• RELIGION IN POLITICS: SACRED LEGITIMACY, DIVINE

RESISTANCE
Sociological theory: Durkheim’s functionalism
All societies founded on distinction between sacred & profane
Whether what is sacred is a God, or an object, or a ritual, or freedom of speech
“social facts”
• External to the individual; social norms, values and institutions
But, unclear how these “social facts” emerge, operate, reproduce themselves, and
particularly change “A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful…
Precisely because society has its own specific nature that is different from our nature as
individuals it pursues ends that are also specifically its own; but because it can achieve those
ends only by working through us, it categorically demands our cooperation.

Society requires us to make ourselves its servants, forgetful of our own interests.” (Religious
Life, pp.208-9)
• Definition of religion?

• “system of beliefs and practices based on belief in, or

acknowledgement of, some superhuman power or powers” (Oxford
English Dictionary, 2009)

• Problems with defining religion: What beliefs are religious? Is belief

necessary? Not all religions have a God or Gods Core beliefs can
differ between elite and members People can be considered
members of a religion irrespective of belief (e.g. Jews, Catholics) &
vice versa (e.g. Church of England)
• If belonging to a group is necessary, how active do you have to be?
Various indicators used
• Self-identification.
• Attendance (also marriages, christenings, etc.)
• Beliefs
• Modernisation/Secularisation
• Three dimensions (Dobbelare, 1981)
• Level of society and institutions
• Within religious institutions
• Individual level association with religious institutions
• Linked to modernisation in three ways.
• Social differentiation: especially adoption of health and education
by the state
• Societalization: reduction in the importance of community relative
to the wider society
• Rationalization: reduces need for coordination and ordering by
values (Bell, 1976)
• Globally, Norris and Inglehart (2004) argue that religiosity is
strongest where economic and physical security are weakest
• Politicisation of religion

• “A person’s religious identity inevitably shapes his or her values and

political positions. The relationship between religion and parties
arises from a centuries-old interplay of these two forces.” (Dalton,
Citizen Politics, 2014)
• Long history of religious wars (e.g. early Muslim conquests, Christian
Crusades, Protestant-Catholic wars of religion)
• Development of ideologies, political institutions and political
competition shaped by religion
• “Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the
basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt
to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilization
identity.” (Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 1993)
• It may not be true, as Georges Balandier (1970: 38) has contended, that
the sacred is always present in politics; but it is seldom far away.
• As Myron Aronoff (1985b: 1) observes, “Religion and politics have been
inextricably interrelated since the dawn of human culture and civilization.”
• Viewers of the classic propaganda film Triumph of the Will, made at the
1934 Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg, might justifiably wonder
whether they are watching a political rally or a religious ceremony. An
implicit sacredness underlies the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States, and offers a divine legitimacy to political
succession.
• In modern-day Ireland, political conflict may be indistinguishable from
religious conflict. However, in preindustrial societies, the boundaries of the
various subsystems—political, kinship, economic, religious—are far less
clearly demarcated than in more complex and specialized societies.
• An African candidate for headmanship who calls on ancestor spirits
for support no more considers himself resorting to the supernatural
than would a senatorial candidate in the United States who accepts a
campaign contribution from a major corporation.
• The role that religion plays in politics is difficult to correlate with
specific types of religion, such as shamanistic or priestly.
• Among some Eskimos, the shaman was the most powerful of men
by virtue of his access to the spirit world; among the tribal Hopi of
the American southwest, political power is articulated through
ceremonies, dances, and re- ligious sodalities; modern Saudi Arabia
is an internationally powerful nation-state, intimately based on
Islam.
• On the other hand, it would be equally easy to provide examples of
hunting-gathering peoples (the !Kung), tribal groups (the
Yanomamo), and states (the Peoples Republic of China) in which
religion plays relatively little part.
• The role of religion and the supernatural in supporting a particular
political regime is manifested mainly in three ways:
• (1) the government may be directly based on religion, as in a
theocracy;
• (2) religion may be used to legitimize the ruling elite; and
• (3) religion may provide the underlying structures, beliefs, and
traditions that are manipulated by aspirants to power.
• However, it should not be assumed that religion only reinforces
existing political structures; religion can also be a powerful force of
opposition.
• Religion may be the binding force of identity politics, as is seen in
Northern Ireland, in Christian fundamentalism in the United States,
and in Islamic nationalism.
• SACRED LEGITIMACY
• There is no clear-cut dividing line between a theocracy and a secular
state.
• Because virtually all preindustrial states claim at least some degree of
divine legitimacy and even the most religiously oriented of
administrations must solve a number of very secular problems—
defense, trade, and development of roads and irrigation networks—
the amount of religious emphasis is a matter of degree, not of kind.
• Even in most cases in which religion plays an extremely important
role, the secular and priestly bureaucracies are usually kept
separate, as was true, for example, for the Inca and the Maya.
• Although the priests may have enormous power, it is not power that
would normally be expended on the mundane functioning of the
government.
• Divine kings may, like the Pope, express their divinity only on certain
specific occasions and in limited contexts.
• Jacobus Janssen (1978) argues that this was true of the Egyptian
pharaohs, who guaranteed and maintained the cosmic order (Ma’at)
while at the same time were subject to that order; their persons were
taboo, but they were incapable of working miracles; they were
omnipotent but subject to the gods and forced to rule through purely
mundane means.
• People in states that are not as highly segmented as our own seem to
have little problem dealing with the simultaneity of the human and
the divine, the sacred and the secular.
• The Shilluk of the Sudan believed in a semidivine cultural hero
who, through an Exodus-like epic adventure, established them as a
unique people, set up the first villages, and founded the basic
divisions of their society.
• This deathless hero, Ny’ikang, simply disappeared, and his spirit
entered into each succeeding king.
• The Shilluk were the only contemporary group chosen by James
George Frazer, in his classic The Golden Bough ([1890] 1900), to
support his theory that the king represented the fertility of the
land and cattle.
• According to Frazer, the king had to be killed in a ritual manner
before he became old, so that the mystic potency would always
remain with a virile leader.
• Although it is true that many such kings died young, in battle or
through assassination, the belief that the king was ritually killed
was itself part of Shilluk mythology.
• However, Frazer, although overemphasizing the symbolic value of
fertility, did hit on an important element of African kingship: the
symbolic identification of the king’s person with the welfare of the
whole society (Mair 1962).
• Religious ritual also has important political functions.
• The periodic reenactment of legitimizing myths unites the entire
community in a sacred bond that transcends private interests and day-
to-day conflicts, while reinfusing the society with the mystical power
of the world of the ancestors.
• In some uncentralized societies, religious ceremony was the major
source of tribal integration.
• For many of the Plains Indians, for example, it was only for two weeks
during the summer Sun Dance that the entire tribe came together as a
unit. It was at this time that the council of chiefs would meet and
make group decisions, and when Medicine Bundles, which brought
both mystical and secular power to their owners, exchanged hands.
• Manipulation of Religious Symbols among the Lugbara The
supernatural is much more than a simple set of passive beliefs that
form an unchanging backdrop for political action.
• Such beliefs are subject to the manipulation both of individuals who
compete for power and those who are called to support (or withhold
support from) the competitors
• This is clearly exemplified in the political system of of Uganda. This
group, which had a classic segmentary lineage system, lacked any
formal government whatsoever prior to the colonial period. The
smallest effective unit of society was the local patrilineal kinship
group, consisting of a cluster of families, and in lieu of kings or chiefs,
authority was vested in an age-set system.
• As members of the age-grades of youth and big youth grew older,
they came in conflict with their elders over land and authority.
• Because violence was not permitted among kinsmen, generational
conflicts had to be worked out by mystical means. If one of the
parties in the conflict were to fall sick and the oracles showed that
his opponent had conjured the ancestors to wreak illness, the
conjurer would gain power by having his authority affirmed.
• On the other hand, if it were believed that the dead had been
invoked merely to gain or maintain status, rather than to benefit the
lineage, the invoker could be accused of being a witch, and therefore
lose status.
• These two interpretations were only narrowly different, but could have the effect
of either legitimizing or destroying a person’s authority.
• Thus, there was room for manipulation of the belief system not only by the
individuals involved, but also by the public and the guardian of the oracle making
the decision.
• Conflicts between local groups were not susceptible to this sort of resolution,
because ghost invocation and witchcraft were thought to be ineffective beyond
the minimal lineage.
• Dueling, feuding, and outright warfare were common means of conflict
resolution; but accusations of sorcery were often employed between close
neighbors who wished to avoid open violence.
• In any case, all political authority was primarily supernatural, because it was
controlled by the dead ancestors and the power of sanctions derived from the
same source (
Symbolism and Ritual in Secular Politics
• It is comforting to assume that such sacred legitimacy is an anachronism of
“primitive” societies. However, even secular politics, in which religion is not
immediately evident, is often replete with the emotional fervor that marks
the realm of the sacred

• David Kertzer (1988) observed that despite modern man’s illusion of

political rationality and of making decisions based on the weighing of
objective evidence, symbolism pervades virtually every aspect of modern
politics.
• However, because symbolism, by its nature, is unconscious and has a
taken-for-granted quality, there is a tendency to treat symbols as though
they were things.
• Government, party, and state are really symbolic constructions, not
the concrete entities that most people suppose. Indeed, such
organizations take their continuity only through symbols; only the
symbols remain constant, whereas the people making up the
organization are regularly changing.
• There are three properties to true symbols, according to Kertzer. The
first is condensation of meaning.
• The ideas of the United States as a physical entity, as “one nation
under God,” as a repudiation of European tyranny, as patriotism in
warfare, or as freedom and democracy (themselves ill-defined
symbols) are all funneled into a single point in the Stars and Stripes.
• Secondly, symbols are multivocal, that is, they encompass a wide
variety of different meanings. A single symbol, such as the Christian
cross, may mean very different things to different people.
• Finally, true symbols are possessed of ambiguity, so that they can
never be fully and completely defined; they have no precise
meaning.
• Ritual is “action wrapped in a web of symbolism”; it is highly structured
and is often enacted at emotionally charged times and places (Kertzer
1988: 9).
• It is through ritual, and through the individual’s participation in it, that
the ordinary citizen makes the crucial emotional bond with the
otherwise unthinkably huge and often impersonal state. Symbols make
power sacred.
• A Fourth of July celebration, a national political party convention, the
inauguration of a president, the bicentennial of the Constitution—all
provide the symbolic form through which the state can be emotionally
embraced.
• Rituals need be neither positive nor routinized.
• The assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space
shuttle Challenger, the Iranian hostage crisis, and certainly the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were all
national-level events that provided a gut-level override of party
loyalties and conflicting ideologies and drew people together in an
emotional bond of shared tragedy.
• A major conflict, such as the U.S. wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, is
certainly real enough and tangible enough to the people who are
fighting, but for the people left at home, it becomes a powerful
symbol of national courage, unity, and pride.
• It is this commonality of the nature of symbol and ritual that makes it
difficult to distinguish the sacred from the profane in politics.
• RELIGION AS RESISTANCE
• It is a truism that official or dominant religions tend to support those
in power.
• Obviously, however, this is not always the case; all or virtually all
religions and cults begin in opposition to some sort of dominant
power; it is only when the religion has become standardized,
routinized, and achieved a critical mass of followers that it passes
from protest to support.
• Christianity, which originated in Roman-occupied Israel and op- posed
what its followers perceived as an overly routinized and hypocritical
Judaism, did not itself attain dominant status for half a millennium.
• Over the last two centuries, religion has often emerged as a primary
form of “antisystemic protest” against the rapid changes wrought by
the spread of world capitalism.
• The Islamic resurgence of the last decades may be read in this light, as
a protest against capitalism and secularism (Robbins 2002: 337–63).
• Critics of secularisation
• Globally religion Primarily Western Europe where
• Even within W Europe, measures of secularization (identification,
church attendances, religious marriages, etc.) disputed
• Changing practice not general decline of religion? (e.g. Martin,
1978) e.g. religious TV and radio, New Age spirituality and ‘believing
without belonging’
• Still, any increases in above too small to compensate for decline in
traditional religious
• Plurality of religions and free competition can explain high religiosity
in the US
• Norris and Inglehart (2004):
• US has low levels of security due to limited welfare state, and it is
just one case
• Eastern Europe where religion
• after 1989 – increasing inequality

• Still, Gorski and Altinordu (2008) criticise Norris and Inglehart (2004)
using ‘existential security’ to mean basic physical needs in non-
Western countries but higher-order psychological needs
(predictability, protection against risk) in US making a temporal
argument based on cross-sectional data
Church versus State
• Most European states originally legitimated by religion
• to maintain power, the church allied with political elite to resist moves towards
democratization
• France: Since the revolution, state strongly anti-clerical, most notably in the
education policy
• E.g. battle over headscarves in schools (although more complex) England
• Early victory of state over church (C16th)
• Church remains established but politically weak
• US, Ireland, Greece and Poland Separation of (majority) church from
Separation of (majority) church from state has allowed religion to flourish It is
the association with political elite, rather than religion, that lead to rejection of
the church (Martin, 1978
• Revitalization Movements
• Religion may substitute for direct political action in cases in which
natives have been rendered politically impotent by an alien power or
they do not understand the nature of their situation. In such cases, a
revitalization movement may arise as “a conscious, deliberate effort
on the part of some members of society to create a more satisfying
culture” (Wallace 1985: 319).
• Such movements are an almost predictable response to Western
expansion, although they can be expected in any situation in which
cultures at totally different levels of technological sophistication or
different levels of raw power come into contact. Incipient
Christianity, arising within a situation of conquest by Rome,
possessed all the elements of a revitalization movement
• Revitalization movements are basically attempts, often unsuccessful,
to adapt to new conditions, and, despite the religious trappings, they
are basically political.
• The prophet’s vision may be seen as a pivotal point in the history of
the culture, at once combining external and internal factors, past and
future, tradition and inevitable change.
• Over the past two centuries most such movements have arisen in the
context of domination by Western powers; therefore, they may be
seen as a first form of political protest, a cry of pain and accusation in
the absence of the knowledge, organization, or power to confront the
occupiers on their own terms.
• Revitalization movements do not emerge only among tribal peoples,
however.
• The stress and chaos of modern industrial society is sufficient to
impel many individuals and groups to seek religious transformation.
• As analyzed by John Hall (1985), the tragedy of the People’s Temple,
in which 900 people died in an orchestrated mass murder and suicide
in Guyana in 1978, was a revitalization movement that actually
achieved its apocalypse.
• The following example, which follows all of the stages set forth above,
reveals the emergence and routinization of a messianic movement in
modern Israel.