View previous stories
	Can Politics remain Secular by International Herald Tribune / New Statesman   March 10, 2006   The twisted religion of Blair and Bush, by Phillip Blond & Adrian Pabst. (International Herald Tribune)   Secular Britain was shocked last weekend when Prime Minister Tony Blair said that God would be his judge over the war in Iraq. Similarly, President George W. Bush has often used God to justify the war on terror as a religiously blessed and righteous campaign against "evil doers." Predictably, those who oppose the war view themselves as secular progressives untainted by religious fundamentalism and the madness it produces.   Unfortunately for liberals, the origins of Bush''s and Blair''s religious convictions lie not within Christianity but rather within the history of Western modernization and, most important, within contemporary liberalism itself.   Religious fundamentalism has often been used to justify extreme political ideologies. Currently both sides of the war on terror legitimate their actions by perverted theological reasoning.   The neo-cons and their acolytes have launched a unilateral pre-emptive conflict, masquerading as a "just war," with horrendous consequences. In the name of good versus evil, people are being killed, imprisoned and tortured with impunity. Likewise, in a quest to rebuild and expand the imperial Caliphate, Al Qaeda and its henchmen are engaged in a modern variant of jihad: They have removed all traditional Islamic limits on warfare, propagating instead mass civilian death via the suicide of their followers.   The usurpation of the great faiths by secular ideology is not usually recognized. This process has a historical and a contemporary dimension. For all the major monotheistic faiths, their primary historical distortion lies with their utilization for the purposes of state formation and nationalism.   Both Judaism and Islam suffer from being religions that are synonymous with the construction of states and political power. This was recognized within Judaism by a constant tension between the prophets and the kings, with the former always calling the latter back to a true righteousness untouched by the corruption of power and avarice.   Islam had a not dissimilar distinction, with the imams often limiting the political ambit of the caliphs, directing them to a properly configured vision of an Islamic polity. It is disastrous that both of these critical religious legacies have been lost to a secular politics that now has no limits.   Christianity had a better start. For almost three centuries it avoided capture by the logic of the state, and was able to form human beings into a community that transcended class, race and geography. This tradition was eclipsed in A.D. 325, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Since states put a premium on conformity and political allegiance, religion became a primary way to ensure mass compliance with state authority.   This dubious historical legacy was further compromised when, in the so-called wars of religion of the 16th century, European princes competed for power. Notions of race and nation were deployed alongside religion to formulate political identities that were ethnically and culturally exclusive. Historically speaking, secular nationalism and racism undermined religion''s universal claims and tied faith to state power.   Contemporary liberalism has championed the secularization of both religion and politics. In the name of tolerance and pluralism, secular liberals relegated religion to the private sphere. By denying religion any public import, this hitherto shared realm became drained of any objective moral beliefs. Society was atomized and culture surrendered to relativism.   Paradoxically, by privatizing religion, secular settlements produced religious fundamentalism. Confined to the personal sphere, religion is deprived of civic engagement that would mitigate fanaticism and foster moderation, and faith answers to no authority other than subjective inner conscience.   Indeed, this is why Blair thinks the invasion of Iraq is consonant with his Christian beliefs: On television he explained, "The only way you can take a decision like that is to do the right thing according to your conscience." The trouble is that once liberalism has surrendered any belief in objective truths, all personal subjective beliefs become true. Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all.   Hence, convinced of their own self-righteousness, Blair and Bush are blind to the reality of their actions. With religious zeal, they pursue their shared project to make Western hegemony irreversible. In so doing, they have embraced a profoundly secular logic - the destruction of traditional religion at home and abroad and the merciless expansion of market democracies across the globe. Blair and Bush seek to create a brave new world in the image of their faith, a vision that just happens to be irreconcilable with Christianity.   (Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin''s College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)   January 2006   Can Politics remain Secular, by Katy Long. (New Statesman)   "From the ashes of political idealism, religion has risen, seductive because it offers a simplistic division of right from wrong that suits both political spin and political vision.."   The politics of our secular modern age is the "art of the possible". In fact, politics might be better framed as a contest for the ownership of the universal ideal of a just society. Justice, after all, is as much the aim of sharia law as the goal of liberal democracy. In western Europe and much of the rest of the world throughout the 20th century, the pursuit of such justice through the political was presented as a purely secular paradigm: post-Enlightenment reason illuminating the superstitions and injustices of religion to the benefit of mankind and the progress of human civilisation.   In the first years of the 21st century, we have watched a series of events unfold, punctuated by the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism, that has torn through such fabrications of western secularism. Now, the media and the political elite construct a "war on terror", a "clash of civilisations" - the splintered division of the world into the faithful and infidels, Islamic and Christian, Christian and Islamic. Religion, it seems, is creeping back into the political, a sphere claimed as a prize by the secular in 18th- and 19th-century Europe.   Yet politics has never divided absolutely from religion; the secular transformation is at best incomplete. Religion remains the opiate of the people. Its powers of sedation are matched only by its power to inspire the zealous and the dogmatic. It is for these reasons that politics and religion have always remained linked. The manipulation of power, after all, requires a justifying ideology. What better ordering of the universe than a divine one?   Politics cannot simply "remain" secular. It must first become fully secularised. And for this to happen, it must be recognised that existing secular politics is failing to address the challenges of the modern age. The religion of the 21st century is comprehensible only as a response, of both the powerful and the powerless, to poverty, inequality and injustice that is wholly modern. Religious thought provides explanation for suffering, even demands it in the pursuit of a "next world". The religious may place their ultimate faith in God. The secular see only human agency in human misery, a cruel expose both of politicians" failings and the disempowerment of the majority of the world"s people; there is no refuge in fate.   This is not to deny the achievements of secular politics: for example, universal human rights, with their increasingly global recognition, find their foundations in the ethics of secular humanism. Similarly, doctrines of popular sovereignty are secular in principle. Yet the west should be wary of taking too orientalist a view of these "universal" secular truths, founded as they are upon a particular Judaeo-Christian heritage. Internationally, politics is not secular: the Middle Eastern Islamic states (from "evil" Iran to western-allied Saudi Arabia) define and contain political activity through religious maxims. Israel owes its very existence to the connections between politics and religion, while the 60 years of bloody violence which have followed the usurpation of Palestine are proof of the dangerous and destructive powers of religion, particularly because the absolute truth of the religious is by necessity an exclusive creed. In such countries, politics and power are understood and constantly underlined through refractions of religious belief that have an impact upon every aspect of global politics.   Even in the heartland of proclaimed secularism - the formal politics of western Europe - sceptical thinkers can find flaws in this claimed separation of the religious from the political. The close relationship between German church and state is demonstrated by the payment of church tax to fund Protestant and Catholic organisations. Politically, many of the parties which have governed Europe since the Second World War have approached topics such as social justice through recourse to Christianity, witness the German, Swedish or Norwegian Christian Democrats. The British political system also allows bishops to sit in the House of Lords and the public political comments of religious leaders, most notably the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be recognised as valid contributions within the British political system. America is still "one nation under God".   However, secular politics cannot be understood simply in terms of formal high politics. Too often, a secular political grammar masks religious language in the new reality of the multifaith state. In India, the largest secular state, politics remains steeped in religious intention, exemplified by the populist Hindu nationalism of the BJP and the Sikh response. Popular American-Christian evangelism has been well documented as a political phenomenon in its own right: arguably it won George W Bush his second term in November 2004. Even in France, proud defender of the fruits of its 1789 revolution, a rise in anti-Semitism is indication that the paradigm of national politics, particularly the politics of identity and entitlement, is not free from the exclusive and conveniently manipulated dictates of religion.   If secularism is as yet an unfinished project, it should, however, also be recognised that the past decade has brought a shift, both in rhetoric and action, towards a more intense and obvious religiosity within politics. There has been a subtle change in the dimensions of international relations, perceived most obviously by western citizens in the rise of al-Qaeda and its direct attack upon the secular values of the west. Yet if Islamic terrorism is the most frequently cited example of this new religious political paradigm, it should not be forgotten that its rise has occurred in tandem with that of the evangelical Christian right in the United States which attacks the same secular society and demands the teaching of creationism and the outlawing of abortion.   Religious solutions to political questions are increasingly expected in this new paradigm. In the wake of the July London bombings, Tony Blair"s response was to turn to leaders of Muslim communities in the hope of stemming extremism, a response to religious fundamentalism framed by religious structures of segregation. Simultaneously, in condemning the London suicide bombers as "evil", he sought refuge in the language of irrational religious dualism in order to avoid discussion of the more concrete political causes of British Muslim disaffection.   The answer to why the 21st century has seen the increasing construction of politics in a religious rather than a rational context can be found only in recognition of the fundamental nature of politics itself. Politics is concerned with power, power to construct society according to the rules of justice determined by the powerful. Politics, in short, is the struggle to gain enough power to build a version of utopia, and thus there is a need for ideology to structure and guide power: to provide inspiration. Yet the last years of the 20th century witnessed the disillusion of the political left and the ascendancy of the pragmatic centre, not only in Britain but throughout Europe and North America. Pragmatic politics lacks the power to inspire either social vision among political leaders or fidelity in the elite"s popular sovereigns (consider, for example, the decline of democracy in the UK since 1979). Return to a religious paradigm provides a substitute for political ideology. From the ashes of political idealism, religion has risen, seductive because it offers a simplistic division of right from wrong that suits both political spin and political vision. Furthermore, religion also exercises strong influence as a personal motivation: Blair"s zeal for social reform bears comparison with the Gladstonian crusades of the 19th century. The lines drawn between the personal and the political are artificial: religion as political motivation transcends them.   The growth of religious politics is also a product of international political history. For all its rational development goals and practical targets, secular internationalism has failed to deliver the developing world from poverty and exploitation by the west, both in economic and political terms. Frustration, misery and anger are met with religion; it is the final promise to the dispossessed, an assertion that the gross injustices of the present world will be addressed again in the next. For authoritarian regimes - Iran or Saudi Arabia, for example - such other-worldliness provides scope for reinforcing the existing power hierarchy: a continuing "divine right of kings". Yet for popular movements, including those exploited by global power-brokers such as Osama Bin Laden and fashioned into terrorist networks, religious politics is a cry to radical action. The hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was after all elected Iran"s president with the votes of Tehran"s poor. The irrational is seductive when "rational" secularism is perceived as clearly designed to perpetuate rather than address power inequalities. The G8 nations have consistently failed to act on reluctant half-promises to reform trade tariffs, or redistribute power within international organisations such as the UN or World Trade Organisation. This problem is not simply international: as Belfast burned in September, the sectarian politics of Northern Ireland once more underlined the potential for religion, perverted, to define riots that were in truth an articulation of economic alienation and political frustration.   Nor should it be thought that political religious propaganda is the domain of the foreign, the other, or even that its reach is confined to the edges of politics in Europe, to Muslim pamphlets or to American evangelical publications. British politics has long asserted religion"s power as a tool for cultural and historical continuity, a means of asserting identity. The Victorian Christian ethics of empire is not yet dead: our understanding of Africa, diffracted through the British media, still relies upon the narrative of the helpless African and divine intercession through western charity. With every unfolding famine headlines scream "For God''''s sake help us". National identity politics have been further complicated in the west by the fracture of Christendom into multifaith communities, each asserting political identity through segregated religion and in doing so shaping the nature of the political agenda, even as most western citizens continue to embrace secularism and its inclusive principles.   For what it is important to recognise is that religious politics is most dangerous because of its exclusivity - its tendency towards the antagonistic, the intolerant. These qualities are not uniquely religious: aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism have led to bitter fighting, war, even genocide. The ideologies that underpinned the cold war and its divided imagined communities for nearly half a century were not religious, but were strikingly similar in their fundamentalist demands for total compliance with specific political creeds. Religion itself is not the difficulty; the problem is that when transformed into religiously driven politics, it provides a tool for the political machinations of global elites and allows for underlying inequalities to be conceived of in the irrational terms of medieval crusaders and not in terms of practical political action.   Political secularism is not dead, particularly not in its European heartland; its greatest protection lies in the continued strength of Europe"s overwhelmingly secular society. Yet Mohammad Sidique Khan"s chilling videotape message, delivered from beyond the grave, underlines how despair at the injustices of the present political order can easily turn to political activism understood through and justified by religion. One fact is clear: until the fundamental inequalities that promote poverty on a national and an international scale are addressed, the position of political secularism will continue to weaken. Blair and Bush have instead concentrated on using the language of the religious, irrational and abstract, to divert attention away from the real and rational. In their "condemnation" of religious extremism, they are simultaneously reinforcing the paradigm of religious politics.   Yet we must hope politics remains a secular forum, and campaign for it to become more so. Ultimately, although religion may prove a powerful motivating factor for social justice, its exclusivity offers no opportunity for the imagining of an inclusive political arena - essential if the people of this world are not to suffer the terrible injustices of the modern age one day. This is because, though religion provides the moral certainty to act on paradise-inspired visions, in the same breath it removes from society absolute responsibility for human suffering. Secularism may reveal bleak truths about inequality in the world today, but these revelations alone can provide the empowerment necessary for real progress towards the universal utopia of a just society.
	Globalizing Martin Luther King"s legacy by Taylor Branch The New York Times USA   Jan. 17, 2006   The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr."s name carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time.   The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America"s high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King"s commitment to the core values of democracy.   His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.   "All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."   His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."   Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government.   After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.   "The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."   This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves.   The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty.   In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century"s first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner"s chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies.   Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, King"s message echoed in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela.   Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism.   These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. King"s ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad.   Above all, no one speaks for nonviolence. Indeed, the most powerful discipline from the freedom movement was the first to be ridiculed across the political spectrum. "A hundred political commentators have interred nonviolence into a premature grave," King complained after Selma. The concept seemed alien and unmanly. It came to embarrass many civil rights veterans, even though nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy.   Every ballot - the most basic element of free government - is by definition a piece of nonviolence, symbolizing hard-won or hopeful consent to raise politics above anarchy and war.   The boldest principles of democratic character undergird the civil rights movement"s nonviolent training. James Madison, arguing to ratify the Constitution in 1788, summoned "every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government," and he added that no form of government can secure liberty "without virtue in the people."   By steeling themselves to endure blows without retaliation, and remaining steadfastly open to civil contact with their oppressors, civil rights demonstrators offered shining examples of the revolutionary balance that launched the American system: self-government and public trust. All the rest is careful adjustment.   Like Madison, the marchers from Selma turned rulers and subjects into fellow citizens. A largely invisible people offered leadership in the role of modern founders. For an incandescent decade, from 1955 to 1965, the heirs of slavery lifted the whole world toward freedom.   Weariness and war intruded. In the White House, President Lyndon Johnson wrestled the political subtleties of sending soldiers to guarantee liberty at home. "Troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people," cautioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The president moaned simultaneously over predictions of bloody stalemate if he sent troops to Vietnam, saying the prospect "makes the chills run up my back," but he succumbed to schoolyard politics. The American people, he feared, "will forgive you for everything except being weak."   Lamenting religious leaders who accommodated the war, King defended nonviolence on two fronts. "Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?" he asked. "What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?"   In politics, King endorsed a strategic alternative to violence. "We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy is a better government than any other government," he told his congregation, "and by making justice a reality for all of God"s children."   Pressures intensified within King"s own movement. To battered young colleagues who wondered why nonviolence was consigned mostly to black people, while others admired James Bond, he could only commend the burden as a redemptive sacrifice.   Change was slow, however, for a land still dotted with lynching, and frustration turned to rebellion as the war in Vietnam hardened the political climate. When offered incendiary but fleeting fame in 1966, the leaders of various black power movements repudiated nonviolence along with the vote itself, which they had given so much to win.   Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson steadily lost his presidency at home before he could forge any political order in Vietnam. Although casualty figures confirmed the heavy advantage of American arms, Johnson fell victim to a historical paradox evolving since the age of Napoleon: Modern warfare destroys more but governs less - one reason military commanders seem, in my limited experience, more skeptical than civilians about the political use of lethal force.   King grew ever more lonely in conviction about the gateway to constructive politics. "I"m committed to nonviolence absolutely," he wrote. "I"m just not going to kill anybody, whether it"s in Vietnam or here."   When discouragement invaded his own staff, he exhorted them to rise above fear and hatred alike. "We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now," he told them on his last birthday.   His oratory fused the political promise of equal votes with the spiritual doctrine of equal souls. He planted one foot in American heritage, the other in scripture, and both in nonviolence.   "I say to you that our goal is freedom," he said in his last Sunday sermon. "And I believe we"re going to get there because, however much she strays from it, the goal of America is freedom."   Only hours before his death, King startled an aide with a balmy aside from his unpopular movement to uplift the poor. "In our next campaign," he remarked, "we have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international."   The United States would do well to incorporate this goal into its mission abroad, reinforcing the place of nonviolence among the fundamentals of democracy, along with equal citizenship, self-government and accountable public trust.   America could also restore King"s role in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it.   (Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of "At Canaan"s Edge," the third volume of his biography of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.)
	View more stories