The Difficulty with Differences: Trying to Understand Religion

JOHN: I feel like I may have been a little harsh in calling Muslims "Medieval-like religious fanatics" but it does seem like societies with strong religious cultures are lagging in the process of secularization. The western world has advanced farther than the non-western world. I agree with Peter Berger's idea that the world has been advancing toward less religion. He says that the seed of "disenchantment" (113) with religion was planted with the conventional morality and permeation of "non-sacred" (115) objects in the Old Testament and blossomed with the advent of Protestantism which "divested itself [of] mystery, miracle, and magic." (111) Secularism cannot be fought because the world today is increasingly scientific and the human mind yearns ever more for fact and truth over mystique and religion. Berger explains the inevitability of the triumph of secularism when he says that "the religious legitimacies of the world have lost their plausibility...for broad masses of entire societies." (124)

When I look at the conflicts in the Middle East, I see it as a conflict between the religious and the secular forms of governing. In this modern age of increased equality and technological advancement, religious leaders as heads of government seem backwards and not beneficial to the people they lead. How can a government be tolerant if it is dominated by the beliefs of one religion?

JANE: I think this is a mistaken way of looking at things. Rodney Stark shows that at the micro level, degrees of religiousness have failed to change overtime despite modernization. Even in the age of "mystery, miracle, and magic" there was widespread disbelief in God and religion. Today, even in the western world, religion is far from absent at the personal level. Over forty percent of "prominent scientists" believe in a "God to whom [they] can pray in expectation of receiving an answer." (Stark, 57) Any perception of a decline in religious inclination over the recent centuries is due solely to an increased tolerance in the western world of the omnipresent dissenters.

JOHN: That is enough. It doesn't matter if the private sphere of religion has not changed. Secularization pertains to the public sphere and the public sphere of the western world is both more secular and more accepting of different religions.

JANE: Where do you think this tolerance came from? The western world evolved in a bloody, intolerant manner that manipulated religion as a tool for division and the benefit of the ruling class. If you did your reading last week, you would notice that in Anthony Marx' Faith in Nation, the evolution of a secular tradition was outlined as a history of the nation-state. Religious hatred was used as a tool to gain power in Spain, France, Germany and elsewhere.

Bobby Sayyid said that religion is just an identity that people have that doesn't have much meaning in terms of political power or social conflict until it is manipulated for purposes of divisiveness. Nation-states are formed by the creation and exclusion of "the other." (Marx, 21) In France, the Huguenots were identified as different and ultimately expelled. This intolerance created tolerance within the remaining non-Huguenot French and allowed them to form a nationalist unity. After the Huguenots were expelled, the King's motives were explained by: "diversity of belief, cult, or ceremony divides [the King's] subjects and causes them reciprocally to hate and despise one another." (Marx, 152).

It was only after this slow period of using division and institutional racism as a political tool for unity that nationalism led to western societies so internally homogenous that they could afford to be internally democratic and tolerant and could afford to end the practice of religious rule. This progression to secularization is not inevitable, as shown by the limited occurrence of secularization in the world and the long period of religious discrimination necessary for the west to shed disunity.

JOHN: I actually did read Faith in Nation. What Marx glosses over is the fact that this secular ideal was not a goal of the nation-states. There was no role model for a secular society. While it is sad that the era of religious exclusion had to occur before an era of secularism could arise, it is not an appropriate example for today. Today there is a secular ideal that can be fulfilled by secularization. With a goal in mind, we can learn from the mistakes of the past.

Christian Smith has provided a way to stimulate secularization. He says that secularization is "an intentional political struggle by secularizing activists to overthrow a religious establishment's control over socially legitimate knowledge" (1) and "the boom and incorporation of industrial capitalism" (15) assisted actors in the secular revolution. If the intellectuals of the early twentieth century could create a revolution of macro-level secularization based on modernizing tools of industry and science then there should be a way to help the countries that use antiquated notions of religious governance advance move past that harmful stage. Understanding that the secular west's past was built on religious intolerance should make us try harder to end the current religious intolerance that occurs across the world.

JANE: That is a common misunderstanding. Just because a nation is not secular does not mean that it is not tolerant. Mark Jeurgensmeyer's concept of a "Double Shar'ia shows that there is a way to make a religion's rules structured into the legal system and still allow its citizens to choose not to follow the rules of the religion. For example, a Muslim country could structure time in the school day for prayers but be tolerant of non-Muslims by not requiring prayer.

Being secular has no arbitrary benefit over being religious. Mark Jeurgensmeyer said that "the secular state has not
Tolerance is a relative term. The necessity of the west to define itself by what it is not has created a conflict between the so-called tolerant, secular west and the so-called intolerant, religious extremist east. The secular west lambastes the non-western (specifically Muslim) world for failing to be secular and tolerant. The hypocrisy is that while the West depicts "the other" as the intolerant nation-state, it is being intolerant itself.

JOHN: I understand your points that the west has not always exercised tolerance towards those who practice religious nationalism and that in the past the west may not have fulfilled promises of modernization. However, I also think that we need to move forward and try to help the world become more secular.

JANE: What you don't understand is that secularism has many characteristics of a western religion. To many in the Islamic world, Bobby Sayyid would say, secularism seems like a western, Christian project to advance ideas of colonial interest. It is not by accident that secularism shares many of the values of western Protestantism.

Religious nation-states are still open to the tools of technology and modernization. However, historical misleading and wronging have disillusioned religious nation-states of using the tools of western thought and secularism to accomplish growth.

JOHN: Shouldn't there be a way to convince them to let us help them. It is ultimately for their own good.

JANE: Secularism and religion are largely balancing forces. When a society turns too far towards religious extremism, a counterweight activates to try to bring it back towards a middle ground. You can see that in Iran today with the resistance to Ahmadinejad. When a society turns away from religion, there is a movement to reinstitute religion. This happened in the United States with the rise of the religious right. There really aren't any wholly religious or wholly secular societies (no pun intended).

JOHN: Well, Jane I am getting bored of arguing and I don't have anymore rebuttals to your smooth, cold logic. Let us agree to disagree.

Works Cited

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion. New York. 1990 © 1967.

Jeurgensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War? University of California, Berkeley. © 1993.

Marx, Anthony W. Faith in Nation. Oxford University Press. New York. © 2003.

Qutb, Sayyid. Fi al-tarikh: fikra wa minhaj 1974: 101.

Sayyid, Bobby. Sign O' Times: Kaffirs and Infidels Fighting the Ninth Crusade.The Making of Political Identities.

Smith, Christian. Secular Revolution. University of California, Berkeley. © 2003.

Stark, Rodney. Secularization, R.I.P. Olson and Swatos. The Secularization Debate. Lanham, Maryland. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. © 2000. pp. 43-66

Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Decline of American Power. The New Press: © (2003: 100-23)