Why the West gets religion wrong
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/07/opinion/edpabst.php
Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst
International Herald Tribune FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2005
LONDON It is hard to overstate the importance of religion in the contemporary
world, yet its role remains underexplored and little understood. Western elites
are perplexed by religion and the beliefs and practices that it can engender.
But before Marx, almost all socialism was Christian. Equally, all those on the
right were Christian monarchists who saw the defense of established religion as
a key political task.
All of this changed far more recently than is supposed. It was in the 1960s
that the idea of a secular Europe really emerged. And it is the mutual
incomprehension and hostility of politics since the '60s that continues to
prevent a true grasp of the importance of religion. Secular liberals regard
religion as repressive, irrational and fundamentalist. Religious conservatives
view liberal secularity as immoral, self-serving and nihilistic. Both are right
about each other, but wrong about religion.
Contemporary secular liberalism is bankrupt. Historically, liberalism drew its
strength from a critique of divinely sanctioned absolute monarchs and
authoritarian rule. As such, liberalism had republican values and communal
aims. But in overcoming absolute sovereignty, liberalism internalized it,
reproducing not mutual citizens but self-sufficient subjects. This process
reached its zenith in the 1960s, when genuine political transformation was
aborted in favor of the subjective desires of pleasure-seeking adults.
The left that emerged from this generation eschewed a genuine public morality
in the name of personal choice and private gratification. At great political
cost, it handed over to the right the language of formation, values and
religion. Unable to craft for itself a new form of civic collectivity, secular
liberalism remains mired in individualism and blind to cultures built around
universal ideals and collective aspirations.
Contemporary religious conservatism is more mobilizing yet no less exclusive.
Politically, conservatism originated from a critique of liberal relativism. In
its stead, conservatism sought to provide a public morality. But in challenging
secular permissiveness, conservatives promoted conformity with the dominant
class. Rather than uniting the citizenry around a common project, this led to
the elevation of one group at the expense of all others. In consequence, the
right surrendered to the left the ideal of a communal solidarity involving all
sectors of society.
Additionally, in a fanatical overreaction to the atomization of liberal
society, American conservatives embraced a new Christian fundamentalism that
promised its followers an eternal community - composed only of themselves.
Only this sort of self-righteousness can explain why, as Robert Kagan writes,
"It was always so easy for so many Americans to believe, as so many still
believe today, that by advancing their own interests they advance the interests
of humanity." In this manner, the neocons repeat the very fundamentalist vision
of their enemies in Al Qaeda who want to build a new Caliphate from the
Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
What unites both liberals and conservatives is their mutual insistence on the
exclusivity and absoluteness of their vision. In this both sides are composed
of fundamentalists who mistake their subjective beliefs for the only objective
truth.
But true religion is not and cannot be fundamentalist. No true follower of
monotheism can claim to know the mind and will of God. Judaism is marked by the
struggle to interpret the righteousness that is demanded by God. Similarly,
Jesus was never fully understood by his disciples nor was he even recognized by
them after his resurrection. And in Islam, a fatwa used to be a nonbinding
wisdom judgment of elders limited by the greater wisdom and judgment of God. It
only became a lethal injunction when Muslims started to copy Napoleonic models
of authority and legitimization.
Equally, religion is not and cannot be relativist. No genuine belief in God is
just a matter of personal taste or subjective opinion. True religion has always
been public and political because it is about forming communities around shared
values and the practices that embody them. In the West, privatizing religion
initiated the abandoning of any collective public realm that expressed common
substantive ideals. We should not then be surprised when Iran and other
countries do not wish to follow us down this path.
(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin's College,
Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at Peterhouse, Cambridge
University, and a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and
International Studies.)
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