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| Prof. Cornel West |
Religion and politics have a long pending case at the divorce court. Those for separation cite issues of compatibility.
A militant coterie of this number has gone so far as to push for the ejection of every last vestige of religion from state and society.
For them, politics is public and normatively rational while religion is private and inherently irrational.
However, their proposition has turned out to be no easy sell as religion proves to be no push-over.
Maybe religion and politics cannot be detached because of the proximate setting of the problems they seek to resolve.
Religion is mankind’s response to the problem of existence while politics is mankind’s response to the problem of co-existence.
Religion is the moral control centre for other spheres of human endeavour possibly because it is the principal domain in mankind’s quest to make sense of the world.
Four eminent thinkers, Cornel West, Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, grapple with the staying power of religion in the 2011 book, “The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.”
It is an engaging philosophical symphony as each of the thinkers brings a unique strand of thought to the discussion.
“Many of our dominant stories about religion and public life are myths that bear little relation to either our political life or our everyday experience,” editors Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen share a pertinent observation.
“Religion is neither merely private, for instance, nor purely irrational. And the public sphere is neither a realm of straightforward rational deliberation nor a smooth space of unforced assent,” note the editors.
The erroneous view has, however, been around for too long and has come to be taken for granted.
It is important not to confuse religion in the public sphere with religion in public administration.
Mergers of church and state, across the lapse of time, have been known to be matters of convenience rather than conscience, therefore more political than religious.
Inquisitions, crusades and state-bankrolled terrorism are ample cases against the incarnation of theocracy this side of eternity.
The essential power of religion is not in enforcement but in liberty.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in “The Brothers Karamazov” demonstrates that theocracy is a case of simulating divine assent to consolidate oppression, this juxtaposed to Christ’s mission of redemption.
On the other hand, new enforcers of conscience are deploying not neutrality but secularism to supplant the influence of religion.
Hilary Clinton said before the United Nations last month that religious views against abortion must be changed.
Such disdain!
In many Western countries, where secularism initially emerged as a mechanism against state-powered religious domination, there has been a subsequent shift to secularist authoritarianism.
In the wake of growing hostility against Christianity, particularly in the West, Charles Taylor’s redefinition of the secular state may be a timely call.
Taylor proposes that secular regimes in contemporary democracy have to be conceived not primarily as bulwarks against religion but as good faith for the protection of human rights, equality and democracy, values which barely render religion less observable for its adherents.
Taylor stresses the need to balance freedom of conscience and equality of respect, instead of limiting religious freedom as in cases where some religious practices have been needlessly taken to violate secular conventions.
Habermas brings exclusive credentials to the dialogue, being the original proponent of the public sphere concept.
His instalment, “The Political,” points out that religion has not ceded its cultural agency to the forces of modernity as erroneously predicted by secularists.
Habermas considers it important, therefore, to revert to a post-secular approach that acknowledges the enduring global vitality of religion.
Such an approach, Habermas observes, must emphasise the importance of appropriating the ethical insights of religion into an inclusive political perspective.
“Although religion can neither be reduced to morality nor be assimilated to ethical value orientations, it nevertheless keeps alive an awareness of both elements,” Habermas points out.
The public use of reason by both religious and secular citizens, Habermas observes, can provoke deliberative politics in a pluralist civil society and lead to the transposition of the semantic potential of religion to the broader political culture.
Habermas counts religious sources of meaning and motivation an indispensable ally in confronting the forces of global capitalism and injustice.
“I do want to save also the authentic character of religious speech in the public sphere, because I’m convinced that there might well be buried moral intuitions on the part of a secular public that can be uncovered by a moving religious speech,” Habermas says.
“Listening to Martin Luther King, it does make no difference whether you are secular or not. You understand what he means,” Habermas points out.
The future of faith is immune to the bleak estimates by which secular imagination has attempted to circumscribe it in the name of science.
It may be wise for belligerent secularists to begin by assessing the magnitude of what they are up against.
To acknowledge that the staying power of religion is in the questions that they evade; questions that alternative domains have no capacity to address.
Militant atheist Sam Harris acknowledges this, even as he maintains his trademark denialism: “What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same.”
As a matter of fact, these are not false questions but problems which cannot be sidestepped from a position of honesty.
The curvature of time and space is not just a route for celestial bodies but also a trap for terrestrial ones.
Without religion, life ends where it begins with nothing to account for its expenditure.
The quest for purpose, for life to count beyond tedious futility, is at the heart of religion.
As David Berlinski points out, a man frustrated by the brevity and sorrow of life cannot turn to science but to religion for answers.
Our elevated consciousness and elaborate capacity for language is not all that distinguishes us from primates. There is our sensitivity to the question of eternity.
Religion is not just a window into the metaphysical but a vantage point for understanding and empathy for the immediate, for calibrating relationships in the best interest of society.
Highly regarded African American public intellectual, Cornel West, summons secularists, whom he accuses of being musically tone-deaf and flat-footed, with his characteristic Christian socialist eloquence.
“Ought we not be concerned with the forms of dogmatism and authoritarianism in secular garb that trump dialogue and foreclose debate?” West protests, a pertinent call noting the growing tendency to shoot down valid contributions to the public sphere on the basis of their cultural emanation.
West points out that the preoccupation with secularisation is a red herring for laying aside the legitimate priorities that democratisation and economic justice ought to be.
“Secularisation is one thing. For me, the priority is a democratisation of the state, which has to do with the substantive accountability and answerability of corporate elites and financial oligarchs who are running amok in terms of might, status, and reshaping the nation, and much of the world, in their image,” Cornel argues.
“That’s very dangerous. It is very dangerous. It is as dangerous as kings and queens running amok in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—unaccountable elites. The history of democracies is the awakening of the demos who try to impose some kinds of regulations, some kinds of controls on them for the public good,” he points out.
West expresses dismay with politicians’ invocation of God to facelift their public images without following through the ethical implications of religion and compares the antic with Pilate absolving Jesus, nonetheless putting Him up for execution.
