FROM POLITICIZED RELIGION TO SPIRITUALIZED POLITICS IN ASIA AND ISLAM
Religion and Politics in the Nation-State
In the modern West, many people believe that the separation of religion and politics has been an unambigous social benefit. They contrast this ideal situation that prevails in the West with the unfortunate state of affairs that prevails in many predominantly Muslim societies where religion and politics have been mixed to the detriment of both. But this distinction between the secular West and the religion-dominated Muslim world is not valid. It covers up a more important difference: the fact that in the modern nation-state, it is the government and not religion that has ultimate authority over the public sphere. This is the case everywhere in the modern world, not just in the West but also in the Islamic nations, India, China, Russia, and Japan. And the consequences have been significant losses as well as valuable gains.
In her magnum opus We God’s People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations (2021), the political scientist Jocelyne Cesari has argued that in modern times there has been an important shift in the relation between politics and religion. Religion was central to identity in premodern times, whereas, in the modern age, politics and religion occupy separate domains. This separation of religion and politics is attributed to the rise of modern science, the individual, and the nation state as new centers of authority, weakening the social and political power of religious leaders. For Cesari, all religions are basically incompatible with the ideas embodied in the nation-state that human beings are intrinsically equal and that the sovereign power to govern ultimately belongs to the people.
In Europe, after the wars of religion and the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, a new political order based on the nation-state was put in place. In the modern age, the state governs the political dimension and regulates public life while religion’s authority is over the transcendent realm and personal beliefs. By tracing changing concepts of religion within history, Cesari shows that claims of a single and unified religious tradition that has existed since the founding of the religion cannot be justified.
Cesari has been led by her compartive study of religion and politics to assert that “the division between religious and political community is the ideological foundation of modernity because this division is entrenched within the national state.” She emphasizes that this division is not fixed and static even in Europe and the United States where modernity appears to be most solidly established. Religious nationalists in the US are trying to bring about a Christian nation by giving back to religion its once dominant social role in which it provided the collective meanings of political sovereignty, law, and morality.
Modern Religion in “Eastern” Civilizations
Western colonialism in the Muslim world was accompanied by the penetration of the nation-state and the increasing spread of political control over collective life. Making religion part of the state increased government control over the people. In predominantly Muslim countries, this has meant establishing Islam as the national religion at the expense of minority religions.
When religion has greater independence from the state, civil society tends to be more inclusive and pluralist. Cesari gives the example of predominantly Muslim Senegal which has less state control of religion coupled with a religiously plural society. But when the state draws and controls the boundary between the public sphere of politics and the private one of religion, it tends to increase its own dominance over religion, taking power away from religious officials in the name of secularization.
Cesari sees Islamism as operating within the secular nation-state paradigm rather than opposing it. “Islamists are not contesting the link between religious and national belonging given to them by the secular nation-builders. Instead, Islamists are trying to strengthen that link by expanding the prescription of Islam, to moralize the public square.” Islamists and some evangelical Christians appear to have similar goals of remaking the public sphere in their own image, carrying out the communal obligation mandated by their religion.
The overall patterns that Cesari uncovers in the three monotheistic religions are similar to those that she finds with some variations in the historical development of Chinese and Indian religions. In premodern China, the three major religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism were encouraged to codify their beliefs, making it easier for them to be regulated by the emperor. Yet there was little interference from the imperial regime in local religious affairs, and most people belonged to all three religions. Their main allegiance was to their local communities of worship which provided important public service, organized festivals, managed social order, and resolved conflicts.
In modern times, though, Chinese religious belief became more strictly organized by the state, weakening people’s local identifications and their flexible approach to religion. As nationalism and communism came to dominate the political sphere, the state became the means for reaching the religious goal of achieving perfection in this world while asserting control over religious institutions, organizations, and ideas. Religion is now tolerated only if it allows its public role to be heavily regulated; members must give full allegiance to the state, not God.
In the case of Indian religions, an older, more popular strand can be distinguished from an intellectual and philosophical one descending from the Upanishads, the first systematic work of Indian religious thought. The older tradition is based on sacrifice and the worship of many gods, customs that have continued in temples and households until the present day. On the other hand, the philosophical tradition emphasizes the unity of God and the pervasiveness of the divine consciousness in the universe. The popular tradition was based on caste distinctions within a rigid and hierarchical social order determined by birth. Yet, despite extreme status inequality, there was a tolerant acceptance of the various religions and sects. With the coming of Muslim rule, however, doctrine and belief started playing a more prominent role; the Hindu upper classes, losing political power, asserted their difference from Muslims.
In early colonial times, the westernized elite defined Hinduism as a single and unified monotheist religion, showing the influence of British Protestant thought. British rule also led to diminished loyalty to local areas and plural faiths and greater identification with Hinduism, defined as belief in one God. As the national identity developed, it was viewed as both Hindu and secular, clashing with local allegiances to a more inclusive idea of religion and an identity based on class and culture as well as religious belonging. This reshaping of local perceptions and attitudes brought about by the nation-state helps explain the increase in communal tensions and the rise of Hindu nationalism, whose political arm, the BJP has used victories in local and national elections to advance its exclusionary cultural and political agenda.
Japan, not treated in Cesari’s comparative study, has provided a variation on the same theme. In the modern world of the nation-state imported from the West under duress, ordinary Japanese enlarged their loyalties from the household and local region to the entire nation, viewed as one large family headed by the divine emperor. They adopted the national ideology of Japanese imperialism and the bushido code, the way of the samurai. After the defeat in World War II, this allegiance was transferred to democratic ideals. But the old face-to-face relations of the village survived in the Japanese company system and continued to be an important source of power. Successful politicians have often relied on personal connections with Japanese groups and patronage networks for electoral success.
Religious identity, although connected with national belonging in ultranationalist times through government propaganda, has played a minor role as a key to national identity since the end of the war. In the 1970s, it was sometimes said by Japanese that the religion of Japan is being Japanese, which has a certain ring of truth. There is neither the close monitoring of religious groups found in China nor the ongoing negotiations between the government and the dominant religion that affect the political outcome in Islamic and Hindu societies. Reactionary modernism has also surfaced in Japan in the form of rightwing nationalism, spearheaded by the late Shinzo Abe. Still, face-to-face relations have remained important in the countryside; village cooperation after the tsunami and nuclear power crisis of 2011 attracted world attention.
Religion in Transition
In prewar days, the Kyoto School promoted Japanese Buddhism as a universally valid form of religious teachings and practice. They hoped to influence the Japanese government to champion spiritual ideals in opposition to Western materialist ones. Yet, Japan built an East Asian empire that resembled Western ones. These philosophers were coopted by a reactionary modernist government, just as the lineages of Gandhi and Vivekananda are being claimed by Modi for his Hindu nationalist projects.
Since the 1970s, anti-Western forces in the Islamic world have often pursued political goals that lack grounding in spiritual and moral awareness. The resistance of the Iranian government, Hamas, and Hezbollah to Western hegemony is often justified by ideas taken from the West’s own critical intellectuals such as the Frankfurt School. They accuse the West of misusing and distorting the original Enlightenment by spreading colonialism in the name of reason, a valid point.
Mao Zedong’s antimodern propensities led him to experiment with localization and radically democratic approaches that had promise if implemented gradually. But the need to govern a vast modern state based on communist ideology left little room to nurture inner growth; instead, social change was imposed from above and the imperatives of the modern state eventually resulted in bureaucratic dominance. Under Xi Jinping, there have been critiques of Western liberalism similar to those made by Islamists; moreover, the closing down of intellectual debate has made the society more rigid and controlled as most of the positive energy of the revolution has dissipated, nationalism replacing communism as China’s guiding ideology. Will mainland Confucianism eventually become a civil religion and move in a reactionary modernist direction?
In China and India, where relative power is increasing along with national wealth, the impulse has been to continue the pursuit of economic and military power, regardless of the dangers ahead. As Prasenjit Duara has shown in The Global Crisis of Modernity (2015), those mobilizing for change are mostly environmentalists in urban centers and the rural and indigenous peoples whose lives are threatened by runaway development. The latter are often still rooted in the land and embedded in the natural world, whereas environmentalists are moving beyond anthropocentrism toward a more intimate connection with nature. The retreat from national identity toward local belonging on the one hand and planetary citizenship on the other is already visible as these two movements converge, a process more advanced in India than China.
Eastern modernists once promoted imitation of the West as the path to national strength but this is no longer the case. The diasporan Confucian scholar Tu Weiming sees the Enlightenment mentality as bringing considerable benefits to East Asia such as material progress and the liberal outlook but it has also downgraded ultimate concerns, family and community relations, and the natural world to the detriment of its people. Japan, the most modern society, although experiencing a malaise in its urban environments, possesses communal values and aesthetic sensibilities, spiritual traditions, and subtle perceptual and emotional capacities that are seeds of renewal. The transformation of the Kyoto school from an ambivalent relation with ultranationalism to a truly universal and nonviolent outlook in the postwar decades shows how the accounts of Japan’s traumatic encounter with Western imperialism can be settled.
The critique of modern Western civilization and the need for new forms of thought and imagination, social institutions and political economies was given its sharpest expression in the philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi and Muhammad Iqbal. Both exposed liberalism’s lack of spiritual and moral foundations that can nourish the deepest human aspirations. But alternative versions of modernity have not overcome the basic limitations of the modern quest. Far too often, the result has been a form of reactionary modernism in which the martial virtues of the past, authoritarian government, and politicized religion have formed an unholy alliance. Loyal adherence to doctrines and protocols plus obedience to rigid rules of conduct must give way to a focus on inner development and wisdom based on spiritual experience. The esoteric teachings and practices within Sufism and Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism offer a meaningful life course that is becoming increasingly attractive.
Premodern Islamic and Chinese civilizations are being reevaluated as well. These civilizations, while far from perfect, did not fall short of the modern Western one in terms of overall quality of life, in spite of lower levels of economic surplus in basically agrarian societies.
In the Islamic world, there was a rough balance between the individual and the collective, local independence and civilizational directives, and the religious scholars and merchants and the military rulers. A dynamic public realm was fed by Sufi esoteric teachings and regulated by the flexible application of sharia law. In modern times, Muhammad Iqbal has restored the luster of Islamic thought, and Ali Allawi in The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009)and Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Science and Civilization in Islam (1968) have described what a renewed Islamic civilization might look like. Nasr has also pursued Christian-Islamic interfaith dialogue and commented on the lack of an esoteric dimension in Christianity. This latter point is very important because the esoteric teachings of Sufism are comparable to those of Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist forms of religion as sources of spiritual renewal.
Cesari, too, has reexamined premodern Islamic civilization, asserting that Muslim women fared better under sharia law then than they do today. Before the coming of the modern nation-state, they had a significant level of personal freedom and there was greater variation in legal systems at the local level. But nation-states in Muslim-majority countries robbed sharia law of its flexibility by defining it as state law, making it more rigid and intolerant. She makes a similar argument concerning secularization, which has produced greater identification with religion in an exclusive manner and led to the marginalization of minority religions.
Losses and Gains from Nation-State Dominance
The central insight that emerges from Cesari’s comparative study of religious and political ideas and institutions in different national settings is that local understandings of religion in non-Western countries were transformed in order to support nationalism. These religions were redefined, legitimizing the new national communities that arose in the modern world under the pressures of Western imperialism. The distinction between religious and political domains that accompanied the nation-state is often viewed as an advance since it was a key element of secularization. In the West, this trend was an outgrowth of modern enlightenment which broke the political power of religious institutions.
But Cesari’s work shows that, in the Eastern civilizations, there were great losses as well as gains. For example, in the Islamic world the balance that had previously existed between centralized political control and local autonomy was disrupted. The humanizing influence of religious and ethical values upon the conduct of rulers was lost. Instead, the nation and its imperatives led to the subordination of religion. As a result, moral considerations were no longer relevant to the carrying out of economic and political activities.
Premodern China had impressive achievements in metaphysics and political thought. The three religions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism came together to produce a rich social whole in Neo-Confucian philosophy. The Confucian focus was on ritual, ethical action, and harmonious social relations, Buddhism’s forte was inner spiritual development, and Daoism maintained a close connection with the natural world, encouraging a simple, unfettered, and unencumbered existence. And with varying success, Confucian scholars attempted to humanize the social and political order under dynastic authority. The contemporary scholar Tu Weiming takes the core of Neo-Confucian philosophy, self-cultivation, as the basis for a humanistic social philosophy relevant to our time.
The unitary idea of the Self was a great Indian discovery, the Self being viewed as consciousness or pure awareness, the origin of the material world. A contemporary Indian achievement has been the excavation of the postcolonial experience and an honest confrontation with the ambivalent attitudes it has spawned. Postcolonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak have pointed to ways of healing the old wounds, and Deepak Chakrabarty has pioneered our understanding of the Anthropocene in the light of human history. In addition, Debashish Banerji has shown how nondual perspectives can be the basis for compassionate action and for political standpoints promoting human equality and social justice.
Forms of Transcendence
Many have argued that transcendence is a universal need, although it can be satisfied in religious as well as non-religious ways. Duara makes a key distinction between radical forms of transcendence, more common in Western and Islamic civilizations, and the dialogical type that has prevailed in most Asian settings. His focus is on the latter, which holds promise because different expressions of the truth may coexist and there is a weaker inclination to root out ideals that differ from one’s own. Instead, religions and political ideologies may engage in dialogue and debate, show mutual disregard, or absorb and borrow from each other, often in unacknowledged ways. This more open attitude facilitates the circulation of ideas among civilizations.
As Duara asserts, dialogical transcendence fits the needs of our Anthropocene age better than radically transcendent forms which have driven the quest for national predominance and unlimited material abundance. There is an important, though often unrecognized, connection between the exclusive nature of most Western religions and the nation-state as the pillar of the political order. In the global sphere nations engage in shortsighted competition for power and resources, unwilling to let go of their exclusive identities: this outlook resembles that of monotheistic religions which see themselves as the only path to salvation. Since change at the level of the governing elites has been glacial, we must look to popular movements for the energy and wisdom to create momentum for an appropriate response to the interrelated crisis we face as a species.
Non-Western civilizations have an advantage as we move toward a new world. They are enriched by still having considerable access to their own spiritual traditions, despite attempts by the carriers of modernity, both foreign and local, to sever these connections. In the West, though, there is a greater distance from the spiritual teachings of the founders of the world religions due to the onslaughts of dogmatic religion and scientific materialist ideology. Therefore, Western people have looked to Asian traditions for a way out, but the Eastern esoteric traditions that offer experiential approaches to truth have also fallen short. They have failed to build upon their spiritual foundations in order to provide guidelines for social and political change. Gandhi is the major exception in this regard.
The monotheistic religions have separated the material world from the divine, turning God into a lawgiver whom humans must obey. This patriarchal image of the divine has led to many dualistic notions at the root of the modern unease with self and world: life against death, humans versus nature, humans divided against themselves. Asian religions have maintained nondual spiritual traditions that can lead us out of our currently divided state and restore us to our connections with cosmos, nature, and other human beings. Nonetheless, the Asian civilizations did not realize a golden age in the distant past to which a return is necessary. The way forward is integration of the most positive aspects of human unfolding, ancient, premodern, and modern, giving indigenous peoples equal status with the inhabitants of the modern world.
