Newsletter 63
Guest Contribution
Charles Taylor: Faith and Identity: Religion and
Conflict in the Modern World
Charles Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at McGill University in Mon-
treal and a Vice-Chair of the Academic Advisory Board of IWM. The following piece is an
excerpt of the lecture he gave on occasion of the Wiesenthal Conference in December. The
complete text will appear in German in Transit – Europäische Revue No.16.
A question can arise for the modern state for which there
is no analogue in most pre-modern forms: what/whom is
this state for? whose freedom? whose expression?
This is the sense in which a modern state has what I
want to call a political identity, defined as the generally
accepted answer to the “what/whom for?” question. This
is distinct from the identities of its members, that is the
reference points, many and varied, which for each of these
defines what is important in their lives. There better be
some overlap, of course, if these members are to feel
strongly identified with the state; but the identities of
individuals and constituent groups will generally be richer
and more complex, as well as being often quite different
from each other.
So there is a need for common identity. How does this
generate exclusion? In a host of possible ways, which we
can see illustrated in different circumstances.
The most tragic of these circumstances is also the
most obvious, where a group which can’t be assimilated
to the reigning cohesion is brutally extruded; what we
have come today to call “ethnic cleansing”.
But there are other cases where it doesn’t come to
such drastic expedients, but where exclusion works all the
same against those whose difference threatens the domi-
nant identity. I want to class forced inclusion as a kind of
exclusion, which might seem a logical sleight of hand.
Thus the Hungarian national movement in the nineteenth
Century tried forcefully to assimilate Slovaks and Romani-
ans; the Turks are reluctant to concede that there is a
Kurdish minority in their Eastern borderlands. This may
not seem to constitute exclusion to the minority, but in
another clear sense, it amounts to this. It is saying in
effect: as you are, or consider yourselves to be, you have
no place here; that’s why we are going to make you over.
Or exclusion may take the form of chicanery, as in the
old apartheid South Africa, where millions of Blacks were
denied citizenship, on the grounds that they were really
citizens of “homelands”, external to the state.
All these modes of exclusion are motivated by the
threat that others represent to the dominant political
identity. But this threat depends on the fact that popular
sovereignty is the regnant legitimacy idea of our time. lt is
hard to sustain a frankly hierarchical society, in which
groups are ranged in tiers, with some overtly marked as
inferior or subject, as with the millet system of the Otto-
man Empire.
Hence the paradox that earlier conquering people
were quite happy to coexist with vast numbers of subjects
which were very different from them. The more the better.
The early Muslim conquerors of the Ommeyad empire
November 1998 – January 1999 Page 28
didn’t press for conversion for their Christian subjects,
even mildly discouraged it. Within the bound of this
unequal disposition, earlier empires very often had a very
good record of “multi-cultural” tolerance and coexistence.
Famous cases come down to us, like that of the Mughals
under Akbar, which seem strikingly enlightened and
humane, compared to much of what goes on today in that
part of the world and elsewhere.
lt is no accident that the twentieth Century is the age
of ethnic cleansing, starting with the Balkan Wars, extend-
ing in that area through the aftermath of the First World
War, and then reaching epic proportions in the Second
World War, and still continuing — to speak only of Europe.
The democratic age poses new obstacles to coexist-
ence, because it opens a new set of issues which may
deeply divide people, those concerning the political
identity of the state.
***
Democracy thus underlies identity struggles, because the
age of popular sovereignty opens a new kind of question,
which I’ve been calling that of the political identity of the
state. What/whom is the state for? And for any given
answer, the question can arise for me/us, can I/we “iden-
tify with” this state? Do we see ourselves as reflected
there? Can we see ourselves as part of the people which
this state is meant to reflect/promote?
These questions can be deeply felt, strongly con-
tested, because they arise at the juncture point between
political identity and personal identity, meaning by the
latter the reference points by which individuals and
component groups define what is important in their lives.
If it is important to me that I belong to a French-speaking
community, then a state defined by its official language as
English will hardly reflect me; if I am more than a pro
forma Muslim, then a state defined by “Hindutva” cannot
fully be mine; and so on. We are in the very heartland of
modern nationalism.
But these “nationalist” issues are the more deeply
fraught, because the personal and group identities which
vie for reflection are often themselves in the course of
redefinition. This redefinition is often forced by the cir-
cumstances, and at the same time, extremely conflictual
and unsettling. We can see the forces surrounding this
process if we follow the serial rise of nationalisms in the
modern world.
We might ask ourselves the question: Why does
nationalism arise in the first place? Why couldn’t the
Germans just be happy to be part of Napoleons liberaliz-
Newsletter 63
ing empire, as Hegel would have liked? Why didn‘t the
Algerians demand the full French citizenship to which they
would have been entitled according to the logic of
“l’Algerie, c’ est la France”, instead of going for independ-
ence? And so on, through an immense range of similar
questions.
First, it’s important to see that in very many situations,
the initial refusal is that of certain élites, generally the
ones who are most acquainted with the culture of the
metropolis they’re refusing. Later, in a successful national
movement, the mass of the people is somehow induced to
come on board. This indicates that an account of the
sources of such a movement ought to distinguish two
stages.
So let me try to tackle the first phase: why do the elites
refuse metropolitan incorporation, even, perhaps espe-
cially when they have accepted many of the values of the
metropolis? Here we have to look at another facet of the
unfolding process of modernity.
From one point of view, modernity is like a wave,
flowing over and engulfing one traditional culture after
another. If we understand by modernity, inter alia, devel-
opments like: the emergence of a market-industrial
economy, of a bureaucratically-organized state, of modes
of popular rule, then its progress is, indeed, wave-like. The
first two changes, if not the third, are in a sense irresist-
ible. Whoever fails to take them on, or some good func-
tional equivalent, will fall so far behind in the power stakes
as to be taken
over, and forced
to undergo
these changes
anyway. There
are good rea-
sons in the
relations of force
for the onward
march of moder-
nity so defined.
But moder-
Charles Taylor nity as lived
from the inside, as it were, is something different. The
institutional changes just described always shake up and
alter traditional culture. They did this in the original
development in the West, and they have done this else-
where. But outside of those cases where the original
culture is quite destroyed, and the people either die or are
forcibly assimilated — and European colonialism has a
number of such cases to its discredit — a successful
transition involves a people finding resources in their
traditional culture to take on the new practices. In this
sense, modernity is not a single wave. It would be better
to speak of multiple modernities, as the cultures which
emerge in the world to carry the institutional changes turn
out to differ in important ways from each other. Thus a
Japanese modernity, an Indian modernity, various modu-
lations of Islamic modernity will probably enter alongside
the gamut of Western societies, which are also far from
being totally uniform.
Seen in this perspective, we can see that modernity —
the wave — can be felt as a threat to a traditional culture.
lt will remain an external threat to those deeply committed
against change. But there is another reaction, among
November 1998 – January 1999 Page 29
those who want to take on some version of the institu-
tional changes. Unlike the conservatives, they don’t want
to refuse the changes. They want of course to avoid the
fate of those aboriginal people who have just been en-
gulfed and made over by the changes. What they are
looking for is a creative adaptation, drawing on the cul-
tural resources of their tradition which would enable them
to take on the new practices successfully. In short they
want to do what has already been done in the West. But
they see, or sense, that that cannot consist in just copying
the West’s adaptations. The creative adaptation using
traditional resources has by definition to be different from
culture to culture. Just taking over Western modernity
couldn’t be the answer. Or otherwise put, this answer
comes too close to engulfment. They have to invent their
own.
There is thus a “call to difference” felt by “moderniz-
ing” élites which corresponds to something objective in
their situation. This is part of the background to national-
ism. But there is more. The call to difference could be felt
by anyone concerned for the well-being of the people
concerned. But the challenge is lived by the élites con-
cerned overwhelmingly in a certain register, that of
dignity.
***
I have been attempting to give some of the background of
modern identity struggles. These have a locus, which is
frequently inescapable, in the modern state, which poses
the question of political identity: what/whom is this polity
for? and the derivative questions: do I/we have a place
here? These issues can be particularly charged, because
they are the point at which the necessary redefinition of a
traditional way of life may be carried out. Indeed, the very
staking of a claim for “us” as a people demanding our
own state, or calling for reflection in an existing state
whose definition excludes us, this very move to
peoplehood in the modern sense, will often involve a
redefinition of what “we” are. Thus on the erstwhile
dominant, conservative and clerical, definition of “la
nation canadienne-française”, this was not meant to
realize itself primarily in political institutions, but rather in
the conservation of a way of life in which the Church
played the major role. The political strategy was to hold
North American Anglophone-Protestant society at bay,
both in its concentration on economic growth, and in its
tendency to enlarge the state’s role in the management of
certain social affairs, especially education and health
matters. This required the jealous guarding of provincial
autonomy, but also the self-denial of the provincial gov-
ernment which refrained from itself entering the domains
from which it was excluding the federal government. Quite
a different self-definition underlies the present identity as
“Québécois”, which for some people at any rate motivates
the demand for separate statehood.
Of course, this move involved a shift away from a
religious self-definition. The last 50 years have seen a
rapid laicization of Quebec society. But the earlier variant
of nationalism also involved a controversial stance on
what it meant to be a Catholic community in majority
Protestant Canada and North America, as the long and
bitter quarrel with Irish clergy testifies.
Newsletter 63
The point is that the resolution of issues of political
identity: what kind of state will one settle for? Do we have
a real choice? Can we strike out on our own? Should we
accept to assimilate? goes along with the settling of the
major issues of personal or group identity: who are we
really? What really matters to us? How does this relate to
how we used to define what matters? What is the impor-
tant continuity with our past which makes us = us? (e.g., is
it just speaking French on this territory for four centuries;
or is it also being Catholic?)
These re-assertions or redefinitions are particularly
fraught, not just because they are anguishing, the point at
which people may feel that there has been a loss of
identity or a betrayal; but also because they are often lived
in the register of dignity: the issue of whether the identity
we end up with somehow will brand us as inferior, not up
to the rest, as a group destined to be dominated, cast in
the shade by others. This may indeed be how we are seen
by powerful others, but the issue is how much this gets to
us, how much we feel that only by changing ourselves in
some direction (“modernizing” our economy, reforming
some of our social practices, attaining statehood or
autonomy) could we really refute this disparaging judge-
ment, and hold our heads high among the nations. And
our plight is not made easier by the fact that one person’s
essential reform, by which dignity is recovered, is another
person’s utter betrayal.
Now religion gets caught up in this process of struggle
through redefinition. Sometimes the result is negative: the
old faith is extruded or marginalized, as for instance in
Jacobin-nationalist or Leftist identities. But sometimes it
seems to be revalorized. “Reformed” versions of an old
religious tradition come forward as the way to embrace
what is good in modernity, even rediscover these good
things in a neglected part of our tradition (Brahmo Samaj,
for instance). Or against these, the counter-claim is made
that they have abandoned what is essential, and new,
more rigorous returns to the origins are proposed. But
these latter efforts take place in a modern context, and
very often while attempting to meet the demands of
power, statehood, economic and military viability, with full
use of communications technology, which belong to this
age. And so they are frequently less of a pure return to
origins than they claim on the surface to be. The pathos of
“fundamentalism” is always a certain hybridity. Present-
day Protestant Biblical “fundamentalism” would have
been unthinkable in the symbolic universe of mediaeval
Catholicism, where everything was a sign; it presupposes
the literal-mindedness of the modern scientific age. Earlier
Christian centuries lived in a world in which secular time
was interwoven with various orders of higher time,
various dimensions of eternity. From within this time
sense, it may be hard to explain just what is at stake in the
issue whether ‘day’ in Genesis means “literally” the 24
hours between sunset and sunset, let alone get them to
see why they should be concerned about it.
Or to take another example, the Iranian revolution and
subsequent régime has been deeply marked by modern
communications, modes of mass mobilization, and forms
of state (a sort of attempt at a Parliamentary theocracy).
Now looked at from a certain angle, these movements
can be seen as attempts to live the traditional faith to the
full in contemporary conditions. The ultimate goal in each
November 1998 – January 1999 Page 30
case is something which would be recognized as such
across the history of the tradition in question — e.g., in the
Muslim case, living the life of submission to God in the
light of Qu’ran and hadith — even if some of the forms
might seem strange and new. But to the extent that the
struggle for re-assertion/redefinition becomes entangled
in identity struggles, a displacement comes about. Two
other goals or issues begin to impinge, which may draw
the enterprise out of the orbit of the religious tradition.
These are the twin goals/issues of the power and the
dignity of a certain “people”. These may impose objec-
tives which are more or less alien from the faith, not only
as lived historically, but even in terms of what can be
justified today.
Constituting a dominant people, especially one with
the power to impose its will through weapons of mass
destruction, has never been seen as a demand of Hindu
piety. A case to the diametrically opposite effect would be
easier to make, as Gandhi showed, and as his brutal
elimination by the spiritual ancestors of the government in
Delhi underlines. Nor has genocide been seen, as a goal of
Orthodox Christianity, even allowing for the worst modes
of perversion of the faith historically.
In many of its most flagrant cases, the contemporary
violence which seems “religious” in origin is quite alien to
it. lt is powered by something quite different. lt arises in
identity struggles which are constituted by and help
constitute “peoples”, self-defining groups struggling to
define themselves and to attain political identity, where
religion serves as a historical marker, while the demands
of piety have utterly disappeared or atrophied: the “Serb”
militants, the IRA and Orange killers, much of the leader-
ship of the BJP.
Even more mixed are various of the militant Muslim
movements of our day. Many of these are undoubtedly
powered by deeply-felt conceptions of piety. But this
doesn’t mean that their form and course may not be
deeply influenced by the context of identity struggle. lt
would be absurd to reduce Islamic integrism to a single
mode of explanation; we are dealing with a complex,
many-sided, over-determined, reality. I nevertheless would
like to argue that its various manifestations have some
features of the profile I have been outlining above. The
sense of operating of the world scene, in the register of
threatened dignity, is very much present; as is the over-
vehement rejection of the West (or its quintessence,
America, the “great Satan”), and the tremendous sensitiv-
ity to criticism from this quarter, for all the protestations of
hostility and indifference. Islamic societies are perhaps if
anything more vulnerable to a threat to their self-esteem
from the impact of superior power, in that Islam’s self-
image, was of the definitive revelation, destined to spread
outward without check. The Islamic sense of Providence, if
I may use this Christian expression, can cope with the
status of conquerors, but tends to be bewildered by the
experience of powerlessness and conquest.
Again, for all their protestations of faithfulness to the
origins, this integrism is in some respects very modern, as
I argued above. lt mobilizes people in a modern fashion, in
horizontal, direct-access movements; it thus has no
problem using the “modern” institutional apparatus of
elected legislatures, bureaucratic states, armies. While it
would reject the doctrine of popular sovereignty in favour
Newsletter 63 November 1998 – January 1999 Page 31

of a species of theocracy, it has also delegitimated all the

traditional ruling strata. The Iranian revolution was carried
out against the Shah. Those enjoying special authority are
exclusively those who “rationally” merit this, granted the
nature and goals of the state, viz., the experts in God’s law.
Not to speak of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s media-oriented
abuse of the Islamic judicial forms in issuing his fatwa
against Salman Rushdie. And to what extent was the
heinousness of Rushdie’s “crime” greatly increased by the
fact that he published his “blasphemies” in English and
for a Western audience?
Again, we do not understand as fully as we might the
tremendous emphasis laid on the dress and comportment
of women in contemporary Islamic reform movements.
Very often the demands seem to spin out of all relation to
Qu’ran and tradition, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But we can trace the way in which women have become
the “markers” for “modernism” and integrism. Atatürk
insisted that women dress in Western fashion, that they
walk in the streets and attend social functions, even dance
with men. The traditional modes were stigmatized as
“backward”. Perhaps this has something to do with the
extraordinary stress an rigorism in dress and contact
imposed on women in many places today. These matters
have become internationally-recognized symbols of where
one stands, ways of making a statement, of declaring
one’s rejection of Western modernity. The struggle in
international public space may be dictating what happens
here more than the weight of the shariat or hallowed
modes of piety.
Moreover, seeing nationalism, proletarian internation-
alism and religious fundamentalism in the same register
may help us to understand their interaction, that they are
so often, in fact, fighting for the same space. Arab nation-
alism gives way to Islamic integrism, just as the demise of
Soviet Marxism opens the way for virulent nationalisms.
The search for a categorial identity, to answer the call to
difference, and be the bearer of the sought-for dignity, can
take many forms. lt is understandable why the discrediting
of some must strengthen the appeal of others.

***

This discussion yields a rather mixed picture. lt cautions

up against taking “religion” as a clearly identifiable
phenomenon, once and for all, responding to a single
inner dynamic. lt ought to be clear that there is more than
one dynamic going on today in connection with religion.
We have to be particularly aware of this if we want to do
something to overcome the violence which is often
associated with religious differences.
I have argued here that there is a particularly modern
dynamic which can issue in “religious” hatred and vio-
lence, but which is in some ways rather alien to religion in
its devotional thrust. There are clear cases, where this
alien nature stands out; but there are also very mixed
cases, where religious movements are traversed by a
number of different demands, of fidelity to the past, piety,
of recovering social discipline and order, as well as of the
power and dignity of “peoples”. In these cases, there is no
single dynamic at work.