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Peter van der Veer

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The religious origins of democracy

Democracy is not in itself secular. There are several possible connections

between democracy and secularity, but there is no necessary one. Secularity can
be promoted in a society by democratic means, but also, as in communist regimes,
by dictatorial means. Democracy, however, by no means depends on seculariza‑
tion. In fact, there are hardly any secular democracies in the world, because there
are hardly any secular societies. As a form of political participation and represen‑
tation, democracy is typical of the modern nation‑state, a particular state forma‑
tion that emerged in Europe and the Americas in the 19th century and has been
spreading through the world ever since. Liberal secularists may demand that the
state be secular and that it treat religions equally and neutrally, but these secular‑
ists must acknowledge that if one allows freedom of religious expression, religion
more often than not will play an important role in the democratic process. One
therefore needs to distinguish between the relative secularity of the state and
the relative secularity of society and to make clear how one defines that secular‑
ity. Modern states like England, Holland and the United States have all had their
own specific arrangements for guaranteeing a certain secularity of the state, but
these states have found their legitimation in societies in which religion plays an
important public role.To give one clear example: it can be safely said that the sep‑
aration of church and state in the United States is a response to a demand that
emerged not from secularists but from religious minorities that were persecuted
in England.Therefore, at least in this case, the secularity of the state is in fact a
religious demand.
76 religion and democracy in contemporary europe

I have argued in earlier work on religion and the nation‑state in 19th‑­

century England that the secular perception of the public sphere, as argued
by authors like Habermas, is a secularist prescription rather than a historical
description.1 In fact, one can easily discern the mobilization of religious groups
at the end of the 18th century on behalf of causes that are both religious and secu‑
lar, such as the modern missionary movements that protested against the East
India Company’s support of Hindu temples in India and the anti‑slavery move‑
ments that protested against England’s involvement in global slave trading and
the use of slave labour on plantations. These religious groups transformed the
public sphere and made the modern nation‑form of society possible. An impor‑
tant further development with the rise of the modern nation‑state in England is
the nationalization of religion. Religion becomes less a form of political identi‑
fication that pitches Protestants against Catholics than an element in unifying
the nation under God and in giving the state a moral purpose. In my view, this also
implies a major shift in the understanding of ‘religion’. Rather than being under‑
stood as ‘true religion’ against ‘false religion’, thus pitching all kinds of groups
against each other, religion emerges as an umbrella under which different per‑
suasions can be active without violent conflict. In the Netherlands, the formation
of this umbrella is called ‘pillarization’, a form of communal organization of soci‑
ety that has pacified the different religious and ideological communities and cre‑
ated a platform for negotiating political influence in the state. Obviously, France,
Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia have all had their own specific arrangements,
but the overall pattern of the nationalization of religion is very comparable.2
Religion was of crucial political importance in western Europe, at least
till World War II, and in countries like the Netherlands till the 1960s. It is not the
growth of religiosity but the new presence of a strong Islam in the midst of the
European nation‑states that is a political problem in Europe.This is less a prob‑
lem for secular democracy than for national and civilizational identity, and it
might be worthwhile to consider whether Islam has replaced Judaism as such a
problem in Europe.Today, manifestations of Islamic conservatism draw negative
attention in ways that manifestations of Jewish conservatism hardly do. Despite
the obvious differences between the histories of Muslims and of Jews in the west,
the ‘problem of Islam in Europe’ combines and sometimes conflates religion and
ethnicity in ways that remind one of earlier anti‑Semitic nationalism. Symbolic
of this shift is the newspeak about the Judeo‑Christian foundations of European
civilization, making Islam the outsider that Judaism was previously.
Europe has been globalizing and has been globalized over many centuries,
depending on which starting point one wants to take for which kind of globaliza‑
tion. A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York about Venice
 The religious origins of democracy 77

and the Islamic world includes a Qur’an printed in 16th‑century Venice, one of
the first in the world to be printed rather than handwritten, and portraits of the
Ottoman ruler Mehmed II by Bellini that closely resemble the artist’s portraits
of Venetian doges. This is the globalization of technology, art and trade, closely
connected to the globalization of religion. Religions like Christianity and Islam
are globalizing formations.They have spread through expansion and conversion
along trading routes and following military campaigns within Europe and beyond
it.This larger history of both competition and contact between Muslim and Chris‑
tian expansionists is certainly important and can be told in many ways that would
confound many recent depictions of Christian Europe as a bulwark against Islam.
All this would take us too far afield, however, and for our purposes it is sufficient
to look at the triad of religion–nation–empire. Although Spain and Portugal had
empires before the modern period, it is especially in England and France, as well
as in the Netherlands, that we see a simultaneous emergence of the nation‑state
(with the important role of religion) and empire. I will leave France aside for the
moment, because of the special relation of religion and anti‑clericalism in France.
In England and the Netherlands we see in the 19th century an emergence of a
religious concern for the heathens who come under imperial rule.This connects
with the civilizing mission of empire, although in an uneasy way, since the colonial
state always had to avoid being seen as a Christian state bent on converting the
colonized. Despite its neutrality, empire had to intervene in society, for the simple
reason that much of the empire had to be ruled by natives and thus the natives had
to be educated.Though in the British empire there is an early orientalist interest
in promoting native traditions of learning, this is soon replaced by modern educa‑
tion in literature and science, in an attempt to produce liberal ‘brown Englishmen’.
Besides such secular education, there is an enormous expansion of missionary
activity under the umbrella of empire that also focuses on education.Through the
effort to produce modern Christians by converting and educating the colonized
to both Christianity and modernity, the missionary societies had a lasting effect
on colonized societies. This effect is to be measured less in terms of converts
(relatively few in countries like India and Indonesia) than in terms of produc‑
ing modern forms of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc as counter‑movements to
Christianity. It is these so‑called revivalist, fundamentalist but basically modern‑
ist movements that one encounters everywhere in the colonial and post‑colonial
world. What we see as political religion in the post‑colonial world is then very
much a product of the imperial encounter.
It is often said that Islam in Britain, France and the Netherlands is a recent
phenomenon, but the historical overview above allows us to see that these west‑
ern European states had to deal with Muslim subjects during earlier phases of
78 religion and democracy in contemporary europe

globalization. With regard to France and Britain, one can easily perceive that
Muslim immigration is a case of ‘the Empire strikes back’, while in the Nether‑
lands Muslim immigration is primarily a case of 1960s labour immigration in a
recently developed welfare society. In the Netherlands, however, Muslims had
for a long time been the great majority of subjects of the Dutch crown, while
being denied citizenship. It is instructive to look at colonial policy that was, as
I mentioned above, geared to educating modern subjects who could eventually
become citizens. Liberals like John Stuart Mill and Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje
saw the colonized as children who were under the care of the state but should be
allowed their religious freedom as long as it did not lead to religious mobiliza‑
tion against the colonial state.This is not so different from a state today wanting
to educate Muslim and other immigrants in modern citizenship in order to make
them participants in the political process, while trying to prevent them from using
their religion as a basis of mobilization. Considering the historical role of religion
in these European nation‑states, however, such a demand is entirely ludicrous,
despite its similarity to the one made in the colonial state.
Another close similarity to the colonial state is the desire for a ‘respons­
ible’ leadership that can function as a broker between the state and the minority
group. In the Netherlands it can be amusing to see how much effort is put into
creating such a leadership. Because ethnic leadership is not readily available, the
state must often have recourse to religious leadership, such as imams, who are,
more often than not, too poorly educated to serve in that capacity. Despite the
negative advice of learned advisory committees, politicians in the Netherlands
now demand that these imams be educated in Dutch universities, as if they were
Protestant theologians. In this contradictory way, a religious leadership may be
created by the Dutch state that did not exist before and does not represent the
minority that the state wants to have represented. All of this reminds one very
much of colonial efforts to produce indirect rule, but one must also remember
that these appointed brokers are often swept aside by religious‑political move‑
ments that emerge from within the community. In the current form of the public
sphere, dominated as it is by the mass media, such movements often emerge in
response to a particular issue, such as wearing the headscarf, Muslim education
or (in ­Britain) the Salman Rushdie affair. In that sense, religious movements are
no ­different from other social movements. Political participation is declining
in most European democracies, and the participation of religious citizens is no
­different from that of others in this regard.
There is a contradiction in the secular European colonial and post‑colonial
state to the extent that secular neutrality does not coexist easily with modernizing
interventions.The liberal demand that the modern state guarantee freedom and
 The religious origins of democracy 79

equality, today including gender equality, raises the problem of creating secular
equality while guaranteeing the religious freedom of orthodox Jewish, Muslim,
Christian or Hindu communities. It is striking that in France the headscarf issue
is presented primarily as an issue of protecting gender equality; thus it becomes
a prime case of white men protecting brown women against their brown male
oppressors, as in colonial times. Indeed, the interventions of the state in modern‑
izing religious communities are constantly portrayed as emancipatory. It is to be
expected that issue politics will develop primarily around issues of emancipa‑
tion, especially gender and sexual emancipation. Secularization in the Nether‑
lands took place in the same period as the 1960s sexual liberation, and Islam is
seen ­primarily as a threat to the liberties gained in that period. Gay, lesbian and
feminist activists are all up in arms to defend these liberties against a religious
repression that reminds them of the Dutch past. Provocations like those concern‑
ingTheo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have played to this audience, and one may
wonder whether emancipation of minority women is really the issue here.3 There
seems to be a real pleasure in provocation and in showing off to an enthusias‑
tic audience one’s own radical liberty in contrast to the backwardness of Islam.
With regard to political participation in European societies, it is important to see
how that participation is framed in terms of secular and liberal demands, hardly
­allowing space for religious arguments and perspectives.
Another major issue concerning political participation of immigrants in
European societies is that of dual citizenship and dual loyalties. Like 19th‑century
Roman Catholics in Protestant countries such as England and Holland, Muslim
immigrants are suspected of not being loyal to the nation‑state in which they
have settled.Their first allegiance is to their religion, it is said, and this prevents
them from being fully loyal to the new nation. This suspicion is exacerbated by
the fact that states like Morocco do not allow their citizens to give up Moroccan
citizenship after emigrating. Morocco’s actions have nothing to do with religion
but rather with the need felt by such states to maintain control over the flow of
migrants’ money into the country. Remittances are of such crucial importance
to Morocco that the state does not want to relinquish control over the migrants
who send the money. In Holland there are two cabinet ministers, one of Moroc‑
can descent and the other ofTurkish descent, both of whom have a second pass‑
port in addition to their Dutch one, and this has recently led to a great political
outcry. But behind this suspicion, in my view, lies the constant doubt in modern
nation‑states whether those whose religion is not nationalized can be trusted.
Especially when ethnicity and Islam come together, we have fertile ground for
endless suspicion and fear.The fact of dual citizenship and secular doubts about
the loyalty of believers alert us to the new phase of globalization we have entered:
80 religion and democracy in contemporary europe

the creation of the network society, a kind of society in which national bound­aries
are transcended by social networks. These networks create identities that go
beyond the national and connect the local with the global.
In the current phase of globalization, religion continues to connect people
and societies over great distances that are now more readily bridged by various
new forms of communication. Islam, Christianity and other religions have devel‑
oped several new global missionary movements that reflect this phase of globali‑
zation.They can all be called evangelical movements, whether their form is Prot‑
estant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist.They are not aimed against
democracies, but they are anti‑secularist and sometimes truly anti‑liberal. The
Judeo‑Islamic‑Christian forms of religion, in particular, seem to share an agenda
that focuses on so‑called family values as an antidote to the corruptions of the
modern age. Many of these movements are either directly political, in the sense
that they mobilize voters for certain issues, or indirectly political, in that they urge
believers to distance themselves from the secular world and come into conflict
with the state over issues of education and gender. In this phase of globalization,
the nation‑state does not disappear but is transformed, weakened in some parts
and strengthened in others. In Europe, the rise of the European Union means the
emergence of transnational governance in crucial aspects of economic and social
politics.The globalization of what are felt to be national financial institutions and
industries also weakens national policy. But in other crucial domains, such as
immigration policies, the nation‑state is strengthened, thanks to an upsurge of
anti‑immigration sentiment throughout Europe. Though this sentiment is gener‑
ally expressed even today in democratic ways – notwithstanding the presence of
strong movements on the extreme right – it has created an atmosphere in which
immigrant minorities have become scapegoats for widespread anxieties about
globalization.
Historically, religious communities and movements have been important
in transforming the public sphere in modern Europe and thus in creating the con‑
ditions for democracy.The presence of Muslim communities is widely considered
to be a problem of integration in European societies. The presence in itself is
not a problem for democracy, but the xenophobic response to it might be, if the
right‑wing response gives rise to a new phase of racist dictatorship in Europe.
This seems, at present, a very remote possibility. The nature of the nation‑state
is changing with the rise of the network society. Because the nation‑state is still
important in a number of crucial areas of policy‑making, democracy need not nec‑
essarily decline in the current phase of globalization. Nationalism is certainly not
on its way out in Europe.
 The religious origins of democracy 81

1
Van der Veer, Peter, 2001. Imperial Encounters, 3
Van der Veer, Peter, 2006. ‘Pim Fortuyn,Theo
Princeton: Princeton University Press. van Gogh, and the politics of tolerance in the
2
Van der Veer, Peter and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), Netherlands’, in Public Culture, 18 (1): 111–25.
1999. Nation and Religion, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.