The subtitle of Michael Walzer’s monumental first book published in 1965, The Revolution of the Saints, was A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. In the first chapter of this work, Walzer placed himself among other authors, notably Max Weber and Ernest Tuveson, whose works explored religious movements and ideologies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the origins, or background, for ideas that would survive in secularized form once religion became redundant. Footnote 1 Radical politics, progress, and even the spirit of capitalism, would surpass their religious roots, whereas religion itself was considered a passing phase.
Walzer’s most recent book, again engaged in religion and radical politics, is an about-face and even a call to action against the aspect of his own prior orientation which saw religion as fleeting. In The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, Walzer traces three successful secular liberation movements from the mid-twentieth century—the Leftist movements which created the independent states of Israel and India in 1947–1948 and Algeria in 1662—and shows how the initial success of each movement was followed, within thirty years, by a religious counter-revolution. Despite the assumptions that liberationists and Walzer himself had once shared, religion was not outlived. Rather, it persisted below the surface before returning in radical form to threaten the achievements of liberationists towards liberal values. Interestingly, Walzer goes so far as to blame the liberationists for the return of radical religion. Precisely by dismissing religion as a passing phase and refusing to seriously engage it, the liberationists who created modern Israel, India, and Algeria, fertilized the soil to which religion would return. Walzer’s new book is a call to take religion—and the return of religion in radical form—seriously, in an effort to salvage liberal values. It is written for his fellow Leftists. In a recent article that became a provocative exchange in the virtual pages of Dissent Online, Walzer wrote that the return of radical Islam is the most significant threat to leftist values across the globe today, yet his fellow leftists seem too afraid of being labelled Islamophobes to truly engage it. Footnote 2 His new book shows the historical and autobiographical grounds for Walzer’s claim that the Left must now take religion seriously.
Here I will place Walzer’s recent work alongside another new and engaging work on religion and politics, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, allowing these works to challenge each other in ways that may be productive for thinking through some of the most crucial issues of our day. Hurd is not Walzer’s target opponent or even reader. While she sets herself up against some rightist agendas, Hurd neither presents her work as ideological or Leftist nor has she avoided engaging religion. Quite the contrary: Hurd has studied and characterized religion, has served as chair of the Religion and Politics section at the APSA, and brought a nuanced approach to religion to political science and IR theory. Yet Hurd’s recent work challenges the two key theses of Walzer’s book: that there has been a return of religion and that religion can and should be engaged. Hurd’s argument in Beyond Religious Freedom goes so far as to consider the “return of religion” as a slur propagated by what she calls “the politics of religious freedom.” This politics, led by the United States and Europe, instrumentalizes a particular expert understanding of religion and privileges this “religion” from among complex webs of causes and identities in its understanding of foreign affairs. Hurd finds that the politics of religious freedom, which makes policy goals based on characterizing events as religious, preferring religious causes over others and religious freedom over other freedoms, causes great injustice in global politics, harming both liberal values and religion itself.
Both Walzer’s and Hurd’s works are compelling and eminently readable, and both seek to protect liberal values, one by engaging religion, the other by reflecting on the harm that governments engaging religion have done. While the messages of these works may seem opposed, here I do not juxtapose them but rather outline the key arguments and contributions of each, and then seek to show how they can profitably read as enriching each other. Hurd’s work, which is wonderfully insightful on the harms of what the author calls “governed” and “expert religion,” might benefit from acknowledging the potency of religious motives behind the politics of religious freedom she critiques and the extent to which these motives returning to politics threatens liberal values. Walzer’s work, which is compelling on the rise of radical religion as something with which the Left must grapple, might be enriched by acknowledging that alongside the Left’s failure to take religion seriously on the level of ideas or ideology, the governing of religion in recently-liberated states may have contributed to the return of religion in radical form.
Beyond and Behind the Politics of Religious Freedom
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s polemic against the politics of religious freedom rests on two main arguments:
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1. When we view international politics and political violence as shaped by religion, we reduce a complex web of causes and motives to a single factor which we claim to understand but in fact feed into the system: religion. But religion is not usually a sole cause of an event, nor a sole identity of a person. It is part of a web of causes and identities, so entangled that where one begins and another ends may not be a fruitful question to ask.
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2. As they set out to protect religious freedom internationally, predicated on a “return of religion,” the organizations set up for this purpose—Hurd focuses on the USCIRF (United States Commission for International Religious Freedom) among other such organizations—inadvertently do violence both to the individuals they should be protecting and to religion itself. Compelling people to define themselves religiously for their own protection, and streamlining religions with the effect of intensifying and solidifying sectarianism, are among ways that the quest for religious freedom does violence.
The book opens with an anecdote: an arson attack on a library in Tripoli, Lebanon, which “experts” called on by Western media describe as yet another case of violence from Islamic extremists (pp. 1–3). From the perspective of locals, the religious motivations behind the attack were at least questionable, and if religion was a motivating force it was part of a web of motivations, including personal and economic. But the experts defining this arson—or any act of violence or persecution—as religious, affect how we understand foreign affairs. In periods and places characterized as fraught with religiously-motivated violence, policy will be shaped to protect religious freedom and to defend against religious persecution, and governmental and intergovernmental organizations will be set up for this purpose. Religious leaders will be recruited to assist in ensuring that “good religion” is victorious against “bad religion.” Those persecuted for religious reasons will receive recognition and protection in international law. At the same time, persecution without religious reason may be inadequately treated. Absurd situations ensue: a persecuted woman is encouraged to portray herself as Christian so that she might find protection under the wing of religious freedom. An ethnic group might be protected in international law as a religious minority, even when its members don’t consider themselves to share a religion. While these statements are general, Hurd transports her reader into concrete cases.
The Rohingya in Burma and the Alevis in Turkey are two key examples in the book about whose plight, and the failure of international organizations to correctly define and assist, we learn a great deal. Hurd opens her section on the Alevis with a succinct summary of the problem of the politics of religious freedom. In setting out to protect groups defined religiously, and even simply in defining groups religiously, international organizations responsible for protecting freedom end up concretizing and perpetuating religious distinctions that should rather be overcome in the name of liberalization:
Rather than serving as a vector of religious liberalization and religious freedom, international pressure by the European Court and other outside actors and institutions to guarantee the rights of Alevi minority subjects reinforces the distinction between Alevis and non-Alevi Turkish citizens in religious terms. It obscures a broader field of lived cultural and religious practices and traditions that are associated with Alevism, downplays the cross-cutting ties and affiliations between Alevis and non-Alevi communities, and reinforces the exclusionary connection forged by the Turkish state between governed Sunni Islam and Turkish Nationalism (p. 96).
The success of Hurd’s work is attested to by the fact that the reader is compelled to read news coverage differently than she otherwise would have. In early May 2016, the New York Times covered the statement of the new Burmese leader regarding the continued exclusion of the Rohingya from Burmese identity. Her statement was that the U.S. ambassador should not invoke the term “Rohingya” as this is not among the 135 recognized ethnic identities in Burma. The leader’s language was void of references to religion (though she notably also did not refer to the Rohingya by name). Yet the New York Times described the Rohingya as persecuted Muslims in a majority Buddhist country, and described those opposing the Rohingya as “Buddhist nationalists.” Equipped with critical tools from Hurd’s book, the discerning reader cannot be oblivious to the fact that “Buddhist nationalists” have been said by their co-religionists not to be Buddhists at all (p. 119), and they have been compared to the Klu Klux Klan (p. 44). After reading Hurd’s book it is also impossible not to reflect on the definition of Rohingya as persecuted Muslims being perpetuated by the USCIRF, even when the Burmese leader speaks of the Rohingya (though not by name) as an unrecognized ethnic minority. Surely the Rohingya should be protected from exclusion and persecution whether they are a religious or ethnic group. But the preference for defining the problem as religious, paired with the absence of international institutions for protecting ethnic minorities is striking.
Hurd’s observation that when we govern religion we define religion, and when we define religion we create it (or perpetuate it as defining our politics), reflects John Locke’s account in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Locke attributes the strife that religion has caused in his time to civil frameworks that have perpetuated distinction between religious groups as relevant. He writes:
Suppose this business of religion were let alone, and that there were some other distinction made between men and men upon account of their different complexions, shapes, and features, so that those who have black hair (for example) or grey eyes should not enjoy the same privileges as other citizens; that they should not be permitted either to buy or sell, or live by their callings; that parents should not have the government and education of their own children; that all should either be excluded from the benefit of the laws, or meet with partial judges; can it be doubted but these persons, thus distinguished from others by the colour of their hair and eyes, and united together by one common persecution, would be as dangerous to the magistrate as any others that had associated themselves merely upon the account of religion? Some enter into company for trade and profit, others for want of business have their clubs for claret. Neighborhood joins some and religion others. But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotions, and that is oppression. Footnote 7
I mention Locke for three reasons. First, at times Hurd’s work reads like a Lockean analysis, such that her perspective fits well into a liberal tradition of thought once well-respected in the United States. Second, and related to this, Locke is often considered for his foundational role in American political thought, including grounding the separation of Church and State, against which Hurd implies that the politics of religious freedom—supposedly grounded in American principles—is fighting on a global scale. Third, I raise Locke because in 1689 it was clear that the intervention he was arguing against was not only the governing of religion but also the governing by religion, or the religious concerns of government actors. This I find to be obscured in Hurd’s text, and I would like to bring to light here. For it seems that to some extent, defining peoples and problems as religious in global politics is not an innocent mistake on the part of well-meaning government seeking to translate far-off problems into familiar terms. Rather, it is an intentional act on the part of politically-powerful individuals for whom religion is an important factor in their own web of motivations. As such, I consider the possibility that the politics of religious freedom itself marks a return of religion to U.S. foreign policy in such a way that threatens liberal values, which is Walzer’s concern being carried out from the exceptional domain of the United States.
Who are the agents behind the quest for religious freedom? They are scarcely named by Hurd, and the quest for religious freedom appears as a government effort—sometimes abstracted by commissions and committees—to keep religion abroad in a form and at a level that would do the least harm to America and its values. We read that “since World War II, the promotion of American-friendly ‘free’ religion abroad has been understood to benefit the rest of the world by saving it from religious and political tyranny” (p. 66). That to mitigate the harmful effects of communism, America coordinated with the Vatican, promoted religion through media efforts in America, and coordinated a communications offensive with influential Buddhists in Thailand. To promote peace in the middle east, it initiated interreligious programs in Israel, educational programs about American democracy and religious freedom in Kyrgistan, and more (p. 73). We read about a UK-based “Two Faces of Faith” initiative. But these programs were not simply state programs. They were programs initiated by an America that understands itself in religious terms, and by UK leaders similarly aligned. In fact, if we look closely at the organizations and experts Hurd mentions, we find a number of religious individuals on a mission which is becoming more acceptable to voice, certainly in American public life. Admittedly, Hurd presents the work being done as tilted towards Protestant and American understandings of religion constructed in the seventeenth century—interestingly by Locke (p. 57)—but leaves the religious identity of the people behind the agendas beyond the discussion.
The experts named as interpreting in the initial incident reported in Hurd’s text are Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute and Robert George of Princeton University, then Vice Chair of the USCIRF. In Chapter 4, contemporary government experts include Melissa Rogers, and Tony Blair appears in his post-PM role. All these actors could properly be described as religious actors. Footnote 3 Abstracting their actions in the name of religious freedom from their mission as religious actors may be artificial. This is striking if we consider the foreign politics of religious freedom as an extension of the First Amendment legal struggle for religious freedom within the United States, as Hurd encourages us to do (pp. 79–80). Anyone inquiring into the First Amendment politics of religious freedom will soon encounter The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The Becket Fund, a “powerhouse lawfirm” in Washington, has attracted much media attention for winning so many first amendment cases that it is arguably changing the face of religious liberty in the United States. Footnote 4 Important for relating to Hurd’s work is that Robert George and the new director of the USCIRF, Kristina Arriaga, hold prominent positions on the board of the Becket Fund. If Justice Antonin Scalia was famously careful not to rule as a Roman Catholic, Becket Fund lawyers are unapologetic about bring religion to SCOTUS as faithful defenders of all faiths. The Fund’s recent achievements include successful appeals for Muslim men to wear beards in prison, Christian children to read their study bibles in public schools, religious institutions to discriminate in employment, and religious groups not to provide their employees with contraceptive support as part of their health care plans—all religious exemptions from laws that allegedly interfere with people living according to their consciences. While this activity, openly led by people of faith for people of faith, can be defended as balancing the laïcité of the U.S. Constitution, they also symbolize a return of religion to U.S. politics. The problematic nature of the foreign politics of religious freedom led by the same religious actors, only in the international arena which lacks a constitution, can now be seen in a new light. It ensures that religious freedom—the priority of certain religious actors—is treated in foreign policy before other freedoms are secured. This is surely a case of the return of religion threatening liberal values. Recognizing the return of religion behind the politics of religious freedom may be important towards moving beyond—or before—religious freedom for international affairs.
It is on this note that I turn to Walzer’s work, which brought me to consider the return of religion as something even Hurd may be up against.
The Paradox, and Policies, of Liberation
The paradox of liberation referred to in the title of Michael Walzer’s new book, is a paradox the author paints as characteristic of three particular liberation movements: In their successful efforts to establish the modern states of Israel, India, and Algeria, prizing modern liberal values and negating the older religious traditionalism that had enamored their peoples, liberationists founding these new societies effectively sowed the seeds for the return of religion in radical form. By negating religion and the old ways rather than by engaging religion as an important part of the lives of those who would form the new states, liberationists failed to provide space for religion in their political visions. The return of religion in radical form thus marked a significant departure from the visions of the founders. Walzer does not present this paradox as necessary. He encourages readers to consider that liberation could be done differently, and that it is not too late to create societies with liberal values that engage religion. This is the author’s battle, a battle with the Left and for the Left, asking it to engage religion in its political vision, without abandoning its resolve for liberation.
One of the most impressive aspects of The Paradox of Liberation is its earnest, even penitent, tone. When Walzer asks “what happened to the secular democratic left?” (p. xiv) and faults the left’s failure to engage religion at the onset of national liberation with the return of religion now threatening its achievements, he laments his own failure and that of his own movement. The secularization thesis that predicted the disappearance of religion over time is expressed by Walzer as “what we all believed in those years and for many years after, social scientists and political activists alike” (p. 25). This degree of self-reflection takes the reader in as a partner on Walzer’s quest, where the way to correct past mistakes is by engaging ideas. In the exchange with Andrew March that developed from the Dissent article paraphrased in the opening of this essay, Walzer writes that he seeks to take on radical religion as “a writer, not a fighter, and the most helpful thing I can do is to join the ideological wars.” Footnote 5
Walzer’s greatest contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religion and politics may be in his masterful presentation of the return of religion as a pattern, rather than an aspect of any particular liberation project. Zionism is not a special case where the return of radical Judaism was brought on by the fact that the Jews were in their ancient homeland; Algeria is not a special case where the return of radical Islam was brought about by the nature of Islam itself; and India is not a special case where the struggle between Nerhu and Gandhi struck an unlucky balance that caused the return of religion. Even the return of religion to the Palestinian liberation movement is not special in its being predicated on the failure—as Walzer perceives it—or the inability to found a Palestinian state (pp. 53–55). Rather, Leftist liberation movements that negate religion as a matter of ideology are generally followed by a return of religion. That the pattern is not presented as inevitable but as emerging from human mistakes and particular misunderstandings about religion and humanity makes the argument particularly compelling. In fact, Walzer’s argument should be so compelling as to respond to the Leftist afraid of being called an Islamophobe, for his argument is not about Islam but about radical religion as a symptom of our times, caused by misunderstandings that were part of Leftist movements.
To make his case about the achievements of the initial liberation movements and the threat that the return of religion poses to these achievements, Walzer follows the liberation of women. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not appreciate the liberation movements’ achievements on this front, or who would not be concerned by signs that women are once again being oppressed with the return of religion. Again, Walzer draws attention to the initial liberation of women, and subsequent return of persecution with the return of religion as not particular to any movement or religion. The return of religion generally brings with it a return of persecution, and thus entails a tangible and universally-recognizable loss of freedom that occurs when religion returns in radical form.
But Walzer’s account of women’s liberation and the return of repression may lack a certain nuance. First, we might consider that the secular liberation movements Walzer describes were not alone in liberating women from traditional roles in the mid-twentieth century. We might recall the “We Can Do It” posters from World War II, and the U.S. government encouraging women to take roles generally ascribed to men while the men were at war. The liberation of women may be more a byproduct of the need to mobilize and win independence, against the backdrop of mid-twentieth-century openness, than a true motive of liberation movements engineered by men. Second, the return of repression may not be entirely attributable to the return of religion. Some of the practices Walzer singles out as repressing women—notably the revival of the Sati (pp. 106–107)—have been cited as cultural rather than as religious practices and the agenda behind the quest to revive these practices may be more a patriarchal attempt to return to a male-dominant society than a return of religion. If Hurd alerted her readers that labeling a practice as “religious” is a choice, this is surely worth considering. This is not to deny that religion is promoted as justifying the repression of women. Where women have recently been prohibited from singing in public forums in Israel, this was defended as an attempt not to offend religious sentiment. Learning to speak the language of religion will be crucial for not allowing the “religion card” to be played when it comes to subordinating women. Here Walzer correctly and importantly notes the strides being made by Jewish and Muslim women who promote their own gender equality from within their religious traditions (pp. 130–133). Footnote 6
Here I come to where Walzer’s work might be enriched by Hurd’s perspective, and this is where it ascribes a primary role to ideology and thought, but refrains from extending to questions of actual governance. In the Dissent exchange, Walzer offers two paths to countering the return of religion: ideological warfare and actual warfare. Missing is the path of policy. Hurd’s work encouraged me to consider, in the example of Israel with which I—like Walzer—am most familiar, how religion was governed in the years leading up to the “return of religion,” and whether this was instrumental in what we consider the return of religion.
Indeed, while Walzer focuses on the Zionist movement’s failure to engage religion on the level of ideas—even providing a caricature of how inadequately Judaism was treated by those who sought to create the “new Jew”—he does not treat the question of how the Jewish state governed religion. Hurd briefly mentions that Palestinians in Israel are distinguished as Christian or Muslim and governed differently based on religion. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Judaism is no less “governed” in Israel than Christianity or Islam. Since its inception, the Jewish state has governed religion: it has allowed Jews to marry only in the Rabbinate. When Jewish children go to school, their parents have two state school options, both of which are part of a Jewish system: religious or secular school. The only conscientious exemption allowed from military service is religious. With institutionalized Judaism at every level—from preschool through the army, marriage, divorce, birth, and burial—and without any escape from defining oneself religiously in all walks of life, religion was given irrevocable status and legitimacy in the way ordinary life is lived in Israel, irrespective of the secularism of the state’s founders. With religion being so legitimized in state structures, and with the distinction between religious Jews, secular Jews, Muslims, and Christians being the first distinction made and reaffirmed at every stage in life, surely the state’s perpetuating and governing of religion cannot be ignored by the secular left which may have “compromised” in its governing of religion, but never promoted religion as something that should not be governed. Locke seems absent from Israel’s public discourse.
Interestingly, this observation on the governance of religion is consistent with Walzer’s narrative on the level of ideas. Much of how religion is governed in Israel was inherited from British colonial rule in Mandate Palestine. So indeed, the Left’s neglect of religion and denial of its importance at the moment of liberation may have led it to leave things as they were on that front. But today we can safely say that if the Left is to succeed in mitigating some of the harmful effects of radicalized religion—or of the “religion card”—on human freedom in Israel, engaging religion will need to be paired with concrete changes in the governing of religion. It will be necessary not only to theorize—though this may be the limit for anyone writing from outside these societies—but also to institutionalize and thus legitimize some alternatives to religion for people of conscience to live by. To some extent this process is happening in Israel bottom-up. Parallel to the strengthening of religion, political parties that cross religious divides have risen, inclusive schools have been established outside the regular system, and Tel Aviv has become the “vegan capital of the world.” But vegan conscientious objectors are still imprisoned, while their religious counterparts have their yeshiva alternative funded by the state as they enjoy civic freedom. Despite and perhaps because of their own secularism, the Zionist Left did not provide institutional arrangements for expressing secular political conscience in the Jewish state. Perhaps this policy deficit, which is in a sense a failure to fully liberate, should be considered alongside the ideological deficit as responsible for the return of religion. I am certain that a change in how religion is governed will be essential to the victory of liberal values, certainly in Israel and possibly elsewhere.
I have one final comment on Walzer’s work, which is more a discomfort with how I have presented it as negating his early work. Walzer has been a master for producing timely thought, and the challenges of The Paradox of Liberation are certainly timely for understanding local and international politics. But for scholars of political theory and the history of ideas, the challenges of Revolution of the Saints remain. However penitent Walzer may now be on the perspective that saw religion as fleeting, his early approach continues to contribute a great deal to our understanding of the history of ideas. So, too, does the perspective that focuses on the agency of the religious revolutionary. It may have been better, from the start, to emphasize the truth in both approaches, of the early and recent Walzer, rather than play one against the other. I regret my limited treatment of Walzer’s work, and my neglect of many relevant intervening projects, though I hope to have enticed the reader to read his latest and most timely piece.
It may not be customary to thank authors of works reviewed for their insights, but I would like to end with just this. My marked up copies of Beyond Religious Freedom and The Paradox of Liberation are sure to serve as resources as I continue to rethink and question the foundations of contemporary questions of religion and politics. It is hardly a criticism to observe that neither work provides a concrete program of action. “Engaging religion” is left abstract in Walzer, and Hurd provides “no single politics or prescriptive program.” As such, the works invite further work, and promise to continue the return of religion to reflections on politics.
