NS Essay - 'From the ashes of political idealism, religion has risen, seductive because it offers a simplistic division of right from wrong that suits both political spin and political vision'
NS Essay
Katy Long
Monday 9th January 2006


          "Can politics remain secular?" we asked for last year's Webb Essay competition. It must, argues the winner, Katy Long, because if we continue to pander to blind faith, our vision of a just society will die

The politics of our secular modern age is the "art of the possible". In fact, politics might be better framed as a contest for the ownership of the universal ideal of a just society. Justice, after all, is as much the aim of sharia law as the goal of liberal democracy. In western Europe and much of the rest of the world throughout the 20th century, the pursuit of such justice through the political was presented as a purely secular paradigm: post-Enlightenment reason illuminating the superstitions and injustices of religion to the benefit of mankind and the progress of human civilisation.

In the first years of the 21st century, we have watched a series of events unfold, punctuated by the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism, that has torn through such fabrications of western secularism. Now, the media and the political elite construct a "war on terror", a "clash of civilisations" - the splintered division of the world into the faithful and infidels, Islamic and Christian, Christian and Islamic. Religion, it seems, is creeping back into the political, a sphere claimed as a prize by the secular in 18th- and 19th-century Europe.

Yet politics has never divided absolutely from religion; the secular transformation is at best incomplete. Religion remains the opiate of the people. Its powers of sedation are matched only by its power to inspire the zealous and the dogmatic. It is for these reasons that politics and religion have always remained linked. The manipulation of power, after all, requires a justifying ideology. What better ordering of the universe than a divine one?

Politics cannot simply "remain" secular. It must first become fully secularised. And for this to happen, it must be recognised that existing secular politics is failing to address the challenges of the modern age. The religion of the 21st century is comprehensible only as a response, of both the powerful and the powerless, to poverty, inequality and injustice that is wholly modern. Religious thought provides explanation for suffering, even demands it in the pursuit of a "next world". The religious may place their ultimate faith in God. The secular see only human agency in human misery, a cruel expose both of politicians' failings and the disempowerment of the majority of the world's people; there is no refuge in fate.

This is not to deny the achievements of secular politics: for example, universal human rights, with their increasingly global recognition, find their foundations in the ethics of secular humanism. Similarly, doctrines of popular sovereignty are secular in principle. Yet the west should be wary of taking too orientalist a view of these "universal" secular truths, founded as they are upon a particular Judaeo-Christian heritage. Internationally, politics is not secular: the Middle Eastern Islamic states (from "evil" Iran to western-allied Saudi Arabia) define and contain political activity through religious maxims. Israel owes its very existence to the connections between politics and religion, while the 60 years of bloody violence which have followed the usurpation of Palestine are proof of the dangerous and destructive powers of religion, particularly because the absolute truth of the religious is by necessity an exclusive creed. In such countries, politics and power are understood
 and constantly underlined through refractions of religious belief that have an impact upon every aspect of global politics.

Even in the heartland of proclaimed secularism - the formal politics of western Europe - sceptical thinkers can find flaws in this claimed separation of the religious from the political. The close relationship between German church and state is demonstrated by the payment of church tax to fund Protestant and Catholic organisations. Politically, many of the parties which have governed Europe since the Second World War have approached topics such as social justice through recourse to Christianity, witness the German, Swedish or Norwegian Christian Democrats. The British political system also allows bishops to sit in the House of Lords and the public political comments of religious leaders, most notably the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be recognised as valid contributions within the British political system. America is still "one nation under God".



However, secular politics cannot be understood simply in terms of formal high politics. Too often, a secular political grammar masks religious language in the new reality of the multifaith state. In India, the largest secular state, politics remains steeped in religious intention, exemplified by the populist Hindu nationalism of the BJP and the Sikh response. Popular American-Christian evangelism has been well documented as a political phenomenon in its own right: arguably it won George W Bush his second term in November 2004. Even in France, proud defender of the fruits of its 1789 revolution, a rise in anti-Semitism is indication that the paradigm of national politics, particularly the politics of identity and entitlement, is not free from the exclusive and conveniently manipulated dictates of religion.

If secularism is as yet an unfinished project, it should, however, also be recognised that the past decade has brought a shift, both in rhetoric and action, towards a more intense and obvious religiosity within politics. There has been a subtle change in the dimensions of international relations, perceived most obviously by western citizens in the rise of al-Qaeda and its direct attack upon the secular values of the west. Yet if Islamic terrorism is the most frequently cited example of this new religious political paradigm, it should not be forgotten that its rise has occurred in tandem with that of the evangelical Christian right in the United States which attacks the same secular society and demands the teaching of creationism and the outlawing of abortion.

Religious solutions to political questions are increasingly expected in this new paradigm. In the wake of the July London bombings, Tony Blair's response was to turn to leaders of Muslim communities in the hope of stemming extremism, a response to religious fundamentalism framed by religious structures of segregation. Simultaneously, in condemning the London suicide bombers as "evil", he sought refuge in the language of irrational religious dualism in order to avoid discussion of the more concrete political causes of British Muslim disaffection.

The answer to why the 21st century has seen the increasing construction of politics in a religious rather than a rational context can be found only in recognition of the fundamental nature of politics itself. Politics is concerned with power, power to construct society according to the rules of justice determined by the powerful. Politics, in short, is the struggle to gain enough power to build a version of utopia, and thus there is a need for ideology to structure and guide power: to provide inspiration. Yet the last years of the 20th century witnessed the disillusion of the political left and the ascendancy of the pragmatic centre, not only in Britain but throughout Europe and North America. Pragmatic politics lacks the power to inspire either social vision among political leaders or fidelity in the elite's popular sovereigns (consider, for example, the decline of democracy in the UK since 1979). Return to a religious paradigm provides a substitute for political ideology. From the
 ashes of political idealism, religion has risen, seductive because it offers a simplistic division of right from wrong that suits both political spin and political vision. Furthermore, religion also exercises strong influence as a personal motivation: Blair's zeal for social reform bears comparison with the Gladstonian crusades of the 19th century. The lines drawn between the personal and the political are artificial: religion as political motivation transcends them.

The growth of religious politics is also a product of international political history. For all its rational development goals and practical targets, secular internationalism has failed to deliver the developing world from poverty and exploitation by the west, both in economic and political terms. Frustration, misery and anger are met with religion; it is the final promise to the dispossessed, an assertion that the gross injustices of the present world will be addressed again in the next. For authoritarian regimes - Iran or Saudi Arabia, for example - such other-worldliness provides scope for reinforcing the existing power hierarchy: a continuing "divine right of kings". Yet for popular movements, including those exploited by global power-brokers such as Osama Bin Laden and fashioned into terrorist networks, religious politics is a cry to radical action. The hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was after all elected Iran's president with the votes of Tehran's poor. The irrational is
 seductive when "rational" secularism is perceived as clearly designed to perpetuate rather than address power inequalities. The G8 nations have consistently failed to act on reluctant half-promises to reform trade tariffs, or redistribute power within international organisations such as the UN or World Trade Organisation. This problem is not simply international: as Belfast burned in September, the sectarian politics of Northern Ireland once more underlined the potential for religion, perverted, to define riots that were in truth an articulation of economic alienation and political frustration.

Nor should it be thought that political religious propaganda is the domain of the foreign, the other, or even that its reach is confined to the edges of politics in Europe, to Muslim pamphlets or to American evangelical publications. British politics has long asserted religion's power as a tool for cultural and historical continuity, a means of asserting identity. The Victorian Christian ethics of empire is not yet dead: our understanding of Africa, diffracted through the British media, still relies upon the narrative of the helpless African and divine intercession through western charity. With every unfolding famine headlines scream "FOR GOD'S SAKE HELP US". National identity politics have been further complicated in the west by the fracture of Christendom into multifaith communities, each asserting political identity through segregated religion and in doing so shaping the nature of the political agenda, even as most western citizens continue to embrace secularism and its inclusive
 principles.



For what it is important to recognise is that religious politics is most dangerous because of its exclusivity - its tendency towards the antagonistic, the intolerant. These qualities are not uniquely religious: aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism have led to bitter fighting, war, even genocide. The ideologies that underpinned the cold war and its divided imagined communities for nearly half a century were not religious, but were strikingly similar in their fundamentalist demands for total compliance with specific political creeds. Religion itself is not the difficulty; the problem is that when transformed into religiously driven politics, it provides a tool for the political machinations of global elites and allows for underlying inequalities to be conceived of in the irrational terms of medieval crusaders and not in terms of practical political action.

Political secularism is not dead, particularly not in its European heartland; its greatest protection lies in the continued strength of Europe's overwhelmingly secular society. Yet Mohammad Sidique Khan's chilling videotape message, delivered from beyond the grave, underlines how despair at the injustices of the present political order can easily turn to political activism understood through and justified by religion. One fact is clear: until the fundamental inequalities that promote poverty on a national and an international scale are addressed, the position of political secularism will continue to weaken. Blair and Bush have instead concentrated on using the language of the religious, irrational and abstract, to divert attention away from the real and rational. In their "condemnation" of religious extremism, they are simultaneously reinforcing the paradigm of religious politics.

Yet we must hope politics remains a secular forum, and campaign for it to become more so. Ultimately, although religion may prove a powerful motivating factor for social justice, its exclusivity offers no opportunity for the imagining of an inclusive political arena - essential if the people of this world are not to suffer the terrible injustices of the modern age one day. This is because, though religion provides the moral certainty to act on paradise-inspired visions, in the same breath it removes from society absolute responsibility for human suffering. Secularism may reveal bleak truths about inequality in the world today, but these revelations alone can provide the empowerment necessary for real progress towards the universal utopia of a just society.

The Webb Memorial Trust wishes to contact the 18 previous winners of the Webb Essay prize. Could winners please write to: Mike Parker, Honorary Secretary, Webb Memorial Trust, Mount Royal, Allendale Road, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 2NJ





---------------------------------
Yahoo! Photos
 Ring in the New Year with Photo Calendars. Add photos, events, holidays, whatever.

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤