Introduction: religion, politics, and the state, at home and abroad

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2007 by N.J. Demerath, III

This special issue of the Sociology of Religion is a product of the Association for the Sociology of Religion's 2005 annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The papers are all drawn from the meeting's program and reflect its theme: "Religion, Politics, and the State, at Home and Abroad." For better and (mostly) for worse, it is hard to imagine a more timely topic than religion and politics in the current world. It is a rare day when even local newspapers do not run a front-page story that is rooted somehow in religion's impact upon or consequences for politics and the state. Here at home, recent stories have included the role of religion in major election and re-election campaigns, the battles over recent Supreme Court nominees, clashes in and out of court over "intelligent design," and the response of civil authorities to Catholic sexual abuses. Abroad, religion seems implicated everywhere in the post-9/11 world: in Afghanistan with its resurgent Taliban; in India with its Hindu-Muslim communal riots; in Iraq with its civil strife between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish Muslims; and in Israel with its death struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs. To paraphrase Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The spectre of religion is haunting the world."

All of this offers daily rebuttal to our sociologist colleagues who dismiss religion as a major variable in societal dynamics because it seems such a non-rational vestige of a by-gone past. After all, non-rational variables should have no pride of place in rational explanations of the world. Insofar as many sociologists consider religion at all, they tend to tuck it under the rug of ethnicity. But there are both overlaps and underlaps between the two. There are indeed situations in which ethnic and religious identities roughly coincide and reinforce each other, as with Judaism. But there are other instances in which a single ethnicity contains multiple religions (for example, Arab Christians and Muslims), and in which a single religion spans multiple ethnic traditions (for example, as both Catholicism and Pentecostal Protestantism span global variations in ethnic identity from Latinos and Anglo-Europeans to Asians). Certainly religion is a prime exhibit on behalf of the causal efficacy of non-rational culture. Whether because of being a-rational or in spite of it, religious conflict may occur both between and within ethnic communities. However one takes one's secularization, with one historical lump or more, it is clear that religion remains a major mover and shaker in many sectors of society and regions of the world. In a word, religion matters, even to those who are non-religious.

This point is made in different ways by all six of the papers and the eight book reviews in this special issue. Two of these papers are obligatory inclusions. The first is my own 2005 Presidential Address. Somehow it seemed appropriate for one President to address another, hence my open letter to President Bush concerning religion and politics in his administration. While its style bears some resemblance to Mr. Bush's own brand of whimsical put-down humor, its substance veers in very different directions from his and is serious to the core. This may be the first ASR Presidential address to be forwarded to the White House in published form, though it is unlikely to be the first to go unread there.

Meanwhile, the second paper in this issue is the 2005 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, also delivered at the Philadelphia meetings. Given the meeting's theme, it seemed highly appropriate to invite a speaker from abroad who might share thoughts on religion and politics in another country--hence the distinguished Indian sociologist and public intellectual, Dipankar Gupta. Here he analyzes the religious and political roots of the communal riots that have plagued India since the partition created by its independence in 1947. Gupta focuses especially on the Hindu-Sikh violence in the Punjab of the 1980s and on the latest outbursts of the country's long-standing Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujurat since 2002.

The four remaining papers were session presentations at the 2005 meeting. All of them seemed to program chair, David Yamane, and myself to have great publishing potential. Accordingly, we contacted the authors and asked them to submit revised manuscripts to that end. After a bit of the usual editorial to-ing and fro-ing, we are proud to present them to you, though David has now changed hats from his previous position as program chair to his new role as editor of Sociology of Religion. Here are brief introductions to the remaining papers in the volume.

First, Nanlai Cao shifts the focus from South Asia to Far East Asia in examining church-state relations in China's current post-Mao, post-socialist reform era. Ethnographic data from the city of Wenzhou show how a sample of affluent Christian entrepreneurs have learned to work with rather than against the state, and how the state has come to work with rather than against the churches (and presumably temples and mosques). The paper adds a new chapter to the on-going Weberian saga of religion and capitalism.