Is the Problem Really Religious Freedom?

By now, much has been made of the return of religion. Much less has been made of the return of the conceptual framework of “religion,” of its politics, its powers, and its international relations. Two new books, both by now well-recognized critics of “religion” Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Saba Mahmood, aim to correct that deficit: Beyond Religious Freedom and Religious Difference in a Secular Age. When we say religion is back, they ask, what exactly do we mean? And, perhaps most importantly for their arguments, when we say people need freedom of that religion, how does that relate, or reinstate, certain powers of the secular state? Does, perhaps, the language of religious freedom itself recreate the kind of sacred-state powers that were ostensibly to have been expunged so many years ago on the battlefields of Europe?

I count myself among those political scientists who find these kinds of questions fascinating, but eventually also a bit annoying, and finally even a bit disingenuous. They are interesting because the term “religion” is what I would call an essentially contested term, simply defining the thing requires us to make a kind of normative claim. In fact, even demarcating “this” as religious and “that” as non-religious, that such a thing can be done, is a normative claim. This insight strikes me as quite important, and both Hurd and Mahmood have been exceptional voices in clarifying the stakes of that game. But these questions are annoying in the same way much of the politics of postmodernism can grow tiresome: if not religion, or religious freedom, what? It may be that the liberal-state with its startlingly sacred powers of securing religious freedom is bad, but worse than what? Hurd passionately denies the promise of any rehabilitation of religious freedom (Religious Freedom 2.0, 63). Mahmood is a bit more pragmatic: “to critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it” she says, “rather, by analyzing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future” (Mahmood, 21). That future, as with so much of the critical tradition, remains, however, obscure.

Finally, disingenuous because religious freedom seems to me simply a proxy for these author’s final dissatisfaction not really with religion, or religious freedom, but really with the project of liberalism. And it is unfortunately a very tired kind of postmodern dissatisfaction at this point, not illegitimate as such, just not bracingly new: that liberal secularity has inscribed into it certain kinds of sacred/secular distinctions, that these distinctions rule some kinds of beliefs and being out of bounds, and that this is wrong. In fact, the heart of their dissatisfaction is not, I think, with religious freedom. It is with liberal secularism.

The Good-Bad Religion Industry

A thing is not usually really bad in the critical canon until it gets an industrial metaphor. Unlike Hurd, however, I am simply not quite sure that the “religious freedom industry” is successful enough to be deserving of this economic-honorific. Hurd argues that the protections for the rights of religious minorities have “gone viral” (5) and that “the good religion-bad religion mandate has become an industry” (35).

To even a modestly informed by-stander this rhetoric has to seem puzzling compared against, for example, Thomas Farr’s testimony in front of the National Security Subcommittee in June of 2013. At that testimony Farr, a former director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, was questioned on the success of this industry. To cite him, it is “difficult to name a single country in the world over the past fifteen years where American religious freedom policy has helped to reduce religious persecution or to increase religious freedom in any substantial or sustained way.”

So which is American religious freedom advocacy: a viral-industry, or empty rhetoric? Its critics ascribe it industrial prowess that its actual diplomats would not recognize in their dizziest dreams. The Americans have a handful of political offices and commissions designed mainly to monitor the global environment, and educate its own diplomatic core. None of them are especially rich. The Canadians just finished a 3-year experiment (2013–2016) with a $5 million Office of Religious Freedom, which its new government promptly shuttered. Of the numbers that appear, Hurd cites $144,000 used in Iraq in 2005 to assist in public relations with Sunni religious scholars (Hurd, 49) and $325,000 in 2009 to rehabilitate four mosques in a Fallujah compound (Hurd, 79). If it is an industry, it is badly paid. And if it is a conspiracy, it is not a great one. Could it be that, far from overtaking the American apparatus of government and foreign policy, religious freedom and religion have simply been installed as part of the establishment, alongside traditionally material, real foreign policy work?

Of course, there is something to be said for rhetoric shaping the reality of foreign relations, perhaps even in subtle ways that diplomats are not accustomed to measuring. This is where Mahmood’s book provides some much needed anthropological ballast. Religious Difference in a Secular Age is a theoretically heavy book, but it is actually largely a long case study of liberal secularism in the Egyptian context. The book is organized to “track the modern career of political secularism in Egypt through the institutionalization of five of its signature ideas: political and civil rights, religious liberty, minority rights, public order, and the legal distinction between public and private” (11). But in Mahmood’s argument the religious freedom industry is a small, and arguably even less interesting, part of political secularism’s distinguished career. American diplomacy is part of, but hardly the panacea, for the problem of political secularism. It is the state itself, argues Mahmood, and its intrinsic project of sovereignty and secularity that is the heart of the problem. It is modern secular governance that “has contributed to the exacerbation of religious tensions in postcolonial Egypt, hardening interfaith boundaries and polarizing religious differences” (1).

Mahmood’s argument is simply that by privileging things like religious freedom diplomacy we risk hardening religious polarizations, which may create the very conditions for vulnerability our diplomacy is meant to fix. In other words, when does the political power to name something as a religious problem sometimes actually help make it a religious problem, where it was not necessarily one before? This is a very real concern worth attention, and if the uninitiated can push through Mahmood’s somewhat academic-jargon, the question is worth the price of admission. Diplomatic rhetoric can render vulnerable minorities more vulnerable by naming their religious status as a cause, especially if the roots of the vulnerability have little to do with religious identity.

The surest way to avoid this problem, at least according to Hurd, is probably to give up on the lost cause of religious freedom advocacy. We do more harm than good, according to Hurd, when we go abroad pointing fingers calling things religious that effectively only export our own secular/sacred problems and solutions. Mahmood is not quite as sure. The “industry” has problems, but naming them does not mean quitting the field. She writes,

The language of religious liberty and minority rights reintroduces the problem of difference into the purportedly neutral language of political belonging, drawing attention to the social and substantive inequalities that continue to permeate a polity. It is not surprising, therefore, that both religious liberty and minority rights occupy a prominent place within Egyptian political discourse today. Their re-emergence should be understood as a sign not of the failure of political secularism in Egypt but of its ongoing promise. (Mahmood, 106)

The “political economy of good religion” (Hurd, 110) may lack the coherence Hurd demands, but it may also be an effort, honestly made as it can, to realize the best of political secularism. This is, of course, where things get real.

Is the Problem Really Religious Freedom?

It seems odd to overstate the power of religious freedom advocacy, as I think Hurd does, especially if religious freedom is taken within its usual context in the canon of human rights more generally. In fact, many of the complaints that Hurd brings against religious freedom seem to me complaints about liberalism and political secularism generally. Mahmood certainly would find that consistent. Religious liberty, for Mahmood, is just one of a repertoire of problems that recurs as a result of “the establishment of the principle of state sovereignty” (Mahmood, 33). I think Mahmood intuits correctly that these problems may not have a final, satisfactory resolution. They are endemic tensions to liberalism and political secularism, and so we should expect that the line demarcating the secular and the religious, the public and the private, will continue to be a site of considerable disagreement in the 21^st century.

But then the problem really is not religious freedom. Hurd’s conclusion is that religious freedom privileges some forms of religion, whether beliefs, modes of being or knowing, and dis-privileges others. Is that really the fault of religious freedom, or is that the natural consequence of sovereignty and of political secularism?

The state, Hurd is at pains to show, is not neutral because it privileges certain kinds of beliefs and being. But of course it does. The “neutrality” of the secular state is not an intellectual innocence. It is a political community that has very definite opinions about certain kinds of beliefs and behaviors, and the suggestion that it was ever intended to be an open-cosmopolitan social space seems historically naïve. That, for example, Hurd could write “the wrong kind of religion is an object of reform and discipline” (27) and this could shock us means we missed the prior postmodern lesson that politics are always moral, that what a political community means by justice—the good of politics—is hardly “neutral” in an intellectual sense. There is no such thing as good or bad religion, argues Hurd (120), except—of course—when we get busy situating ourselves in a tradition, or moral position, then some kinds of belief and being and knowing are good. And some are bad.

This is where postmodern polemics sometimes hit a snag, because we know that we are already situated in such a sense, whether we are busy attending to it or not. This is Charles Taylor’s point in A Secular Age about the “modern social imaginary,” that we were in the business of having understandings of and practices in the world long before we got into the business of theorizing about them. What is Hurd’s social imaginary, then?

I believe it is one whose moral hierarchy counts diversity and equality as its chief aims. The fundamental problem with religious freedom, then, is the same as the problem with human rights generally. Quoting Talal Asad, she writes that religious freedom “usurps the entire universe of moral discourse, capturing the field of emancipatory possibility and effacing the distinction between law and justice” (Hurd, 64). This approach is deeply democratic, but it is not necessarily liberal. In fact, quoting Asad again, she writes “the modern idea of religious belief (protected as a right in the individual and regulated institutionally) is a critical function of the liberal-democratic nation-sate but not of democratic sensibility” (Hurd, 108).

Therefore, if we disagree with Hurd about the conceptual use “religion” as a category for international politics, the fulcrum of that disagreement becomes clear: it is probably because, like me, you are a liberal democrat, the values of liberalism accompanying and qualifying your democratic enthusiasm, whereas she is unapologetically a democrat. A democrat is a good thing to be, and I respect a thoroughgoing defense of values I also believe in, I just happen to think being a democrat, untethered from the limits of what Taylor calls the “constitutive values of liberal democracy” is a little riskier politics than I like to play.

Saba Mahmood goes right for the jugular on this. She cites Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor in their little book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Mahmood, 177–178), and their attempt to settle this “religious problem” by simply including under the label of religious liberty any controlling, core beliefs. But this fails, as it must, to meet an ultimate democratic-moral aim, because it still depends on “the particular sovereign prerogative of the state to judge and decide which values are worthy of legal protection” (Mahmood, 178). Furthermore, she writes,

… in order to judge whether a certain belief is worthy of protection the state must inevitably involve itself in investigating the substance and sincerity of the belief; this in turn embroils the secular state further into the domain of privacy, which his supposed to be a space of autonomy and freedom. (Mahmood, 178)

I would go a step further than Mahmood. Not only is it true that the state would be embroiled in sincerity tests on the part of individuals, the state will even be embroiled in determining what kinds of behaviors, what kind of “modes of being,” it deems acceptable regardless of sincerity. There is, in other words, no such thing as this state-space of autonomy and freedom, and the idea that there ever was is a modern dream, for which these peculiar postmodern eulogies seem oddly out of step with their own tradition.

Mahmood writes in conclusion,

How can we expect the modern state to ameliorate religious inequality when, as I have shown in this book, its institutions and practice hierarchize religious differences, enshrine majoritarian religious and cultural and cultural norms in the nation’s identity and laws, and allow for religious inequalities to flourish in society while proclaiming them to be apolitical? (212)

Maybe we cannot. Maybe the state as an historical, religious-political entity would not ever do any of the above terribly well. Maybe these are the emblematic tensions of the liberal-state that never go away, that recur, reframed, reformed, resurgent in every generation. Maybe, if we are really lucky, we can do a better job than we used to, even while introducing new, unexpected problems. That might just be the damnable work of politics: the peaceful conciliation of the diversity of interests. Would that conciliation be more just if we left religion as a concept off the table? I do not think so, and I am not sure it would solve Hurd’s problems either. Only undoing the liberal-state and its attendant superstructure of sovereignty will rid us of these awkward religious/secular pressures, and so far I am just not sure that is a great idea.