Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

Tocqueville is probably the single modern classic theorist of democracy and civil society who remained unconvinced by the Enlightenment prediction that religion would decline and become politically irrelevant with the advancement of democracy and individual freedoms. On the contrary, he thought that the incorporation of ordinary people into democratic politics would only increase the relevance of religion for modern politics. The empirical evidence from American democracy confirmed him in the correctness of his uncommon views. He saw religious associations as "the schools" of civil and political associationism crucial for a democratic republic, thought that transcendent religion was the foundation of the kind of "self-interest rightly understood" that transcends egoistic and solipsist individualism, and wrote that "religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions" (Tocqueville, 1990, I: 305).

It is true that Tocqueville attributed the positive role of religion in American politics to the republican character of American Protestantism, but he was simultaneously inclined to generalize this argument and find elective affinities between the equalization of social conditions characteristic of modern democracy and the equalization of all individuals before God brought on by Christianity or, one could add, by any monotheistic religion. Particularly, he was eager to extend this argument to Catholicism in order to counter the view, widely held on both sides of the French republican-laicist/ monarchist-Catholic divide, that Catholicism was incompatible with modern democracy and with individual freedoms. He argued that the absolutist monocratic authority of the pope had the same kind of leveling effect among Catholics that royal absolutism had in France, equalizing conditions and preparing the ground for the revolution and for democracy. In any case, and irrespective of how persuasive one finds the analogy, Tocqueville was happy to confirm that Catholics in America had adapted perfectly well to republican conditions by learning to compartmentalize rigidly the religious and the secular spheres. "Thus the Catholics of the United States are at the same time the most submissive believers and the most independent citizens" (301-2).

The Tocquevillian argument can easily be applied to Islam. More perhaps than any other religion, Islam stresses discursively and ritually the equalization of all Muslims before God. Moreover, in comparison with the clerical, hierarchic, and hierocratic centralized administrative structure of the Catholic Church, the Islamic umma, at least within the Sunni tradition, has a more counciliar, egalitarian, laic, and decentralized structure. Moreover, in comparison with the canonical and dogmatic modes of official "infallible" definition and interpretation of the divine doctrines, Islam has more open, competitive, and pluralistic authoritative schools of law and interpretation with a more fluid and decentralized organization of the ulama. According to prophetic injunction, only the uncoerced consensus of the umma is guaranteed no error. The pluralistic and decentralized character of religious authority that had always been distinctive of traditional Islam has become even more pronounced in the modern age. Actually, if there is anything on which most observers and analysts of contemporary Islam agree, it is that the Islamic tradition in the very recent past has undergone an unprecedented process of pluralization and fragmentation of religious authority, comparable to that initiated by the Protestant Reformation and operative ever since within Protestant Christianity. Unlike the sectarian tendency of Protestantism to fragment into separate communities, however, Islam has been able to preserve its identity as an "imagined community."