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The Journal of Politics, 2014
Religiosity is often seen as a prime mover of American public opinion. In Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Will Herberg spoke of "tripartite" religious traditions as the cause of political dynamics. More recent scholarship has broadened the concept of religiosity to distinguish tradition from the specific features of one's religious beliefs, the dynamics of one's religious behaviors, and a believer's sense of belonging to a particular faith or religious movementan approach commonly called the "3 B's" (see Geoffrey Layman, The Great Divide). Paul A. Djupe and Brian R. Calfano's God Talk: Experimenting with the Religious Causes of Public Opinion is, quite ambitiously, a critique of this entire approach to religion and politics scholarship. Religiously motivated public opinion dynamics often arise, change, and recede faster than do individuals' beliefs, behaviors, and belonging. This premise in place, the authors submit that it is necessary to rethink the nature of religion itselffrom viewing it as a rather static dispositional feature (individual and attitudinal) to a more dynamic understanding of religion as a communication source, accounting for the extent to which individuals are exposed to messages with religious cues, and the extent to which individuals adopt said messages. As such, God Talk involves using fairly common theoretic approaches to understanding political communication (see e.g., John Zaller. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion) in a subfield where political communication has been somewhat neglected. According to Djupe and Calfano, this theoretical omission has largely been the product of methodological limitations. Religion and politics
Philosophy in the Public Square Tone deafness in the Age of Religious Activism
Philosophy in the Public Square: Tone-deafness in the Age of Religious Activism Despite the fact that modern, secular nation-states reluctantly accept the role of theology in the public square, movements for social good continue to draw from religious traditions that draw large crowds and inspire people deeply. Religious figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Thich Nhat Hanh were deeply at odds with the state in their protest of state-sanctioned injustice and in the fact that their metaphysical convictions held them to a standard outside the purview of the state. In the case of these activists, we see American secularism accepts the identification with and outward expression of religion in a personal manner and theoretically protects it by law, however the state has 1 repeatedly used force against non-violent and and alternative epistemologies. Societies that purport a lack of religious preference do not stop seeking answers to questions about metaphysical reality, such as the reflection on and distinction of good and evil, nor do they entirely abandon coercive social structures familiar to the history of the world's religions. I assert that the modern secular nation-state has in this way adopted Western philosophy as its ideological basis, believing it to be a satisfactory mid-point between "religions" and a truly unifying endeavor to access common humanity. I will argue that this choice of philosophy is in fact a disservice to and an effective prevention of authentic religious activism. One striking example of the limits and flaws of philosophy as a universal framework for religious activism in the public square is Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope . Lear's question about the death of culture and civilization, the loss of a way of categorizing, understanding, and making meaning of the 1 Interestingly, notions of secularism, as freedom from religious preference or freedom from religion entirely, are based on a nearly unspoken definition of religion. Religion usually entails theology in the form of systematic convictions about metaphysical realities and their resulting ideological frameworks, sacred semi-historical mythologies often recorded in authoritative books, bounded communities of relatively like-minded individuals led by charismatic experts, and distinguishing and symbolic physical manifestations of adherence.
Advance Access publication January 11, 2006 ARTICLE Theology in Modernity’s Wake
2016
When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gen-der, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. —Stanley Fish (2005) AS A CONSTRUCTIVE FEMINIST THEOLOGIAN whose work focuses on “the triumvirate ” and draws on “high theory ” including that of Jacques Derrida, this comment from Stanley Fish in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye. I position my comments against that backdrop. We are said to have arrived at the end of moder-nity, a turn of the cosmic clock supposedly marked by such milestones as the death of the subject, the demise of metanarratives, and the loss of con-fidence in reason. Jacques Derrida, among other continental thinkers, is often touted as a harbinger of “postmodernity, ” one mark of which is (ironically, perhaps, given the supposed demise of metanarratives) pur-portedly the return of the religious. ...
The Enlightenment In Contemporary Cultural Debate
Religion, Politics and Law
Everywhere in the world there seems to be a new orientation on religion as an important political factor. "Whoever misunderstands religion, does not understand politics", is the title of a book by German authors also to be found among the contributors to the present volume 0#0 Religion, Po/ilia and Law.1 In the United States of America the secular tradition lies under siege by the so-called 'theocons', scholars and intellectuals who favour a breach with the secular roots of the American Constitution. 2 No less indicative is the upsurge in the Islamic•world of countless move• ments that claim political significance, some of them with a violent character, others more peacefully. 3 It is not very surprising that under those circumstances there is also renewed interest in the tradition that is well known for its secular orientation: 4 the Enlightenment. Recent decades have seen renewed debate on the Enlightenment. 5 Important books, by scholars such as Peter Gay,
bepress Legal Series, 2006
their attitudes toward religion. More specifically, they are distinguished by the role that religion plays or does not play in the grounding of their public approach to defending liberalism. I do not propose to trace the views of individual liberals. The families I describe are more like ideal types, and they are not exhaustive. At least, they serve to illustrate that liberal views are compatible with a range of attitudes toward religion. A. The Five Families Described With respect to religion, liberalisms might be hostile, indifferent, mixed, cooperative, or favorable. Hostile or anti-religious liberalism is sometimes hostile to religion generally or to supernaturalism; it is generally hostile to organized religion. Indeed, it tends to define itself against religion. It proceeds from the view that institutional religion has a disreputable record of oppression, persecution, and violence. Hostile religion most readily finds a home in themes that found vigorous expression in the French Enlightenment. 19 The Enlightenment arose from an antipathy to what it perceived to be blind adherence to authority, tradition, custom, habit, and faith. 20 It valorized reason, independent thought, autonomy, and scientific method. 21 Representatives of this strand of liberalism might be Voltaire, 22 John Dewey, 23 Alan Ryan, 24 and 19 "Liberalism is par excellence the doctrine of the Enlightenment. Brian Barry, How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions, 20 B.J.POL.S. 1, 2 (1990). On the hostility of much of the Enlightenment to religion, the subtitle of Peter Gay's classic tells it all, PETER GAY, THE ENLIGHTENMENT: AN INTERPRETATION, THE RISE OF MODERN PAGANISM (1966). See also id. at xi: The philosophes' rebellion was a "paganism directed against their Christian inheritance and dependent upon the paganism of classical antiquity, but it was also a modern paganism, emancipated from classical thought as from Christian dogma." 20 Suzanna Sherry, The Sleep of Reason, 84 GEO. L.J. 453, 456 (1996)("The lasting accomplishment of the Enlightenment, then, was its development of an epistemological method. That method was a repudiation of the 'millennium of superstition, other worldliness, mysticism, and dogma know as the Middle, or Dark, Ages.'"), quoting RALPH KETCHAM, FRAMED FOR POSTERITY: THE ENDURING PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONSTITUTION 21 (1993). 21 "A. .. notable aspect of the Enlightenment thought is the emergence of a scientific way of thinking. .. ." JAMES M. BYRNE, RELIGION AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 10 (1996). 22 Voltaire's "secular philosophy was a formidable, almost irresistible rival of Christianity." PETER GAY, THE PARTY OF HUMANITY 5 (1964). For Voltaire, the "church was the implacable enemy of progress, decency, humanity, and rationality." Id.at 44. See Byrne, supra note 21, at 2 (Voltaire's criticism of Christianity and the church weakened the power of religion in French cultural life). On the other hand, Voltaire thought that it might be a good thing for the masses to remain religious despite his contempt for the religion they held. FRANK E. MANUEL, THE CHANGING OF THE GODS 66 (Hanover: Brown University Press, 1983). 23 Dewey did not object to God talk, but he rejected any concept of the supernatural. ALAN RYAN, JOHN DEWEY AND THE HIGH TIDE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM 273 (1995).