Editorial

In Paris there have recently been terrorist attacks by something which calls itself a state; an Islamic state; but it is not a state in the territorial/ethnic sense that had its flowering in the ‘long nineteenth century’ (from the French Revolution in 1789 to the First World War in 1914, as defined by Eric Hobsbawm); rather it is a state in a much more fluid and aspirational sense, at once more ancient and at the same time more contemporary and postmodern; in a self-proclaimed religious sense. In the context of liquid modernity and globalisation, the discussion in the UK Parliament on 2 December 2015 on whether the UK should bomb Syria included dealing with the fact that the enemy is not a state but an abstract concept, its soldiers not ranked in a recognisable national army but diffused among a heterogeneous population and across international borders. The interplay of religion, state and society, the subject-matter of this journal, is again at the forefront not only of political but also of scholarly concern.

Paris is the capital of one of the 28 member-states of the European Union (EU). Religion, State & Society began life in 1973¹: that was the same year that the UK joined the EU. It was also at the height of the stagnation of the communist system in the USSR during the ‘short twentieth century’ (from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991; Hobsbawm again), which was dominated by the Cold War.

We need for scholarly continuity to be reminded regularly about how things were under communism, when (broadly speaking) states were defined by borders and ideologies controlled blocs of territorial states. Two books reviewed by Janice Broun in this issue help to keep alive memory and respect for those who were caught up in the struggles of those days, when religious believers and religious organisations in communist states had to come to terms with a hostile secularist ideology and its structures. As Agnieszka Halemba observes in her book review in this issue, ‘In general, there is a definite need to pay more scientific attention to the influence of living under socialist and communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe on national and religious practices and identifications.’ This is something that Religion, State & Society will continue to do, in what might turn out to be a ‘long’ or a ‘short’ twenty-first century (1991–?). The configurations and confrontations of religion, politics and society in the past are mainly different from those in play today, but the underlying categories display important continuities.

Halemba highlights the continuing legacy of the communist period at the level of religion, the state and the nation. In some post-communist nation-states the authorities have aspired to recruit religion for national political ends: in her article Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko notes that Buddhism in post-communist Mongolia is mobilised by political parties to fulfil a nationalist agenda. Or else religion feels that it is influential enough to involve itself in the political sphere: in her article Agnieszka Szumigalska notes the political potential of the Catholic Church in Poland. At the same time, however, the subversive and/or transformative potential of religion within a given state is recognised. Abrahms-Kavunenko says also that in Mongolia Buddhism is treated by the government with caution because it contains a potent alternative political locus; this is also the case with Islam in Central Asian countries, as has been discussed in a good many articles in RSS (Abrahms-Kavunenko cites for example Peyrouse 2007). However, the findings by Mikhail Alexseev and Sufian Zhemukhov in their article in this issue, which I discuss later in this Editorial, provide material on the basis of which we can question the assumption not only by Central Asian authorities but much more widely that committed practising Muslims are necessarily going to be drawn to extremism and militancy; rather indeed often the reverse: 'Sociopolitical tolerance is an important democratic value. A fundamental Islamic practice – the hajj pilgrimage – appears to enhance it.’²

Meanwhile in the new ‘long’ or ‘short’ twenty-first century we are experiencing the new phenomenon of expansion beyond the nation-state (globalisation), and the reaction to that: contraction within the nation-state (glocalisation). The book reviewed by Alexander Agadjanian in this issue examines ‘modern pagan’ and ‘native faith’ movements. Agadjanian writes:

In both cases we can see this responsive, reactive impulse to protect the small from the overwhelming, the particular from the pretentiously universal, the rural from the urban, the natural from the artificial, the tribal/ethnic from the modern-national and the national from the global. The editors rightly see in these movements a perennial response to globalisation.

In the same vein, Rafis Abazov reviews a book on the revival in Kazakhstan of Tengrianism, the ancient nomadic belief system centred on Tengri, the supreme god of the sky. He says that discussion of this has entered a new stage: about the impact of Tengrianism on the spirituality of the Kazakh people as well as its role in contemporary society in the country and beyond.

Soviet scholars largely considered Tengrianism to be a dead religion which had largely disappeared in the pre-modern era, giving way to Islam. However, in the post-Soviet era, and especially over the last 10–15 years, Tengrianism has re-emerged as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon and has attracted significant interest from many societal groups, especially artistic communities and sectors of the intelligentsia who have begun to assert that Tengrianism is very much alive and is still an important part of Kazakh culture and spirituality… There is a growing interest in rediscovering the impact of Tengrianism as a holistic system on the modern cultural landscape in which many symbols and messages of the past have found ways to integrate into the emerging post-Soviet culture and identity.

Is the UK going to stay in the EU? There will soon be a referendum to confirm or reverse that decision. The EU was born in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century it is discussed largely in terms of economics; but we need to be reminded of its religious dimension, which was very much in the mind of key figures who founded it. The books reviewed in this issue by John Nurser and Alastair Hulbert are very timely as we move towards the referendum. We do not need a reference in any EU Constitution to the Christian roots of Europe, but we do need a working recognition of the role that people of all faiths can play in developing a ‘Soul for Europe’, in the vision of Jacques Delors, and continuing discussion between the EU and representatives of faith groups.³ In her article in this issue, Montserrat Gas-Aixendri surveys the current legal situation in the EU on changing religion. She places her discussion against the background that ‘religious diversity has become an increasingly common fact of life as migratory flows take on planetwide dimensions’, and that ‘changing religion and the legal consequences of such a change take on a growing importance in multicultural societies, in which a change of religion is made more possible by increasing contact among people of different faiths’; ‘intolerance has also occurred in European countries that have received large influxes of immigrants in recent years.’ Her conclusion is that ‘the full recognition of the right to change religion is a necessary step on the road to achieving a better management of religious diversity in the multifaith societies that characterise Western countries’.

In her article Szumigalska discusses the debate on human rights within the Catholic Church in Poland: some place the legislative activity of the EU in the historical context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which they argue laid the foundations for contemporary liberal thought; some identify the EU as embodying a new religion aimed at replacing Christian thought; some criticise the individual rather than collective dimension of the interpretation of human rights in the EU.⁴ This aspect of concern by Catholics in Poland is outward-looking: Polish membership of the EU is seen as an opportunity for Christians to express concern about the ethical dimension of European integration. However, Szumigalska also identifies a second strand of concern, which is more inward-looking: concern about the impact of Europeanisation on Polish identity and culture: the dangers to the cultural identity of the nation have been perceived as deriving ‘from outside’. The church in Poland has thus presented an ambivalent approach towards the idea of EU integration. So can we see in Poland an example of a ‘glocalising’ reaction vis a vis the EU? And might anti-EU sentiments in the UK be analysed in a similar way? The debate about EU membership which is taking place in the UK is similar to that taking place in Poland inasmuch as a major theme is whether the member-state in question should stay inside the EU and seek to reform it from within, or leave the EU in order to protect its own perceived traditions and values.

The former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has recently discussed ‘the habits of mind that make war inevitable’, and identifies among them ‘contempt towards the powerless, towards minorities, towards the stranger, the longing for an end to human complexity and difference’ (Williams 2015). In The Liberty of Norton Folgate, Madness (2009) make us aware that we are all ultimately immigrants to one degree or another, and they celebrate the cross-fertilising power of diversity. There is a constellation of questions, and possible answers, when people try, need or fail to live together, as now when coexistence within nation-states is being challenged both by waves of refugees and by what one might call ‘terrorisme sans frontières’. Articles in RSS over the years have considered the relationship between diversity and tolerance, and how best to promote not just tolerance but fruitful symbiosis (see for example Michael 2013; Patnaik and Mudiam 2014). Does uniformity/homogeneity lead to (theoretical) intolerance of the outsider? Or does (sudden) diversity lead to (practical) intolerance? Or does prolonged diversity produce tolerance, or indeed render the question of tolerance/intolerance irrelevant? Two contributions in this issue, both offering counter-intuitive insights, have sparked for me new possible trains of thought in this context, and point to new avenues for research.

The first is the book by Agnieszka Pasieka Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland reviewed by Halemba in this issue. Let us remember that it is only since the redrawing of boundaries after the Second World War that Poland has been a relatively homogeneous ethnic and religious country. Earlier in history it had been outstanding for its heterogeneity, especially as a main constituent part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe: Poles mingled with a large number of nationalities including Lithuanians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Belarusians and Jews. Pasieka illuminates an area of today’s Poland where there is a mix of nationalities, ethnicities and religions, and argues that this has led to the spontaneous grass-roots recognition of a kind of hierarchy among them. In her review of this book, Halemba illuminates the counter-intuitive tone of its conclusions. Poland is a homogeneous country not because there are no minorities there – quite the contrary. It is a country with one dominant national-religious narrative, but this is sustained rather than challenged by discourses of pluralism. In her conclusion she writes:

Pasieka’s work suggests that hierarchical pluralism is at the moment not as much caused by political decisions at the highest level of governance, but rather deeply ingrained in the stuff of everyday life. This is a conclusion important on many levels. It helps us, for example, to understand current debates on migration policies in the European Union. Faced with discussions in the EU concerning the need of greater involvement of all member-states in accommodation of the increased flux of refugees and other kinds of migrants from outside Europe, inhabitants of Poland are very reluctant. They seem to think that it is good that they still know what is ‘normal’ in their country and do not want to change it. This attitude is much more important than any strategies of the Catholic Church hierarchy or reluctance on the part of politicians. ‘Normality’ is a powerful and often dangerous concept, if it catches, as Pasieka skilfully demonstrates, popular imagination.

The second contribution in this issue sparking new thoughts in this context is the article by Alexseev and Zhemukhov. The authors examine the attitudes expressed by Muslims from Russia’s North Caucasus who have undertaken the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, and they discuss the ‘Pilgrims’ Paradox’, which is that people who one may assume to be most fervent in their faith (those who go on the hajj) in fact turn out to be more tolerant of diversity than those who don’t. The authors refer to the concept of the ‘Axis Mundi’ as employed by Mircea Eliade. The ultimate physical destination of the pilgrims, the Kaaba in Mecca, is the Axis Mundi of Islam: ‘their axis of the universe, their centre of Heaven, their hub of the world’. They point out, however, that an ‘axis’ presupposes a ‘mundus’ through which the pilgrims pass, involving ‘exposure to high diversity, social and religious’, and also a ‘mundus’ composed of the subgroups within the pilgrim group itself.

At the theoretical level, physical and symbolic repositioning of pilgrims into Islam’s Axis Mundi suggests two generalisable conditions that engender these benign effects. One is high intrinsic common ingroup identity value (the Axis effect). The other is high subgroup diversity within the common ingroup (the Mundi effect). Crucially, the common ingroup value (for example Muslim) must be higher to individuals than their subgroup value (for example Circassian).

The authors go on to draw some more general conclusions from their findings.

This theoretical explanation of the Pilgrims’ Paradox offers nontrivial, if counterintuitive, recommendations for improving intergroup relations. They imply a paradigm shift in practical conflict resolution. To promote sociopolitical tolerance in divided societies and polities, mere exposure to high diversity of custom and opinion, or bringing diverse groups together or intergroup dialogue or discussion forums or conferences or sporting events or festivals are not enough and, in fact, may not be the best solution. The issue is not whether to bring together diverse groups, but how. Suppose we have two ethnic groups and want to see relations between them improve. The traditional approach would be to bring as many members of each group together as possible and maximise contact between them: to select on across-group difference (ethnicity). The alternative or complementary approach we suggest is to bring together members of the same ethnic groups, but to maximise social diversity within each ethnic group: to select on within-group difference.

The authors argue that across-group and within-group diversity-maximising approaches need not be mutually exclusive, and that ‘whether one is more successful than the other and how the two may interact appears to be a theoretically promising and substantively important new direction for social and political research’.

One of the most salient themes as far as I am concerned as we move out of the first 25-year portion (quarter?) of the (short or long?) twenty-first century is the rise of globalisation and the rise of the reaction to it, glocalisation. And it may be that scholars can now start to talk about a new turn of the wheel of history: post-glocalisation, or its mirror image, re-globalisation. With confidence in the future of RSS and its central importance in the development of worldwide scholarship in the field of interplay of religion, state and society, I now hand over to our new editorial team.

Marat Shterin has long been involved with Religion, State & Society as a member of the editorial board and a guest editor, reviewer and contributor. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was teaching and researching before moving to King’s College London in 2006. As a senior lecturer at King’s College he is in charge of teaching and research in the sociology of religion. He is widely known for his research and publications on various aspects of religion in Russia, in particular new religious movements, state management of religious diversity, and religion, radicalism and violence. While focusing on Russia, his research is informed by the wider developments in social sciences and religious transformations in other parts of the world. Beyond academia, he is a great admirer of classical music and contemporary arts and literature.

Daniel Nilsson DeHanas is a lecturer in political science and religion at King’s College London. He completed his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research and publications investigate a range of issues on postmigration religion and politics, including work on the everyday tactics of Muslim identity, counterterrorism, contemporary governance, opposition to mosque construction, and an in-depth comparison of Muslim and Christian youth political engagement. His book London Youth, Religion and Politics: Engagement and Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

Lina Molokotos-Liederman has a PhD in sociology of religion from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and is a postdoctoral associate of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (GSRL). She is also a visiting fellow at the Uppsala Religion and Society Research Centre (CRS) in the area of welfare and religion and a postdoctoral research assistant at the London College of Fashion working on the Faith and Fashion project. Her current research interests include religion, social welfare and the European economic crisis and religion, migration and identity in Europe. She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on these and other subjects.

December 2015

Notes

1. See my Editorial in the previous issue of RSS (43 (3)).

2. An article in an earlier issue of RSS making the same point from a different perspective is Montgomery (2014).

3. This dialogue is enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 which came into force in 2009. Article 11(2) of the Treaty commits the EU to maintaining an ‘an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and Civil Society’, and Article 17 singles out religious bodies specifically and undertakes to maintain a dialogue with them (McCrea 2009, 17).

4. In my Editorial in the previous issue of RSS (43 (3)), I discussed the potential for developing discussion on human rights in the EU, including what should be the balance between individual and communal, and I highlighted the contribution that the Orthodox churches might make.