Content area
Full text
This essay takes on the broad question-what explains the political pursuits of religious actors?-by exploring two powerful influences on these pursuits. The first is differentiation, or the degree of autonomy between religious actors and states in their basic authority. The second is political theology, the set of ideas that religious actors hold about political authority and justice. Through global comparisons across religions, regions, and states, it seeks to establish the effect of both influences on two political pursuits in which religion's role is hotly debated today: support for democratization and political violence, including communal violence and terrorism. It concludes with lessons learned commonly from the analysis of both pursuits.
In 1979, an Islamic revolution in Iran confounded American foreign policy and inspired an Islamic resurgence in Afghanistan, Kashmir, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In Turkey, after over seven decades of rule by a secular nationalist military regime, an Islamic party won elections in 2002, deepening democracy and advocating Turkey's entry into the European Union. In the 1990s, after four decades of rule, India's secular Congress Party yielded power to a Hindu nationalist party that promoted religious laws and discourse and provoked Hindu-Muslim violence. The teachings of the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965 encouraged subsequent democratization in the Philippines, Brazil, and Poland, but not in Rwanda, Argentina, or Hungary. In Sri Lanka, a lack of separation between sangha and state has fueled war between Buddhists and Hindu Tamils, whereas Buddhism in Taiwan and South Korea has promoted human rights and religious tolerance. Over the past generation, evangelical Protestants have become a powerful voting bloc in the United States, Brazil, Guatemala, and Kenya.
Defying the erstwhile dominance of the secularization thesis among western intellectuals, religion has waxed in its political influence over the past generation in every region of the globe except perhaps Western Europe (see Berger 1999; Casanova 1994; Stark 1999). What form this influence takes has become the subject of heated debates in the popular media, academia, and policy circles. Most voluble are today's polemicists, for whom rising religion amounts either to a growth in fundamentalism, violence, and intolerance or to a welcome bulwark against cultural decadence. More measured analyses, along with the previous examples of religious politics, point instead,...