Religion in Global Politics: Concepts, Definitions, Trends
by Rolf Schieder
1. Is soccer a religion?
The FIFA-Soccer-World-Championship in Germany drew much attention from all
over the world - not only because of soccer but also because of the Germans’
behaviour. A new patriotism seemed to arise, a new way of being proud of one’s
own country. Some sociologists of religion even asked: Is soccer Germany’s civil
religion?
I am well known at AICGS-conferences to draw evidence for my hypotheses for
the German tabloid BILD. And BILD never disappointed me. After the quarter
finals, when Germany made to the next round, BILD titled: „Lehmann - du bist
unser Fußballgott” Lehmann was the keeper of the German team and had held
two penalty shots. But also more serious newspapers believed that a civil
religious awakening has taken place. The international ‘Herald Tribune’ titled:
“Team spirit grips Germany. Loss can’t dim new pride sweeping nation.” In the
article one could read sentences like: “It appears that a breakthrough of sorts
has occurred.” “The track has been a long and arduous one these last 61 years.
But the “Klinsmänner” … have jolted Germany toward a new lightness of being.”
And indeed many of phenomena described by the journalists are well known to
sociologists of religion:
- the feeling of encountering some sort of conversion;
- the hard way of the religious leader (coach Klinsmann) to reveal his
power;
- the idea of sacrifice (“they gave everything”);
- the highly ritualized behaviour which creates a sense of a collective
consciousness, which Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”;
- the collective attendance of holy places. If scientists of religion from outer
space would visit our globe, they would be convinced that the sports
arenas are men’s holy spaces.
But is a new collective consciousness, a new feeling of collective identity already
a religion? There are some reason why this might not be the case:
- No soccer fan would ask coach Klinsmann to conduct a burial ceremony for
his grandmother. Ordinary people seem to have a clear sense where
sports ends and religion begins. Sports is entertainment, but religion has
to do with life and death
- with all these things that are of ultimate concern for the individual of for
society.
We should be very careful when we use the term “religion”. There is a tendency
in our present times to use religious terms as metaphors. You find religious
allusions not only in sports - you can detect is also in the commercials or in
“corporate identity”- programs of big companies. The extensive use or religious
metaphors must not necessarily be read as an increase of religion in society - it
also can be read as the decline of respect towards religious words and images.
And there is another problem coming along with the increase of religious
semantics in every day life: when everything is religion, nothing is religion. So
we have to care about proper differentiations.
2. Religion as a cultural concept
Basically there are two ways conceiving of religion: You can understand religion
as an individual action and you can understand religion as a social action.
One of the most important theorist of religion as an individual action was the
German theologian Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher. He stressed the individual
dimension of religion when he defined religion as a feeling of absolute
dependence (“Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit”) and as a taste for the
infinite (“Sinn und Geschmack für’s Unendliche”). Even the purpose of the church
is to meet the individual’s needs for the communication of his or her piety, the
purpose of the church is to enable “Geselligkeit”.
French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the contrary stresses the social dimension
of religion when he states that religion is a matter of collective consciousness.
Individual and private feelings should not be mixed up with the social force, a
religious system imposes on its adherents. This social system of religion can according to Durkheim - not be confined to churches and denominations. In a
sense, all denominations are part of a larger social system, the system of
society. Durkheim’s famous formula “God equals society” refers to the fact that a
given society is an imagined community which needs not only core values but
also an idea of its destiny in time and space. American civil religion can serve as
an example, but also the French system of ‘laicité”.
For both types of definition evidences can be found. But since they exclude each
other, it seems important to choose a perspective which transcends this
dichotomy. This is even more important when one takes into account that
“religion” as a separate and distinct field of individual and personal action can
hardly be found in Asia. A more comparative perspective easily reveals that
religion has to be thought of as a cultural concept.
This means that no universal definition of religion is possible. So we shouldn’t
even try to define “religion”. Instead we should describe the practices of defining
religion and then ask why someone holds the opinion that this or that is religion.
In other words: We should analyse the discourses of defining religion and no
more on the definitions themselves. What kinds of interests are connected with
the given definitions?
This approach to religion is inspired by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis.
Discourse analysis is always a historical analysis. How fruitful this approach can
be, shows the change of understanding of religion in the 16th and 17th century.
In the Middle Ages religion was a term to describe the intensity of faith. So the
concept of religion still belonged into the religious discourse, a transformation
took place after the confessional wars. When the acknowledgment of religious
pluralism became inevitable, the term began to play a vital role in the political
discourse. Religion became the umbrella term for the different confessions. This
gave the rising nation states the chance to organize religious peace by accepting
different faiths as acknowledged religions and at the same time differentiating
between a private and particular religious and a public and common political
field. Although the claim of the new nation-states to be the one and only to
represent the public sphere meant to underestimate the public role of religion,
this model is still very popular among politicians and political scientist.
The differentiation between church and state in early modern times did not
develop against the will of the churches of the reformation - as a matter of fact,
religion itself modernized and developed important differentiations between
politics and religion. So the modernization of religion should not be thought of as
the necessary decline of religion, but as the functional differentiation of religion
which rather enhanced the functions of religion in society. Religion was not just
the victim of the process of modernization, but also one of its actors - as Max
Weber in his capitalism-Calvinism-theory showed.
And even the Catholic Church which so heavily was opposed to the ideas of the
Enlightenment became a modernizing force in the 20th century. Today’s
Catholicism as a transnational force plays a vital role in the transformation of
societies in the process of globalization. It is not without irony that most
Protestant churches remained within a national framework, while Catholicism and
Islam as transnational forces developed much more global impact during the 20th
century.
3. What is “secularization” and who are the seculars?
There are some misunderstandings of the concept of secularization. The concept
of secularization should not be taken as a philosophy of history which can predict
the necessary decline of religion in the process of scientific and technological
progress. Quite the contrary is true. The more people become aware of the risks
of technological change, the more they feel the need for ethical and religious
orientation and of the construction of certainty.
Secularization is neither a process of the privatization of religion. The idea of the
privatization of religion is rather the wishful thinking of the political elites.
Religion is and has always been a public matter. Although processes of the
individualization and pluralization of religion have taken place, these processes
have always been a matter of public discourse.
Secularization in its proper sense means differentiation. It was T. Parsons’ and N.
Luhmann’s systems theory which focussed on the processes of functional
differentiation in modern times. These processes of differentiation did not
weaken the system of religion. In the contrary: Differentiation aims at
developing the strengths of every system - including the religious one. Religious
freedom is the best soil for the growth of religions. Even when there are
collisions of values between the different value systems, for the first time in
history these systems can develop according to their own rationale without the
fear of state intervention.
How can the relationship between secular and religious people be described?
Some analyst of the American religious scene described this relationship as a
“culture war”. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Forum cautioned and
interpreted their figures as being there a the fairly common ground of values on
which secular as well as religious people stand. And also in Germany a recent
poll shows that 80 % of nonconfessional Germans want more “Christian values”
in politics.
Taking this seriously, the seculars should not be defined as being anti-religious.
In order to describe a difference -you need a common ground on which the
differentiation can take place. What is the common ground between secular and
religious people? Both face the need to make sense out of their lives. In other
words: Seculars as well as religious have to develop their very own worldview
(“Weltanschauung”). Without such a worldview man is unable to act. Worldviews
are not irrational, in the contrary: they are highly rational for the individual,
because they are the only way to get the necessary orientation for decisionmaking. A worldview is the presupposition for rational choices.
So the difference between seculars and religious is not that those have no
worldview and these have. The difference can be that either religious people
integrate the idea of God in their worldview and the seculars do not or that some
seculars integrate at least the idea of some empty transcendent spot as a kind of
negative theology into their worldview, but do not like to affiliate with a religious
group. In the first case the seculars would favour a philosophical instead a
theological approach to live, in the second case they would just prefer an
individualized form of religion.
4. Conclusion
A discourse analysis of religion seems to be an appropriate way of understanding
religion in a plural and globalized world. There is no universal definition of
religion which fits for a tribe in New Guinea as well as for a neighbourhood in
New York. Every society is a special case, and within the societal framework
every individual is a special case too. Whether certain practices should be
describes as religious or not is an open scientific question which has to be
negotiated. And sometimes it is the task of scientist to point to problematic uses
of religious terms. And even the diagnosis of a re-emergence of religion should
be thought of as just a discoursive matter of fact.