideology’ which is bound by an ‘either/or model of thinking’ which contributes to a negative view of religion by continually emphasising one half of each of three binaries, and suppressing the other. So, international relations theory conceives religion as inherently (i) individual (and so missing its communal elements) (ii) institutional (and so missing what Wilson calls its ideational elements, meaning broadly theological content) and (iii) irrational (enabling it to ignore what she identifies as religion’s rational elements, such as potential to con-tribute to conflict resolution, and also to overlook secularist ideology’s own irrational elements (2012: 144)). For Wilson, religion is both individual and communal, both institutional and idea-tional, both irrational and rational.

The large-N studies in Norris and Inglehart and in Fox and the numerous single-case instances in James advance the field by providing a large amount of new data; Wilson does most to advance the theoretical discussion. A review of this length cannot adequately address the detail in four books of the length and richness of those under discussion. In what follows, therefore, I concen-trate on the four books’ shared concerns and on one important theoretical dividing line, namely, the ways in which they delineate the religious and the secular.

As we might expect, the conclusions at which the authors arrive depend significantly upon the initial framing of the question. When authors assume that the delineation between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ is self-evident, the insight that can be drawn from their data is limited. When authors are aware of the consequences of different ways of casting the religious-secular divide, fewer limitations result.

The shadow of ‘9/11’

A second ghost, besides that of the secularisation thesis, haunts all four texts. Each opening chapter drops an early mention of ‘9/11’ (always by its numerical sign alone—no need nowadays for such explanatory terms as ‘terrorist attacks’ or ‘World Trade Centre and Pentagon’, nor clarification that

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it refers to 11 September rather than 9 November) by way of explanation for international relations scholars’ renewed interest in ‘religion’.

The narrative of literary drought (pre-‘9/11’), followed by abundance (now that international relations scholars have discovered religion), mirrors a previous, if less specifically international relations focused, dearth-and-abundance narrative. In the 1990s, a similar spate of books on reli-gion in global politics told a similar story citing different fertilising events: the Iranian revolution; the political prominence of the US evangelical right through groups such as the Moral Majority and the American Christian Coalition; Catholic activist movements such as the liberation theology-inspired Basic Ecclesial Communities in Latin America, ‘People Power’ in the Philippines and Solidarity in Poland; India’s Bharatiya Janata Party; the realisation that Israel’s Haredim (the so-called ‘Ultra-Orthodox’) were not declining as anticipated but, on the contrary, increasing in num-bers, political assertiveness and economic demands on the state (eg Juergensmeyer, 1993; Marty and Appleby (eds), 1993; Casanova, 1994; Barber, 1995; Huntington, 1996; Connolly, 1999). In the earlier narrative, Islam was one religious resurgence among many; by the post-‘9/11’ wave of secularisation thesis revision, to which our four texts belong, Islam—or rather, one particular man-ifestation of political Islam—had taken on such iconic status that, although all four books discuss a wealth of traditions and themes in exhaustive detail, ‘9/11’ had become a sufficient invocation to justify the need for more work on religion in international relations.

The discussion of religion and global politics is greatly advanced by all four contributions, notably in relation to politically-visible Islam. In answer to the ‘lazy conspiracy of assumptions’ which portrays human rights protection as a western achievement in the face of Muslim opposition, Anthony Chase (in James, 2011) documents the numerous ‘sinews’ connecting Muslim states, and movements, with global human rights discourse. If Muslim states are not always consistent in their application of human rights principles, Chase challenges readers to nominate a state that does apply such principles consistently. Lazy conspiracies of assumptions similarly plague discussions of democratic values, and Norris and Inglehart provide a timely corrective. Their data show that attitudes to democracy among people living in Muslim states are not significantly different from those of people living in western democracies, and that both groups’ attitudes are markedly more pro-democratic than those of people in Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America (2011: 146).

What is religion?

The foregrounding of Islam in work advocating greater attention to religion has a certain irony. The two waves of books pleading for international politics literature to include more religion coincided with the climax of a fifty-year slow boil during which the discipline of religious studies became increasingly sceptical as to whether the category of ‘religion’ has any academic validity or utility (eg W C Smith, 1962; J Z Smith, 1982; Asad, 1993; Fitzgerald, 1999; Masuzawa, 2005). By 2008, classicist Stanley Stowers declared that ‘the rhetoric of despair about “religion as an object of study” has become nearly hysterical’ (Stowers, 2008: 434). That anxiety began with Wilfred Cantwell Smith, an Islam specialist who directed Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions from 1964 until 1973. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) argued that ‘religion’ is a western category which western scholars apply to members of other societies; but those societies typically do not have any term corresponding to ‘religion’. He proposed that scholars should aban-don the category ‘religion’.

Since then, scholars of religion with disciplinary roots in history, anthropology and philosophy have taken up the argument. According to anthropologist Talal Asad, the assumption that religion ‘has an autonomous essence—not to be confused with the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense—invites us to define religion as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon.’

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But defining religion in this way is problematic, because doing so involves a conceptual ‘separa-tion of religion from power’, which is ‘a modern Western norm, the product of a unique post-Reformation history.’ (Asad, 1993: 28)

The most recent iteration of this position has been developed by William Arnal, a scholar of Christian origins, and Russell McCutcheon, whose work focuses on myth and ritual and on secu-larism. They question the ‘widely shared, seemingly commonsense presumption that there is such a thing in the world called religion’ which ‘is inherently or properly distinguishable from that nonreligious thing that goes by the name of politics, the secular, the profane, or … the mundane.’ (2013: 3) Instead, they see religious and secular as a co-dependent pair whose significance lies less in the position of the line between them than in the whole that they constitute, namely, the nation-state. (2013:128–9)

This produces a new understanding not just of religion, but also of the secular state, since the two are products of their mutual interrelation. The secular state ‘generates a shadow image of itself, a realm of collective voluntary commitment rooted in (irrational, variable and uncompelled) per-sonal belief that the state would not partake of or constrain.’ Viewed like this, ‘religion is first and foremost a political category, albeit an ambivalent one, with its apotropaic [evil-averting] function of referring to qualities from which the state seeks to dissociate itself.’ (2013: 109) Religion, in other words, is (among other things) the basket into which the secular state can thrust the elements of itself that it would prefer to conceal or ignore.

Most of the authors under review assume the delineation of religious and secular to be pretty much self-evident, a matter of common sense. In the discipline of religious studies, by contrast, few questions are more contentious. In the rest of this paper, I hope to show why the definition of religion matters, and how the studies that fail to attend to this question, rich though they are, obscure parts of the very matter they aim to illuminate, namely, how those fields designated ‘reli-gious’ function as part of, and not merely as something removed and assumed to be protected from, politics.

Seek, and you shall likely find

Norris and Inglehart define religion almost exclusively in terms of individual religious commit-ments, expressed as belief in God, prayer and attendance at worship (2012: 40). But their subtitle announces their theme as ‘Religion and Politics’, inviting the question of how well these strictly individual categories match the terrain. We can explore this by concentrating on one example.

By the measures of individual belief, prayer and attendance, Australia fits Norris and Inglehart’s model of a secularising wealthy and secure country. Australian church attendance has reached historic lows1, while the proportion of Australians selecting ‘No Religion’ in the 2011 census was, at 22.3 per cent, an all-time high, making ‘nones’ the second-largest religious identification cate-gory after the Catholics’ 25.3 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012).

While Australia’s people have secularised, however, many of its institutions have seemingly gone in an opposite direction. The privatisation, or quasi-privatisation, of previously government services (O’Sullivan et al., 2009) led to a transfer of welfare services from government to religious agencies, such that economist Paul Oslington estimated that ‘Approximately half of all social ser-vices in Australia are delivered by church-related organisations, often through contracting-out arrangements with government’ (Oslington, 2013). The proportion of Australian students enrolled in public schools peaked at 78.9 per cent; by 2013, successive policy and funding adjustments saw that proportion drop below 66 per cent. The rest attended private schools, of which over 90 per cent are Christian. Some Christian schools derived over 80 per cent of their recurrent funding from government sources, while teaching non-standard curriculum (eg creationism). Religion-based

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exemptions from antidiscrimination legislation allowed them to sack teachers on grounds of sexu-ality, marital status, pregnancy and potential pregnancy, and to expel homosexual students (Maddox, in press).

Norris and Inglehart explain that ‘“modernization” … greatly weakens the influence of reli-gious institutions in affluent societies, bringing lower rates of attendance at religious services, and making religion subjectively less important in people’s lives’ (2011: 25). But are attendance and subjective importance the only, or even the best, measures of ‘the influence of religious institutions in … societies’? Arguably, the handing-over of up to half of a country’s welfare activities and over one-third of its school education to religious institutions is also ‘influence’. The desecularisation of Australia’s school and welfare systems has outstripped comparable processes in many similar nations, and yet Australia is by no means alone in the overall trend towards so-called ‘faith-based’ providers taking over increasing proportions of previously public services (Glenn, 2000; Daly, 2009).

One explanation for omitting such developments from studies of secularisation could be that outsourcing, even to religious organisations, is not seen as ‘really’ religious policy or legislation. It might be argued that religion in these instances is being used primarily instrumentally, as a way of delivering services more cheaply, increasing consumer choice, transferring risk to individuals and non-government organisations, or for other reasons. James’s Religion, Identity and Governance takes as its starting point three sets of questions, of which the first is, ‘How is it established that religious identity is the relevant factor in explaining or understanding politics? How do we know when religion is “real” versus a cover for some other factor such as ethnicity or group power?’ (James 2011: 3) A contributor to the volume, John F. Stack, elaborates: ‘It is difficult and probably impossible to isolate religion entirely from the other basic social markers … ethnicity, language, culture and race.’ (Stack, 2011: 29)

The scare-quotes around ‘real’ alert us to the problem: what does it mean for religion to be real? What is unreal religion, and how would anyone tell? If, indeed, religion cannot be isolated from those other factors, the requirement that scholars discern when it is ‘real’ seems to amount to a plea to discern when a person making a claim on the basis of the religious (as opposed to ethnic, linguis-tic, cultural or racial) aspect of their social being is doing so in good faith.

Such an effort is beset with difficulties. As Jonathan Fox and Nukhet Sandal argue in their con-tribution to Religion, Identity and Global Governance:

there are no circumstances in which it cannot be argued that religion is being used for ulterior motives. Put differently, there is no action that an individual motivated by religion might take that cannot be ascribed to other motivations including secular political and economic incentives. (James 2011: 96)

Again, the whiff of bad faith seems to blow over the suggestion: religious motives are noble and pure, but sometimes people do things for baser reasons (political and economic), and then try to pass them off as admirably religious.

If, as Asad and Arnal and McCutcheon propose, we stop worrying about where the boundary lies between religious and secular (or between ‘real’ religion and religion which is not ‘real’ and therefore presumably fake), we could instead concentrate on arguably more interesting questions. The Australian government’s motivations for outsourcing significant chunks of its welfare, aged care, health, mental health and education activities to church institutions may be a desire to desecu-larise these activities (as some ministerial pronouncements have suggested, eg Abbott, 2000; Cadman, 2000; Costello, 2003; Howard, 2004; Gillard, 2011; for discussion see Maddox, 2005: 235-242; and Maddox, 2012). Less frequently-mentioned effects of such outsourcing, which might also have provided motivations, include the fact that shifting services from government to the

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church not-for-profit sector moves the associated work to a minimally-unionised and compara-tively lower-paid labour force which is supplemented by volunteers, producing a significant price advantage. Moreover, religious organisations’ exemptions from antidiscrimination legislation mean that workers in that sector are frequently not covered by the human rights protections that cover employees in other sectors, arguably making for a more compliant workforce (because an employee who knows she is vulnerable to dismissal because of her domestic arrangements, sexual-ity or pregnancy, might be less inclined to raise concerns about wages or conditions). Whether the motivation for the policy shift was ‘really’ religious may not be the most important question. More productive may be observing how sacralising the move through religious discourse positions the new, outsourced arrangements rhetorically in what Wilson identifies as the irrational, communal and ideational world of the religious private. Sacralising the outsourcing of public services renders the power relations involved in the change less visible, and harder to criticise.

A further example of how the framing of the question shapes the answer comes in one of the moments when Norris and Inglehart look beyond their focus on individual markers of religiosity. One additional indicator of secularisation beyond private religious practice is ‘the waning ability of religious authorities to shape mass views on such issues as abortion, divorce, and homosexual-ity’ (2011: 41). No doubt, in many religious societies, religious institutions’ influence on such attitudes is a relevant marker; but it seems curious that even the examples of institutional (as opposed to individual) religious behaviour still concentrate on individual, rather than collective, actions.

But, we might wonder, what is particularly significant about abortion, divorce and homosexual-ity, that makes those, and not other issues, the appropriate litmus tests of religious authorities’ influence and therefore of secularisation? What about the ability of religious authorities to shape mass views on such issues as just war, responsibility to the poor and marginalised, and care for the non-human parts of creation? Unlike Norris and Inglehart and Fox, the collection edited by James offers numerous examples of such efforts, not only on the part of religious authorities but also by religious grass-roots organisations. The five-chapter section on ‘Practice’ begins, for example, with an analysis of John Paul II’s largely unsuccessful attempts to shape both mass and elite views in the United States about the justice of the invasion of Iraq (Heft, 2011). Similarly, Wilson’s admittedly Christian-centric discussion of the range of potential religious interpretations of human rights (2012: 39–41) makes clear that collective and socially-oriented attitudes are no less authentically ‘religious’ than the individually-focused, so rendering questionable the exclusive focus on reli-gious influence over individual moral behaviours as a measure of institutional secularisation.

The attention to abortion as an indicator of the presence or absence of religious laws arguably says more about the location of observers in relation to the United States and its domestic political struggles than it does about any inherent attribute of some generalised ‘religion’. A quite different handling of the issue is evident, for example, in Japan, where a higher stigma on contraception and lower stigma on abortion has made abortion a common form of birth control (abortion has been legal since 1949, while the oral contraceptive pill was not legalised until 1999). Japanese Buddhism’s reservations about abortion produced not a political movement for religious legisla-tion, but a ritual process aimed at restoring peace alike to the departed child and grieving parents (B. Smith, 1988). This combination of policy and ritual responses to abortion may say less about Japan’s secularisation in general than about perceptions of abortion (as opposed, say, to the oral contraceptive pill) as an appropriate site of government intervention. Viewed from outside the bub-ble of Catholic and conservative evangelical concerns, the association between religious legisla-tion and abortion seems rather arbitrary.

Where Norris and Inglehart confine themselves almost exclusively to personal indicators of religiosity, Fox concentrates on religious institutions, restricting his analysis to the complementary

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indices of ‘Government Involvement in Religion (GIR)’ and ‘Separation of Religion and State (SRAS)’. Even there, however, Fox looks for institutional expressions of a phenomenon (religion) whose essence he takes to be fundamentally private and individual—to be, in Arnal and McCutcheon’s words, the collection of qualities ‘from which the state seeks to dissociate itself’.

Fox notes that religion is multidimensional, and so neither secularisation nor sacralisation is unilinear: some dimensions of religion may decline while others advance. But recognising the definitional problem does not solve it. For example, Fox identifies ‘religious legislation’ as one indicator of GIR or SRAS, explaining that his religious legislation variable ‘measures whether the government legislates religion’. (2008: 53) But what, exactly, it means for a government to ‘legislate religion’ is, in practice, extremely difficult to delineate, for reasons very closely related to the general problems with delineating what is religious and what is not. Fox offers no definition of what this might entail, illustrating it instead by means of a series of examples which include dietary laws, government appointments to clerical office and religious officials holding ex officio government posts. These examples involve religious institutions, and so their integration into his institution-level analysis is relatively straightforward. Things become more complicated after that, however, because Fox’s list of instances of ‘legislating religion’ also includes ‘prohibitive restrictions on abortion’. The list does not include violence, responsibility to the poor and marginalised, or care for the non-human parts of creation; so, again, readers might be left wondering why abortion is, apparently, self-evidently a ‘religious’ issue, while the others are not.

Fox’s list of examples of religious legislation also includes ‘mandatory religious education in public schools’. But ‘mandatory religious education’ can take many forms. Compulsory education into a single religious tradition in a way that tries to elicit a faith response from children might constitute ‘legislating religion’ (Lovat, 1989); but what about compulsory non-confessional, cross-cultural education about many religious traditions, as is standard in several European countries and Québec (Willaime, 2007)? Some educationalists have argued that compulsory non-confessional, cross-cultural study of religions should be considered an essential criterion for a state to be regarded as ‘secular’. (Jensen, 2008)

The difficulty about what constitutes ‘legislating religion’ is well illustrated by a debate in an Australian Senate committee in February 2011. The Employment, Education and Workplace Relations Committee was considering the guidelines regulating the National School Chaplaincy Program, under which the federal government funds chaplains2, mostly in public schools, while forbidding them to ‘proselytise’. The committee debated what constitutes proselytising. The Liberal Senator for Queensland Brett Mason asked the program’s administrators whether a chap-lain saying ‘God loves you’ to a child would constitute proselytising. The administrator replied that ‘it would depend on the context’. Senator Mason asked whether chaplains were ‘allowed to promote the tenets of Christianity?’ The administrator, Lisa Paul, replied: ‘They are not allowed to promote if that means proselytising.’ What about Christian ethics, Senator Mason suggested. The Departmental reply was: ‘It is not within [chaplains’] authority to promote any religious path or view’. Senator Mason mused: ‘Not to proselytise Christian ethics, but if someone says, “Mate, you shouldn’t steal that,” that is promoting a Christian ethic, is it not?’ The committee chair pointed out it was also promoting the law of the land, and no doubt the ethics of religions other than Christianity. The discussion continued—for five pages, through hypothetical examples, and arguments about whether it was fair to raise hypothetical examples—but always returning to the critical point:

Senator Mason—Do you see how difficult it is?Ms Paul—Not really. I am not saying it is easy, but I think proselytisation is well understood.

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Senator Mason insisted: ‘I wish the demarcation was clear, Ms Paul.’3 The exchange illustrates the difficulty of demarcating what, exactly, constitutes ‘legislating religion’. In the absence of defini-tions, lists of examples, particularly once they stray beyond the strictly institutional, raise more questions than they answer.

Conclusion

Each of the books under review commits itself to (re-)inserting religion into the field of interna-tional politics from which it had, the authors propose, been wrongfully banished by mistaken adherence to the secularisation thesis, or to an insufficiently-developed version of it. Meanwhile, the discipline of religious studies has nurtured increasing scepticism about the usefulness of reli-gion as an analytical category, seeing its deployment as likely to obscure distributions of power, without illuminating anything else. Scholars such as William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon, Talal Asad, Timothy Fitzgerald and Tomoko Masuzawa denaturalise ‘religion’, so as to make visible the power distributions, economic transactions, gender assumptions, environmental devastations and so on which the term is inclined to privatise, sacralise and therefore protect from critical analysis. Taking Arnal and McCutcheon’s view that religion is ‘first and foremost a political category’ removes the need to adjudicate on when it is ‘real’ and when it is not, freeing us up instead to observe how its deployment as a category advances some political agendas, and obscures others.

So, when terrorists under the direction of Osama Bin Laden (who was not merely religious but, according to Norris and Inglehart, ‘fanatically religious’ (2012: 5)) flew planes into the iconic structures of the global military-economic superpower, that was clearly religious violence. On the other hand, a religious element is harder to see when the superpower wages a pre-emptive war on a Muslim population, even when the war’s supporting rhetoric is framed in religious terms, as Wilson (2012: 154–5, 171–3) and others (eg Lincoln, 2006) have shown.

The four books reviewed here argue for scholars of international politics to pay more attention to religion; and, in very different ways, they set about showing how this might be done. They draw only lightly from the existing corpus of religious studies, whose theoretical insights could deepen the discussion. In return, they offer enormous and detailed empirical data to those for whom ‘reli-gion’ is the central unit of analysis, but whose empirical studies (with a few exceptions) tend to be smaller scale and often qualitative. The two approaches have much to learn from one another.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Sean Durbin, Michael Symons, the editors and anonymous referees.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant numbers FT110100198, DP120104085].

Notes

1. According to National Church Life Survey Director A/Prof. Ruth Powell, around 15 per cent of Australians claim to attend church at least monthly (personal communication, June 2013).

2. The scheme was officially open to chaplains of any religion and was subsequently broadened to allow ‘secular Student Welfare Workers’ as well as religious personnel. According to figures obtained from the Department, at the time of the exchange quoted here over 70 per cent of chaplains worked in public schools and over 95 per cent of chaplains were evangelical Christians.

3. Senate Employment, Education and Workplace Relations Legislation Committee, 24 February 2011, 46–67.

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Author biography

Marion Maddox is a Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Politics Department at Macquarie University and a Conjoint Professor in Religion and Political Life at the University of Newcastle, both in NSW, Australia. She holds PhDs in Theology (Flinders, 1992) and Political Philosophy (UNSW, 2000). Her books include God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 2005) and Taking God to School: The End of Australia’s Egalitarian Education (to be pub-lished by Allen & Unwin in 2014).

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