Componentes del molde de acero

OF RELIGION

What Post-Westphalian Does Not Mean

Post-Westphalianism in this context does not mean that the Westphalian arrangements are being superseded by a revolutionary and new set of arrange-ments. The relation between Westphalian and post-Westphalian is a little like the relation between the neologism of globalisation and the older idea of mod-ernisation: more a matter of the reconsideration of the latter term than a ques-tion of substituting the former for the latter. Globalisaques-tion implies the end of a single modernisation and instead yields talk of multiple modernities (see, e.g., Eisenstadt 2002), such that the old modernisation becomes at best one option among several. Thus, a post-Westphalian condition will only negate the seem-ing necessity of the Westphalian structurseem-ing of religion, leavseem-ing open the pos-sibility of the continuation of Westphalian arrangements as a contingent or reflexive choice only, one that will appear as particular, without a claim to universality. A second caveat is that we cannot at the moment have any real idea of what the positive characteristics of post-Westphalianism may eventu-ally be. The language of ‘post’ already says this. Therefore, instead of talking about characteristics of a post-Westphalian condition, I only want to talk about intimations. A final denial is in some ways the most important. Post-Westphalian is not the same as post-secular or desecularisation. If anything, it may be pointing in the opposite direction, namely, that the post-Westphalian condition, in providing for a de-linking of state and religion in a much more radical way, marks a further secularisation of state and society, provided that we do not think of secularisation as the necessary weakening or disappearance of religion and that we include civil religion within our observations.

The Post-Westphalian and the Post-Secular

A good way to begin is to compare the idea of a post-Westphalian condition to the idea that we are entering a post-secular age. The main difference in the two terms is, of course, the word secular. If we are in a post-secular age,

then we must at one time have been in a secular one—that is, meaning non-religious by definition. Conversely, a post-secular condition must be com-paratively more religious, or at least religion has to have a more prominent place. The idea of post-Westphalian distinguishes itself in that it focuses, not on which sphere, the secular or the religious, is stronger or strengthening, but on the relation between the secular and the religious, on the ways that the secular—here, in the first instance, the state and the nation—and the religious are constructed in relation to one another.

A more concrete outline can begin with the sort of events that I discussed at the beginning and that seem to be instrumental in generating talk of a

‘post’ situation. I put aside the religio-political movements dubbed ‘fun-damentalisms’, and concentrate instead on those developments dependent on transnational migration and the resultant greater religious diversity in a number of, mainly rich, Western, states. The increasing presence of reli-gious others within the bounds of the nation-state introduces new forms that end up challenging Westphalian assumptions. The United States and several Western European countries can serve as examples. The former, of course, has a long history of incorporating and structuring religious plural-ity, including the religions of those newly migrated, along what have been called congregational, denominational, and organised lines. There is strong evidence to suggest that this tradition is continuing with the current increase in religious diversity brought by the ‘new immigrants’ (see Warner 1993;

Yang & Ebaugh 2001). What is, however, intriguing in the current context is the apparent movement in the United States to alter an aspect of Ameri-can civil religion, namely, to expand the religious identities through which one can be American—hitherto, to cite Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1960)—to include all ‘Abrahamic faiths’, most specifically Islam (cp. Had-dad & Esposito 1998). This is a way of saying that the dominant religion of the American nation in the Westphalian sense is being recast as an Abraha-mic one. If the process continues, it will amount to including in the religious majority something that is or was one of the religious minorities, and this in turn begs the question of the limits of such majoritisation. Will Hindus be included (cf. Kurien 2007)? What about Buddhists, Sikhs, Wiccans, and Scientologists? Projected forward, I suggest, this development is an ‘inti-mation of a Post-Westphalian condition’, one in which the critical distinc-tion between majority/nadistinc-tional religion and tolerated nadistinc-tional or religious minority loses its cogency and above all its self-evidence. In that sense, it decouples religion and nation/state within the peculiarly American variant of the Westphalian model. The implication is that, as the process continues, one can increasingly be American without being of a particular religion and, above all, without being particularly religious.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Western Europe’s response to the new religious diversity introduced through postwar immigration is the prevalence of Islam in the equation. It is not at all going too far to say that when many Europeans say ‘religious diversity’, they mean Islam; and when

they say Islam, they see a problem. To some extent that is the case in all Western countries, but it is especially so in Western and Central Europe. If one then asks what is so problematic about Islam in Europe and, through Islam, about religious diversity, then the much-discussed idea of a European Islam is probably indicative. Embedded in this discussion are a number of assumptions. These include, first, that Islam isn’t already European¹—by itself an idea with strong Westphalian resonance. Conversely, there is the often implicit assumption that for Islam to be or become European, it has to restructure itself more along the lines of the established Christianities that, even if vicariously or as a chain of memory (Davie 2000; Hervieu-Léger 1993), currently dominate in European countries. In these countries, on a Westphalian basis, the secular is also deemed to trump the religious. A third assumption, therefore, is that Islam supposedly does not accept this West-phalian subordination and also does not accept being a minority religion;

that is why it has to develop a European identity and structure that allows both. An intimation of post-Westphalianism would in this case be that this insistence on Islam becoming European will appear highly contingent, not at all self-evident, and that Islam will successfully resist the pressure to con-form.

The third set of events, namely, the fall of avowedly atheist but nonethe-less civil religious Socialism/Communism points in a parallel direction. The iconic dismantling of the Berlin Wall as harbinger of the virtual elimination of the Socialist option represents, among other things, the removal of a strong set of staunchly secularist Westphalian variants. In its wake, West-phalian logic has immediately asked, what will take its place? Will it be secu-lar or religious nationalisms? Will it be Islam? Will it be Huntington-style (Huntington 1996) imagined civilisations? A post-Westphalian intimation would be to ask, why do we need a replacement? A post-Westphalian stand would not be post-secular so much as it would be post-secular/religious.

If there are Westphalian intimations in the European and the post-Socialist cases, then these would be twofold. First, that in a few cases a West-phalian solution does not even appear on the horizon, cases like China or Great Britain; second and much more importantly that the several attempted Westphalian solutions appear anodyne, controversial, or downright oppres-sive. Countries as varied as Russia, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and India would fall under this latter heading. They distinguish themselves in how careful they feel that they have to be in reasserting a Westphalian order.

Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church has a renewed special place, but one is careful not to give it any real privilege and at least to pretend not to ‘minori-tise’ other religions. Muslims in countries like Germany, the Netherlands and France are no longer told openly that they are simply foreigners or excluded minorities (as Turks in Germany were in principle and practice not so long ago), but that they have to integrate or to adopt local values. And when the Swiss ban minarets or the French pass laws against Islamic women’s cloth-ing, they do not exactly meet with understanding and approval from other

countries or from all quarters of their own populations. The intimation of post-Westphalianism is therefore the relatively greater difficulty one has in self-evidently continuing to pursue the Westphalian model, including in the name of the nation, and in defence of a civil religion.

The Post-Westphalian Remodelling of Religion

Post-Westphalian intimations from the side of the secular, from the side of the state, are only one part of the thesis. Just as important are develop-ments on the side of religion. These include some of what has already been discussed, like religious changes attendant upon intensified transnational migration or the rise of ‘fundamentalisms’; but these are, from the perspec-tive of religion, not so much the main events as developments that make a greater number of observers aware of religion and the changes happening in this domain. The more consequential transformations would be ones that have more to do with the form of religion—with its remodelling—than with the way religion impinges upon nonreligious domains.

We can begin an analysis of these changes in form by looking at other aspects of the religious developments just discussed. Here I mean in par-ticular the degree to which they demonstrate how religions are crossing and even ignoring state and other boundaries in multiple and more intensified ways. Although religion transcending political boundaries is far from new in human history, the Westphalian model is relatively new. The religions are themselves to a large degree the product of construction and reconstruction over the modern centuries—and this to an extent, but certainly not entirely, following a Westphalian logic. Their reconstruction has, in that context, also been transnational and increasingly global. With the increasing globali-sation of communication and thus of connectivity around the world over the past century, and especially since the end of the Second World War, religions have more and more extended themselves globally such that their centres of recognised authenticity and even authority now lie in multiple places, and not just or not necessarily in their historic ‘heartlands’ (Beyer 1998). One can certainly see this process happening in the case of Christianity and its many subvariants, as, for instance, when Ugandan and American Episcopa-lians struggle internally over the direction that the Church of England is to take; when African missionaries go to the European Christian heartlands to

‘return authentic Christianity’ to those who sent them the message in the first place (Adogame 2000); or, when a worldwide Pentecostal movement grows rapidly, has no recognisable centre, and yet is by its own narrative and activity single and global. It is possible today to make a cogent case for Christianity precisely shifting its predominant centre of gravity away from the historic heartlands in the Global North to the Global South (Jenkins 2007), and that includes the still quite centralised Roman Catholic Church which is now arguably moving to the sort of transnational stance that it had before the Westphalian era (Casanova 2001). The case of Islam, while

very different in the details, is analogous. The centres of authenticity for this religion are not just in Saudi Arabia, at al-Azhar in Cairo, in Pakistan, or in some other country. They are, on the one hand, in a great many coun-tries and in no country (cf. Beyer 2007). It is legitimate to talk about a very convergent and clearly defined global Islam whose centre is everywhere and nowhere, including in cyberspace (cf. Roy 2004). Similar cases can be made for Buddhism and to a lesser extent for Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Judaism. Yet this de-centring of religions does not also mean their effective de-construction as single social institutions. Each one of them still has an enacted unity that is carried by their adherents, albeit not a unity founded on centralised orthodoxy or even any uniform orthodoxy at all (Beyer 2003).

And in all these developments, what is clearly receding is the role of particu-lar states in disciplining, let alone regulating this process. The states in this process are, and probably have been for some time, fading, but only in this Westphalian sense (cp. Rudolph 1997); as institutionalised and systematised modalities of power, they are as strong as ever, if not stronger, unless one insists that this is to be measured by their ‘Westphalian’ role.

Consonant with this process of de-centring and globalising, there appears to be another sort of development which, again, has probably been hap-pening for some time, but which has also accelerated significantly since about the middle of the last century. This is a tendency in many, though not all quarters, to individualise the practising of religion, to, for instance, practise ‘religion à la carte’, to engage in a Luckmannian ‘bricolage’ (Luck-mann 1967), what Ingelhart calls ‘post-materialist religion’, what Troeltsch already called ‘mysticism’(Troeltsch 1931), and what is reflected in the cur-rent focus of some scholars on ‘lived religion’ (Hall 1997; McGuire 2008) or ‘popular religion’ (Parker 1996). The relatively recent rise of the word

‘spirituality’ (Flanagan & Jupp 2007) to express religion that is individual, experiential, nonauthoritative, and even nonnormative—and this in explicit contrast to collective, dogmatic, and authoritative ‘religion—would be another manifestation of this development. Just as remarkable, however, is that this change does not necessarily negate or replace the institution-alised religions; a great deal of this process of individualisation is happening

‘within the religions’, as people, who otherwise have no trouble identifying themselves and being identified as adherents of one of the religions, partici-pate in and reproduce these religions selectively, in many cases intensively, very often only occasionally and often not exclusively. If one were to look at this process only from the perspective of the individuals, then one could well regard it as a shift of religion from the collective to the individual. From the perspective of the religions, it might appear worrying for some authorities but would not really constitute much of a threat to the regular reproduction of that institutionalised religion. If coming to church, mosque, or temple to engage in ritual activity is not all that some individual may do to express their spiritual selves, they nonetheless do help reproduce the institutional religion by that activity. If they do it only once or twice a year, the result is

the same because many others are doing the same thing. To be sure, there are still around the world a great many exclusivists, people who not only identify with only one religion, but make sure their religious practices, their spirituality, is exclusively carried out within the operative boundaries of that religion. These are the people that probably still attract the attention of most observers. But even here, the process of individualisation is happening for a great many.

Considering these various phenomena together, what is most important in the present context is the degree to which they question the self-evidence of the Westphalian assumption that religions, states, and national identities—

‘peoples and their religions’—‘naturally’ overlap to a high degree. What this suggests is that religion as an institutional domain may be modelling itself less than under the Westphalian regime on the state and, conversely, that the state will be modelling itself less on religion as the institution responsible for the foundational unity and identity of the state-centred society. If this mutual modelling is lessening, what alternative sorts of modelling might be taking place?

State and religion are not the only strongly differentiated institutional systems that dominate in contemporary global society, just as the mutual modelling that I have been describing under the heading of the Westphalian model is not the only relation between systems that has been important.

Religion, for instance, has also modelled itself on science, styling itself at times very explicitly as a kind of scientific knowledge with different sources.

That has been going on as long as and longer than the Westphalian relation between state and religion. Analogous long-standing relations of modelling have existed between religion and art, medicine, and education. What may be comparatively new and thus a stronger intimation of a post-Westphalian condition developing is religious modelling on the basis of economics and mass media, two systems that are in the popular and much scholarly imagi-nation most closely associated with globalisation.

Current sociological observation of religion is a good place to start with respect to the possibility that religion may be modelling itself more on eco-nomics and less on the state. A type of theory of religion that has risen to strength only in the last 30 years is the religious economy or rational choice theory such as that championed by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, among others (see, e.g., Stark & Finke 2000). In this theory, religion behaves like an economy, consisting of suppliers and consumers, products which are marketed, religious firms, competition, monopolies, capital, cost-benefit relations, and so forth. An intriguing feature of this theory is the degree to which it appears to be quite cogent and revelatory, on the one hand, and quite limited on the other (Young 1997). This combination makes sense in a condition of increasing post-Westphalianism; the theories and their impres-sions are intimations of this post-Westphalianism. Thus, on the one hand, one can suggest that the apparent cogency of these theories is rooted in the fact that in certain cases and in certain places, religions have begun to

model themselves on capitalist enterprise. The reason that the theory works best in the United States is then because American religion has for some time been more entrepreneurial than religious in other parts of the world.

Correspondingly, the reason that the theories are less cogent in other parts of the world, and especially for other periods, is because religion has not been modelling itself on an economy in those places and times. Therefore, in the contemporary world, where the theory seems to be most applicable or interesting, is not just the United States but various other countries like China, Brazil, or South Korea—places where certain forms of religion have manifestly attempted to take on some economic modelling. Such model-ling allows them to behave more like private corporations than public and national institutions, permitting an easier transnationalism and a lesser tie

Correspondingly, the reason that the theories are less cogent in other parts of the world, and especially for other periods, is because religion has not been modelling itself on an economy in those places and times. Therefore, in the contemporary world, where the theory seems to be most applicable or interesting, is not just the United States but various other countries like China, Brazil, or South Korea—places where certain forms of religion have manifestly attempted to take on some economic modelling. Such model-ling allows them to behave more like private corporations than public and national institutions, permitting an easier transnationalism and a lesser tie