Ulrike Spohn, University of Muenster Challenging the Topos of Religion and Violence in Liberal Political Theory

Ulrike Spohn, University of Muenster Challenging the Topos of Religion and Violence in Liberal Political Theory I. Introduction In this paper, I deal with liberal political theories of the secular state that determine special restrictions for religious arguments in public deliberation concerning controversial moral- political issues. In the current debate about secularism in normative political theory, proponents of political liberalism advocate a duty of public reason, i.e. a moral duty to abstain from drawing on religious reasons in political debates that touch on fundamental questions of justice (Rawls, 2005) or are conducted within the formal, institutionalized settings of public deliberation (Habermas, 2008a). First of all, we should have a look at the justifications given for this duty of public reason. For at first sight, it seems that special restrictions for religious reasons are in tension to the normative basics of liberal democracy: [G]iven that it is of the very essence of liberal democracy that citizens enjoy equal freedom in law to live out their lives as they see fit, how can it be compatible with liberal democracy for its citizens to be morally restrained from deciding and discussing political issues as they see fit? (Wolterstorff, 1997, p. 94) So we must ask how liberal theorists like John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas or Robert Audi arrive at the conclusion that the restrictions implied by the duty of public reason are not to be viewed as a violation of equal freedom but in fact as a necessary precondition for its realization. The primary justification for the public reason- view appeals to the problem of political legitimacy. The liberal principle of legitimacy asks that coercion be exclusively justified in terms of reasons accessible and acceptable to everyone independent of their particular religious convictions. The claim of political liberals is that religious reasons lack general intelligibility and acceptability and thus cannot serve as a basis for public deliberation among free and equal citizens. As Habermas puts it: In a secular state, only those political decisions can count as legitimate that can be impartially justified in the light of generally accessible reasons, in other words, that can be justified equally towards religious and nonreligious citizens and citizens of different confessions. The exercise of power that cannot be justified in an impartial manner is illegitimate because it reflects the fact that one party is forcing its will on another (Habermas, 2008a, p. 122). This argument about legitimacy is well known and has been a central point of discussion in the debate about secularism. There is, however, a second justification for a duty of public reason in the theories of political liberalism that has received less attention so far. The appeal to political 1

legitimacy is accompanied by an appeal to public safety. According to political liberals, a further reason for special restrictions with regard to the role religious reasons can play in public deliberation is that religion as such bears a special potential for violence. There is the idea that an unrestrained use of religious language in the public sphere will increase the risk of a violent escalation of political conflicts. In this paper, I leave aside the much- discussed argument concerning legitimacy and instead focus on public safety as a second argument for a duty of public reason. II. Public safety as an argument for a duty of public reason On closer inspection of the works of political liberals, it can be recognized that their argumentation for a duty of public reason is based on the assumption that religion has an intrinsic propensity to violence. Robert Audi, for example, claims that [w]here religious convictions are a basis of a disagreement, it is, other things being equal, less likely that the disputants can achieve resolution or even peacefully agree to disagree (Audi, 1993, p. 691). Granted that secular disputes can also polarize, other things equal they have less tendency to do this (Audi, 1997, p. 7). These remarks suggest a particular structure or nature of religion that generates a special danger of violence. Habermas often uses the term core with regard to religion. For instance, he speaks of the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths (Habermas, 2008a, p. 129), the discursive extraterritoriality of a core of existential certainties (Habermas, 2008a, p. 130) or the opaque core of religious experience that remains [ ] profoundly alien to discursive thought (Habermas, 2008a, p. 143). Moreover, Habermas observes: Conflicts over existential values between communities of faith cannot be resolved by compromise (Habermas, 2008a, p. 135). At closer examination, it becomes clear that political liberals operate with a particular theory of religion. At the heart of this theory is the idea of an essence of religion that predisposes religious believers to dogmatism and violence. The political liberals theory of religion can be reconstructed as the following chain of assumptions and inferences: a. basic assumption about an essence of religion: Religion consists of a core of doctrines of belief that are inaccessible to discursive thinking. This opaque core is the basis of all religious arguments. b. inference 1: As religious arguments remain tied to this discursively impenetrable core, they are unamenable to rational criticism and compromise: Religious believers experience the 2

doctrines they adhere to as sacrosanct and nonnegotiable. c. inference 2: As religious reasons are amenable neither to rational criticism nor to compromise, religious people are intrinsically predisposed to dogmatism and intolerance which in turn renders it likely that they have recourse to violence in order to force through what they view as inviolable and nonnegotiable truths. This is the theory of religion behind the liberal argument for a duty of public reason on the grounds of public safety. The cogency of the argument hinges on the persuasiveness of this theory. In what follows, I will show that the argument for public reason so based is problematic for empirical/historical as well as theoretical/methodological reasons. III. Is the argument from public safety cogent? In order to assess the argument that is supposed to justify special restrictions for religious reasons in public deliberation on the grounds of public safety, we should first of all have a look at empirical research on the question of the relationship between religion and violence. Scientists in the field of peace and conflict research reach the conclusion that the role religion plays in violent conflicts is overestimated by many people and that the assumption that religious differences as such increase the risk of civil war could not be confirmed by quantitative research so far (cf. Hasenclever, 2009, p. 170 f., cf. also Casanova, 2008, p. 66). But the assumption about a special propensity of religion to violence looks suspect not only from an empirical viewpoint but also from the perspective of social theory. The conceptualization of religion as an abstract entity that is bound to generate violence under the conditions of diversity is unconvincing in that it completely ignores the crucial role of individual and collective human agents. This view of religion obfuscates the fact that violence usually means violent action performed by human beings which is always the contingent result of a complex mixture of a person s or a group s definition of the situation, their selection and interpretation of certain resources of meaning (e.g. specific passages of a religious text) as well as the availability of opportunity structures. Personal temperament of individual people and the particular experiences they have had in their lives also play a role. Scott Appleby rightly stresses that there is no Islam, no Christianity, no Buddhism only Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists living in specific contingent contexts, possessed of multiple and mixed motives, each of which might contribute to a particular action or decision taken (Appleby 2000: 56). Likewise, Veit Bader states that we cannot talk about a fundamental truth or the essence of religion or specific religions outside history and 3

societies and that [p]olitical philosophers should resist the temptations to construct some essential, a- historical truth of Christianity or Islam to be found by authoritatively stating or researching its original intent (Bader, 2007, p. 118). Religious violence thus must be viewed not as an inevitable, anonymous effect of some essence of religion but as the contingent outcome of a particular construction of religious meaning by acting human beings. But if the assumption of a special, intrinsic relationship between religion and violence is empirically not demonstrable and conceptually unconvincing, the question remains where this idea comes from and where it finds its hold. The theory of religion built in political liberalism has its roots in a narrative about the emergence of the secular state in reaction to religious civil wars that raged over Europe in the 16 th and 17 th centuries as a consequence of the schism caused by the Reformation. Political liberals frequently link their normative discussion of the proper relation of religion and politics to brief historical excursuses to the so- called wars of religion in order to demonstrate a special potential of religion for destructive violence and to suggest that the secularization of the public political sphere is the inevitable answer to this threat to public safety (see Habermas, 2008b, p. 22; Rawls, 2005, p. xxiii f., xxvi). The recurring evocation of Europe s wars of religion in theories of political liberalism serves not only as a genealogical explanation of the emergence of the modern secular state but also as a normative justification for it (cf. Casanova, 2008, p. 63). There are two problems with this account, though. The first problem concerns the way in which the historical situation is portrayed. Religion and the secular(ized) state are placed in a dichotomizing opposition in that they are depicted as warmonger and peacemaker, respectively. As a closer look at historical research about this period shows, however, the distribution of roles in Europe s civil wars of the 16 th and 17 th centuries was hardly so clear (see Burkhardt, 1992, 1997; Wilson, 2008). While religion undoubtedly figured as a major source of conflict at the time, it was not the only one. Especially the portrayal of the state as a neutral, benevolent peacemaker (Cavanaugh, 1995, p. 398) is what strikes one as inadequate at closer examination. What the historical account built in theories of political liberalism completely ignores is the entanglement of the emerging modern state itself in the dynamics of the civil wars. Some scholars suggest that the term religious wars is actually misleading and that many of the European civil wars of the 16 th and 17 th centuries should rather be called the wars of early modern European state formation (Casanova, 2008, p. 65; cf. also Burkhardt, 1997, p. 551). For the early modern state did not start off as a neutral arbiter between warring religious parties but as a confessional state that deliberately used the confessional antagonism and the identity building that went with it as a means for its own purposes of constructing and consolidating political authority (cf. Casanova, 2008, p. 64 f.; Burkhardt, 1997, p. 550). Even early policies of toleration must be viewed in this light: religious toleration was a 4

political means to the formation of strong state power [ ] rather than the gift of a benign intention to defend pluralism (Asad, 1993, p. 206). To prevent misunderstanding: The aim of this argumentation is not to just reverse the roles and portray the state as the real warmonger while presenting religion as intrinsically or essentially peaceful. There can be no doubt that the level of dogmatism and intolerance in religious matters was high during the early modern period and that the confessional antagonism fuelled many of the violent conflicts of this time. What is important to bear in mind, however, is that religion was but one factor in a complex web of causes. Another were the radical changes that accompanied the reorganization of Europe s social and political order from feudalism to a system of modern nation states. The problem of the historical account in theories of political liberalism is not that they highlight religion as a major source of conflict in the early modern period but that they blank out the dynamics of the emerging modern state as another such source by presenting it unambiguously as the neutral arbiter that stepped in like a scolding schoolteacher on the playground of doctrinal dispute to put fanatical religionists in their proper place (Cavanaugh, 1995, p. 408). The issue here is not just descriptive inadequacy or undue oversimplification as such. It is important to recognize the strategic relevance of this historical narrative to the normative argumentation of political liberalism: The clear- cut distribution of roles that links religion to violence and the secular(ized) state to peace and neutrality renders the argument for a duty of public reason on the grounds of public safety plausible. However, as soon as a more complex picture is in place and the more ambivalent role of the emerging state in the civil wars of early modern Europe becomes apparent, the argument for public reason loses its strength. For then it is not so clear anymore where the threat to public safety is located: does it lie in some essence of religion or rather in the dynamics of homogenization linked to the modern state? In other words, it seems to be an open question whether the danger stems from a political unleashing of the potential for violence innate in religion (Habermas, 2008b, p. 19), as Habermas is convinced, or whether it actually flows from an unleashing of the potential for violence innate in the modern state that strives to instrumentalize categories like religion or ethnicity for the sake of political mobilization and control. Against this background, the claim that religion needs to be constrained in the public political sphere by a duty of public reason in order to protect public safety could be met by the counter- claim that the integration of religious voices into the public political forums of deliberation can help to maintain a pluralistic political culture and keep homogenizing tendencies in check. Apart from the one- sidedness of the picture that theories of political liberalism paint of the historical situation in early modern Europe, there is a further problem with their using the historical narrative of the wars of religion as a normative justification for the duty of public reason. This problem is methodological in nature and concerns the attempt to draw general conclusions from a 5

particular historical situation. Political liberals tacitly assume that the fact that religion had been a cause for civil strife in European societies in the 16 th and 17 th centuries somehow implies that it still poses a special threat to public safety in the European societies of today. Habermas for example suggests that the historical review can tell us something (Habermas, 2008b, p. 22) about the preconditions of a polity in which all citizens enjoy equal freedom. This claim is not further elaborated although it really calls for explanation. For it is not at all obvious in what ways exactly an analysis of the conflict constellation in the Europe of the early modern period a continent with political, economical, cultural and religious structures so completely different from those of Europe in the 21 st century can guide normative political reasoning with regard to an adequate relationship between religion and politics in the context of contemporary liberal democracies. The fact that political liberals believe they can waive such further explanation testifies to the thesis advanced in part II of this paper that their whole reasoning is based on a theory of religion that construes religion as a static, trans- historical essence. The presupposition of a core of religion intrinsically prone to unleashing a destructive dynamics of violence is the implicit link between the past and the present in the reasoning of political liberals. This means that the argument for a duty of public reason on the grounds of public safety is built on essentialist thinking about religion. This essentialism, however, cannot stand up to critical scrutinization. The main problem with the essentialist view is that it presupposes a static, unitary being of religion while any closer occupation with religion reveals that it is more appropriately captured as a dynamic, plural phenomenon that is constantly in the state of becoming. In other words, the essentialist view of religion neglects the vast variety of religions and the different intellectual schools, theological struggles and internally contested teachings that make up a religion (Stoeckl, 2014, para. 3). Moreover, by treating religion as an abstract, general category, the essentialist view does not take into account the historical development and cultural rootedness of the concept of religion within a Western epistemological horizon. Accordingly, it fails to recognize the ways in which religion is continuously challenged and changed by non- Western actors who, in the course of the multiple transcultural encounters and exchanges under globalization, relate their autochthonous epistemologies and moral horizons to the Western- biased concept of religion by acts of demarcation or creative reconciliation. In sum, what does not enter the picture in the essentialist view is how religion is constantly constructed in processes of interpretation and iteration (Benhabib, 2008; Walzer, 2007) of resources of meaning embodied in texts and practices. IV. Conclusion The analysis carried out in this paper leads to the conclusion that the argument for a duty of public reason on the grounds of public safety is unconvincing. In a first step we saw that the assumption of a special relation between religion and violence is not backed by respective empirical findings and 6

that on the level of social theory, the assumption suffers from a neglect of the dimensions of human agency and historical contingency. In a second step, it was pointed out that the idea that religion breeds violence is rooted in a particular historical narrative concerning the European wars of religion enshrined in the theories of political liberalism. It was argued that the maintenance of the assumption that religion bears an intrinsic potential for violence on the basis of this historical narrative is problematic for two reasons. The first criticism was that the historical narrative itself is unduly simplifying and disambiguating the historical events of the early modern period. The second critical point concerned the methodological aspect of generalizing from a particular historical conflict constellation to a purportedly universal theory about religion and violence. Yet it seems that the idea that religion breeds violence is unlikely to fully vanish in the face of these arguments. The reason for this is that this idea forms a cultural pattern of meaning that is not easily dissolved. Nicholas Wolterstorff suggests that this pattern of thought [ ] in the theory of political liberalism runs deep and wide in the mentality of the modern West in general; political liberalism is just one version of the pattern. Over and over it is said or assumed that the presence of religion in our society [ ] harbors within itself the threat of coercion and violence (Wolterstorff, 2012, p. 281). The religious scholar Hans G. Kippenberg points out that the idea of an intrinsic connection between religion and violence is deeply rooted in the European collective imaginary and reaches back to philosophical thought of the 17 th and 18 th centuries (cf. Kippenberg, 2008, p. 16). One reason why this pattern might resist dissolution in the face of rational criticism probably lies in its being linked to socio- psychological needs concerning the preservation of identity. Casanova suggests that the pattern performs the function of maintaining a sense of (superior) identity by defining secular Europe positively against the horrors of a violent religious past or the specter of a violent religious (especially Muslim) other, respectively (cf. Casanova, 2008, p. 66). Linking religion not just contingently but systematically to violence and relating secularism equally systematically to freedom and democracy facilitates maintaining the narrative enshrined in classical modernization theory that Western Europe is the spearhead of modernity, progress and Enlightenment. I would like to stress that these remarks are not aimed at constructing secular Europe as an arrogant suppressor of religion. This would neither be fair nor would it stand in any proportion to the facts. After all, it cannot be denied that European countries are among those places in our contemporary world where the right to religious freedom is most firmly established and best protected. We should always bear this fact in mind when criticizing the way in which the relation between religion and politics is construed in mainstream European political thinking. I suggest that this criticism must be understood as a relative instead of an absolute one in that it does not aim at a wholesale rejection of Europe s political forms and ideas. Rather, the objective of the criticism is to 7

get Europe to reconsider and reform its political ideas and forms by loosening the obsession with the religious wars of the 16 th and 17 th centuries and by adapting concepts and institutions to the circumstances of the 21 st century. The main point of a reform of the European concept of secularism, which stipulates the separation of state and religion for the sake of the neutrality of the state, would be to get rid of the fixation on religion and to focus on the diversity of conceptions of the good life more generally (cf. Taylor, 2011, p. 311). In this respect, it seems important to me that we work towards an interdisciplinary opening of the debate about secularism in normative political theory to perspectives from history, religious studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Taking into account the debates and insights of these disciplines could help Western political theory to overcome its essentialist and biased understanding of religion that stands in the way of finding suitable ways of redefining the relation of religion and politics for the multicultural and multireligious societies of today. Bibliography Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chrisianity and Islam. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Audi, R. (1993). The Place of Religious Argument in a Free and Democratic Society. San Diego Law Review 30(4): 677 702. Audi, R. (1997). Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics. In R. Audi & N. Wolterstorff (eds.), Religion in the Public Square. The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bader, V. (2007). Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Benhabib, S. (2008). Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National, and the Global. In R. Post (ed.), Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burkhardt, J. (1992). War der Dreißigjährige Krieg ein Religionskrieg? In Der Dreißigjährige Krieg. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Burkhardt, J. (1997). Die Friedlosigkeit der Frühen Neuzeit. Grundlegung einer Theorie der Bellizität Europas. Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 24(4): 509 574. Casanova, J. (2008). The Problem of Religion and the Anxieties of European Secular Democracy. In G. Motzkin & Y. Fischer (eds.), Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe. London: Alliance Publishing Trust. Cavanaugh, W.T. (1995). A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House : The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State. Modern Theology 11(4): 397 420. Habermas, J. (2008a). Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of 8

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