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The image of a moth circling a flame is virtually universal. Moths everywhere are drawn to the warmth and light of a flame, and moths everywhere risk an igniting fate similar to the mythical Greek Icarus who perished when flying too close to the sun. The moral here involves a cautionary paradox. The object is to fly near enough to the heat to receive its benefits without flying so near as to suffer its costs. The optimal course is difficult to calculate and maintain. Increasing benefits also entail increasing risks.
Religion offers a worldwide case in point. Like the moth, religion often ventures out of its safe orbit to experience the light and heat of a flame. When religion keeps its distance, it maintains purity at the risk of a precious but often irrelevant marginality; when religion approaches the flame, it experiences relevance at the risk of being consumed. Consider religion’s relation to politics. To many Western ears, the very phrase “religion and politics” means trouble. It is a volatile combination that suggests something is wrong. After all, religion involves otherworldly beliefs and rituals that need to be nurtured in their own sacred garden. Politics, on the other hand, involves all-too-worldly concerns pursued within a secular weed patch of compromise and corruption. Religion seems at its best when it is farthest from politics. Politics may appear to be at its best when it involves religion, but such appearances are treacherously deceiving. Surely the best relationship between these two realms is no relationship at all.
Or is it? As we shall see, there is truth in this view—a view that is part of the dual legacy of Protestant Christianity and the American “separation of church and state.” But in other ways, this perspective confuses two distinctions and draws the wrong line in the wrong sand. There is a critical distinction between religion’s relationship to politics and religion’s relationship to the state. Politics involves processes of power seeking and policy shaping; states involve governing structures that generally derive from some form of charter or constitution. One without the other is rare. Politics without states can amount to an anarchic free-forall; states without politics are the dictatorial regimes of despots and oligarchies.
John F. Kennedy’s campaign in 1960 for the U.S. presidency illustrates religion’s different relation to each. As a Roman Catholic, Kennedy revived old concerns among Protestants that a Catholic president would be a stalking horse for the Pope, who would soon take over the U.S. government and make it a Vatican stable. Kennedy’s appearance before a group of largely Baptist clergy in Houston, Texas, was a critical turning point in his presidential campaign. Basically, he affirmed religion in politics but attacked religion in the state by noting the difference between a Catholic politician and a Catholic president. The former could certainly pursue his private convictions, Catholic or otherwise, but the latter is sworn to uphold and work within the laws of the land and especially its constitutional framework.
The Baptists nodded approvingly as members of a denomination that had been an early advocate of separating church and state in seventeenthcentury Rhode Island. By now the distinction is commonly acknowledged, if not always implemented. But cleaving religion from politics is a very different matter. Separating religion from the state is both possible and desirable; separating religion from politics is frequently neither possible nor desirable.
Clergy and other religious officials often address such religiously sensitive political issues as conscientious objector status in the military, nuclear disarmament, abortion, contraception, capital punishment, gay and lesbian rights, family values, and questions of poverty and inequality. But they know and generally accept that, even if their positions resonate, they must work within a state structure where some things may be changed by law but others must endure because they involve basic constitutional rights protected by the courts. Such rights generally include some version of the freedom of—and possibly from—religion. It is true that not all religion is socially engulfed. Some forms offer meaning and belonging to individuals and to small communities of adherents that do not require political involvement and where retreat into a private sanctum is in order. Some religious groups take such extreme positions in avoiding wider social entanglements that these become political positions in their own right when they involve, for example, aberrant patterns of communal living, home schooling, or preventing their severely ill children from receiving standard medical care. What attracts religion to the political arena? The answer is similar to the infamous Willy Sutton’s explanation of why he robbed banks:
“Because that’s where the money is.” From a religious perspective, politics is where a good deal of the moral and ethical payoff resides. If some religion is privatized and inward looking and other religion is in aggressive and aloof retreat from its surrounding community, clearly there is another, more socially active pattern. Most religions have a social agenda not only for themselves and their members but for the society around them. Many religions define their very rationale in the mission to confront sin and sloth in the world beyond their sanctuaries.
It is by virtue of this impulse that religion is implicated in both the best of times and the worst of times. Religious conflict may be a low point for the surrounding society but a high point for the religions themselves. Any religion’s vision of a better world or world to come may be as chilling to the unconverted as it is uplifting to the faithful. The more zealous the vision, the more alienating its potential. Passionate convictions are always jealous masters. As militant, even terrorist, movements around the world attest, the strength of one’s own commitments is often measured by one’s intolerance of others’ commitments.
A religion without a crisis can be a religion with a crisis. Religions must be wary of easy routinization and “lazy monopolies.” Lassitude is an archenemy of faith, and there is nothing like a crisis to supply the requisite fire. The sense of a looming threat helps to mobilize the faithful and concentrate resources. Just as incumbent politicians are sometimes accused of war mongering for the sake of reelection, so are religious leaders sometimes thought of as hypersensitive to evil and moral decline. Even when crises are real and disabling in the short run, they can lead the resulting remnants to new opportunities and new fulfillments. Here religious prophets are the great exemplars, and in the pages to follow, we shall meet many around the world who resemble the Americans Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Religious movements in American politics range from the Christian Coalition of evangelical Protestantism to the Catholic bishops’ stance on behalf of a “consistent ethic” that favors life when threatened by nuclear weapons, capital punishment, poverty, or abortion. Nor are these exclusively the work of entrepreneurial activists. Such movements reach deep into the churches and temples of America to mobilize both direct and indirect support among the faithful.
But like the moth, religion increases both its possible gains and possible losses by approaching the political flame too closely. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X represent the most tragic outcome shared by many others around the world, including Catholic proponents of Liberation Theology in Latin America, Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the violence in Northern Ireland, Muslim clerics and activists from Nigeria to Indonesia, Sikh devotees in India, and leaders of unofficial “house” churches in China, to name but a few.
There are also losses short of death. The cultural power of religion in deploying moral suasion can win dramatic victories against overwhelming odds, as illustrated by King and the nonviolent civil rights movement in the U.S. South during the 1960s. But over the long haul, the political establishment’s greater access to money, media control, and coercion takes its toll. Religion may experience both direct and indirect losses. The direct losses of legislative inaction or government suppression are painfully obvious, and fighting uphill political battles can be momentarily exciting but ultimately draining for any religious group or movement. In the United States, this is well illustrated by both the conservative Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition on the right and by the liberal National Council of Churches on the left.
Indirect losses may be more severe. Religion in politics can sometimes not only turn apparent defeat into a martyr’s victory but turn apparent victory into a co-opted defeat. When any religion is welcomed into the halls of power, assured that it is “preaching to the converted,” and given a well-upholstered seat at the right hand of power, there are almost inevitable problems ahead. This is the road to apathy, laxity, and the universal threat to religion that comes in the form of complacency. I shall examine several countries that are officially religious—whether Christian, Islamic, or Buddhist. But if the designation suggests a religious state, the reality is more often a state religion. With few exceptions, the powers of national governments far outstrip the powers of religious bodies. States frequently align themselves with religion in order to control it. They even provide funds for religion as long as it conforms to state rules and regulations.
For many religions, politics offers alluring bait, but state establishment represents a barbed hook. In fact, establishment status confers only marginal advantages on those religious majorities most likely to gain such standing. In yet another irony of religion’s relation to power, establishment may be more of a problem than a triumph for both religion and the state. In country after country, a religion’s capital is often most effective when it is not a capital religion. This is nowhere more apparent than in the United States, where the First Amendment’s prohibition of the state establishment of religion leveled the playing field for a highly competitive form of denominational vitality as the state by and large stayed out of the contest.