Religion and Politics Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Editors Enzo Pace, Luigi Berzano and Giuseppe Giordan Editorial Board Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa) Anthony Blasi (Tennessee State University) Roberto Cipriani (Università di Roma Tre) Xavier Costa (Universidad de Valencia) Franco Garelli (Università di Torino) Gustavo Guizzardi (Università di Padova) Dick Houtman (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) Solange Lefebvre (Université de Montréal) Otto Maduro (Drew University) Patrick Michel (CNRS and EHESS, Paris) Ari Pedro Oro (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) Adam Possamai (University of Western Sydney) Ole Riis (Agder University) Susumu Shimazono (University of Tokyo) William H. Swatos, Jr. (Augustana College) Jean-Paul Willaime (EPHE, Sorbonne) Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (University of Leipzig) Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University) Fenggang Yang (Purdue University) Sinisa Zrinscak (University of Zagreb) VOLUME 2 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/arsr. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 2: Religion and Politics Edited by Patrick Michel Enzo Pace LEIDEN • BOSTON LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 This book is printed on acid-free paper. ISSN 1877-5233 ISBN 978 90 04 20928 2 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. 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CONTENTS Preface: Religion and Politics .....................................................................vii Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace Articles PART I THE RECOMPOSITION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND POLITICS, AND THE NEW FEATURES OF THE GLOBAL RELIGIOUS SYSTEM Religious Pluralization and Intimations of a Post-Westphalian Condition in a Global Society .................................................................3 Peter Beyer Resurgent Religion in Politics: The Martyr, the Convert and the Black Knight of Apocalypse ............................................................30 Enzo Pace Religious, Political and Global ...................................................................48 Patrick Michel Complicating the “Clash of Civilizations”: Gender and Politics in Contemporary Kuwait .......................................................................64 Alessandra L. González and Lubna Al-Kazi The “Social Integration” of Religious Groups in Society: A Social Mechanism Approach .............................................................85 Jörg Stolz PART II RELIGION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY Christian Religion in the West: Privatization or Public Revitalization? .......................................................................................119 John Roeland, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, Willem de Koster, Peter Mascini, and Jeroen van der Waal vi contents The Cultural Foundations of Islamist Leadership in Morocco ...........135 Mohammed Maarouf The Protestant House Church and Its Poverty of Rights in China .................................................................................................160 Zhaohui Hong Rethinking the Role of the Catholic Church in Building Civil Society in Contemporary China: The Case of Wenzhou Diocese ................................................................................177 Shun-hing Chan PART III RELIGION AND POLITICS BETWEEN COMMUNITARIANISM AND POLICY OF IDENTITY India: The Politics of (Re)conversion to Hinduism of Christian Aboriginals ............................................................................................197 Christophe Jaffrelot Religion and Politics: The Italian Case ..................................................216 Franco Garelli The Reciprocal Instrumentalization of Religion and Politics in Brazil .................................................................................................245 Ricardo Mariano and Ari Pedro Oro The Reinvention of Cuban Santería and the Politics of Identity ........267 Elena Zapponi A Secular Cancellation of the Secularist Truce: Religion and Political Legitimation in Australia .....................................................287 Marion Maddox Note The Concept of Implicit Religion: What, When, How, and Why? .....309 Edward Bailey List of Contributors ..................................................................................326 Index ..........................................................................................................333 PREFACE RELIGION AND POLITICS Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace Over the past thirty years, religion has increasingly played a relevant role, both on a national level and in international affairs. Since 1978, with the Iranian Revolution, there has been an acceleration in the events occurring after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the rise of political Islam up to its senile disease of terrorism, the crucial part played by Pope John Paul II in seconding the final collapse of the Soviet system, the emergence of neo-Hindu movements ever more aggressively against religious diver- sity, and a parallel growth in the new Christian Right Wing in the USA could all be listed on the agenda of the social sciences, as well as on the agenda of international affairs. All these events have been interpreted as symptoms of God’s “return” or “revenge”, a religious revival all over the world. Is it a restoration of the sacred canopy? One the most prominent scholars of secularization, Peter Berger, who biased a generation of soci- ologists in the West (and elsewhere, if we consider the Marxist version of his theory in the former Communist regimes), has himself dismantled his earlier assumptions (Berger, 1999; 2008). Meanwhile, all over the world, religion is a vital force in the life of individuals and societies – only Europe still seems to be a sort of exception (Davie, 2002), reversing, in a sense, the old American exception. Around the world, but not in Europe (usque tandem?), people are furiously believing and practising religion, according to Peter Berger once again (1999). This explains why scholars who paid little attention to religion in the past, and particularly those who did not specialize in the social sciences of religion, have turned to focus more and more on analyzing the key factor of religion in society. Economists and political scientists, scholars of international relations and students of marketing have considered religion as a useful password for understanding social and economic processes, political conflicts and the circulation of commodities in societies shaped by diverse religious identities. We are therefore faced not only with a huge quantity of books, articles and surveys, edited by social scientists of reli- gion, but also with a varied and sometimes plethoric production outside the traditional confines of the sociology or anthropology of religion. viii patrick michel and enzo pace We are indeed witnessing an increasing interest in the topic of religion, sometimes associated with the issue of risk. The Risikogesellschaft (Beck, 1986; 1997) is the ideological or theoretical frame that enables us to understand the mutual attraction between the religious theme and the risk society. Religion immediately brings to mind fanaticism, ethnic conflicts, violence, terrorism; it represents a new threat to democracy, peace and world order. At the same time, religion has become a pressing issue on the political agenda. The continuing reference to security in the politicians’ rhetoric, sometimes linked to migration policy, but also to fears of terrorist attacks by so-called radical Islamic groups, confirms the above considerations. In the absence of other topics for mobilizing and polarizing public opinion – it’s the case of the collapse of dictator- ship or authoritarian regimes, falling down dramatically in Tunisia or Egypt in the hot winter of 2011 – the religious risk has worked, and continues to do so, despite evidence all over the world that the radical politico-religious movements have failed (Roy, Volk, 1988; Roy, 2010; Pace, 2004). The attempt made by politicians to reframe the policy of social cohesion in a neo-nationalist light (one land, one language, one religion = one political community), demising any kind of multicultur- alism, facilitating instead a return to assimilation shaped by fear of the other (culture, religion, language, and so on), is very often associated with a restoration of the primacy of religious discourse in the public sphere. It is not just a return of religion in the public sphere (Casanova 1994), but the exploitation of religion by politics to reconstruct a social cohesion in the absence of ideological resources. The main goal of the second issue of the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (ARSR), devoted entirely to religion and politics, is precisely to question the sense of a reconstruction of the mutual and simultaneous relations between these two spheres of social life. What does this process mean and where is it taking us? We take a pragmatic stance: observing religion as a macro-indicator of a transformation in the political domain. Our hypothesis is as follows: instead of supporting the idea of the return of religion to the public domain, we prefer to argue that its new social visibility and role as a protagonist in politics is evidence of the crisis being experienced by politics. In particular, this crisis concerns one of the most impor- tant constitutive elements of politics: the capacity to imagine a new world, what Hannah Arendt calls the miracle of the incipit (Arendt, 1973), i.e. the narrative capable of creating a universe of believing that gives identity to people and, at the same time, infuses hope in social preface: religion and politics ix change. In the contemporary world, all the great narratives of the 20th century have disappeared. This means that all the conditions for mobilizing a collective belief in the miracle of politics no longer exist. Politics is consequently continuing to lose its credibility, its reliability. Politics gets into trouble when it attempts to manage its autonomy, its legitimating mechanisms, and its effectiveness all together. Its autonomy is limited by the global market and global migrations, which tend to reduce its sovereignty over a given national territory. The traditional legitimating mechanism, based on the recognition of a national identity, has become more and more precarious nowadays in many societies with high levels of cultural and religious diversity: I can feel like a new citizen in a nation to which I do not belong historically. Last but not least, the effectiveness of politics is faced with such a strong differentiation between people by race, gender, sexual orientation, religious diversity, that its decision-making process suffers a sort of paralysis. Religion, on the other hand, seems to be able to play a crucial part on the public stage and in the political arena, both when it comes to redefin- ing the role of politics and involving religion in this process, and when politics makes religion instrumental to its own ends, mobilizing salva- tion goods (Stölz, 2008) to recreate a mechanism for its own legitimation. To sum up, therefore, when politics becomes less dependable, religion can mobilize to make people believe in the effectiveness of politics despite the deregulation processes underway in society, and despite the wide- spread decline in the sense of belonging to a political community. By appealing to religion, politics reveals its internal difficulties, relat- ing both to the lack of any utopian prospects of a new world, and to the resurgent forms of Millenarian and Messianic movements that very often extend their religious utopia into the political sphere. When poli- tics agrees to support such movements, it is indeed seeking new grounds for its legitimation. The challenge for politics is to find a password so as to enter the movement of society, to grasp the arcane of social change, convincing people that they form a society, not just a segmented, frag- mented jumble of various individualist interests and strategies. For poli- tics, referring to religion means defining its relationship with the movement of society, managing the main devices for either controlling or rejecting that movement. In the latter case, politics tends to use religion to promote a new vertical sociability, splitting society into pure/impure human beings, loyal/disloyal citizens, friends/enemies (on the inside and on the outside). It also tends to reconstruct the myth of the origins of a nation and of national identity, applying a sort of dual