Why the West gets religion wrong | July 18, 2005

7-08-2005

Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst
International Herald Tribune

London It is hard to overstate the importance of religion in the contemporary world, yet its role remains underexplored and little understood. Western elites are perplexed by religion and the beliefs and practices that it can engender. But before Marx, almost all socialism was Christian. Equally, all those on the right were Christian monarchists who saw the defense of established religion as a key political task.

All of this changed far more recently than is supposed. It was in the 1960s that the idea of a secular Europe really emerged. And it is the mutual incomprehension and hostility of politics since the '60s that continues to prevent a true grasp of the importance of religion. Secular liberals regard religion as repressive, irrational and fundamentalist. Religious conservatives view liberal secularity as immoral, self-serving and nihilistic. Both are right about each other, but wrong about religion.

Contemporary secular liberalism is bankrupt. Historically, liberalism drew its strength from a critique of divinely sanctioned absolute monarchs and authoritarian rule. As such, liberalism had republican values and communal aims. But in overcoming absolute sovereignty, liberalism internalized it, reproducing not mutual citizens but self-sufficient subjects. This process reached its zenith in the 1960s, when genuine political transformation was aborted in favor of the subjective desires of pleasure-seeking adults.

The left that emerged from this generation eschewed a genuine public morality in the name of personal choice and private gratification. At great political cost, it handed over to the right the language of formation, values and religion. Unable to craft for itself a new form of civic collectivity, secular liberalism remains mired in individualism and blind to cultures built around universal ideals and collective aspirations.

Contemporary religious conservatism is more mobilizing yet no less exclusive. Politically, conservatism originated from a critique of liberal relativism. In its stead, conservatism sought to provide a public morality. But in challenging secular permissiveness, conservatives promoted conformity with the dominant class. Rather than uniting the citizenry around a common project, this led to the elevation of one group at the expense of all others. In consequence, the right surrendered to the left the ideal of a communal solidarity involving all sectors of society.

Additionally, in a fanatical overreaction to the atomization of liberal society, American conservatives embraced a new Christian fundamentalism that promised its followers an eternal community - composed only of themselves.

Only this sort of self-righteousness can explain why, as Robert Kagan writes, "It was always so easy for so many Americans to believe, as so many still believe today, that by advancing their own interests they advance the interests of humanity." In this manner, the neocons repeat the very fundamentalist vision of their enemies in Al Qaeda who want to build a new Caliphate from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

What unites both liberals and conservatives is their mutual insistence on the exclusivity and absoluteness of their vision. In this both sides are composed of fundamentalists who mistake their subjective beliefs for the only objective truth.

But true religion is not and cannot be fundamentalist. No true follower of monotheism can claim to know the mind and will of God. Judaism is marked by the struggle to interpret the righteousness that is demanded by God. Similarly, Jesus was never fully understood by his disciples nor was he even recognized by them after his resurrection. And in Islam, a fatwa used to be a nonbinding wisdom judgment of elders limited by the greater wisdom and judgment of God. It only became a lethal injunction when Muslims started to copy Napoleonic models of authority and legitimization.

Equally, religion is not and cannot be relativist. No genuine belief in God is just a matter of personal taste or subjective opinion. True religion has always been public and political because it is about forming communities around shared values and the practices that embody them. In the West, privatizing religion initiated the abandoning of any collective public realm that expressed common substantive ideals. We should not then be surprised when Iran and other countries do not wish to follow us down this path.

(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)