The Religious as Political and the Political as Religious: Globalisation, Post-Secularism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Sacred

Abstract

The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, particularly in the wake of the so-called “postsecular turn”. Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.

Introduction

Questions concerning the place of religion in politics and public life have taken on renewed significance in numerous contexts in the twenty-first century, particularly within the discipline of international relations (IR). Despite the enduring influence of religion in the international sphere, discussion of religion in IR is often still influenced by a notable ‘secular bias’, ‘the unquestioned acceptance of the secularist division between religion and politics’.¹ Yet, the dominance of this secularist bias is increasingly being challenged and scholars are beginning to explore alternative ways of conceptualising the relationships between the religious and the political. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent turn within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. Are the contributions to substantive political issues by religious actors a new development, a reclaiming of a past heritage or, in fact, the result of a recognition by scholars and practitioners alike that secularism does not have a monopoly on the best ways in which to approach the key questions related to collective human existence? Our contributors offer answers to these and other related questions, examined across diverse cultural and political settings at the local, national, regional and global levels. In this way, this special issue further contributes to the important task of moving IR beyond its traditional secular, state-based frameworks for analysis.

In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.

Religion and the ‘Fetishisation’ of the Westphalian Paradigm

IR scholars have generally ignored or downplayed the extensive Judeo-Christian influences within IR's foundations by proclaiming it a secular discipline, with notable recent exceptions.² Despite the important work by contemporary scholars questioning IR's secular basis, these findings have yet to truly penetrate into mainstream IR. This has led to a lack of self-reflexivity on the part of Western scholars regarding the level of religious influence in their own political contexts.³ Further, it has contributed to an inability amongst many IR scholars to achieve a nuanced analysis of the religious and the political, frequently missing the multiple ways in which religion and politics are mutually constitutive, even in supposedly secular Western political contexts. When Fred Halliday points to the English School's ‘fetishisation’ of the Westphalian system to explain the way in which English School scholars can overlook the violence that was necessary for that system to spread across the world,⁴ we too can look at a certain ‘fetishisation’ of the Treaty of Westphalia to explain the omission of religious discussion in IR.

The common narrative holds that the peace treaty ended decades of religious wars which had erupted in Europe over doctrinal differences between Protestants, Catholics and Calvinists in the wake of the Reformation. The Peace of Westphalia recognised the imperative to divorce the powers of the state from the duty to uphold any particular faith.⁵ In this narrative, Westphalia is viewed as the instigation of the gradual process of functional differentiation between the state and religion which evolved and deepened in the following centuries. Yet even though it needed both philosophical and political revolutions in order to fully establish this differentiation within the newly emerging states,⁶ the Peace of Westphalia seemed to have successfully expelled religion as a source, ostensibly, of violent strife from the interactions between states.

This reading of history thus suggests that the emergence of the sovereign state helped to solve the problem of violence for religious reasons, first externally, and later internally. The argument that secularism arose in response to religious violence is contested by William T. Cavanaugh who argues that the religious wars ‘were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the state’.⁷ The religious wars were essential in creating not only territorial sovereignty but the ‘very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs’ which was necessary for ‘new states … to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects’.⁸ Cavanaugh directs us to recognise that the wars of religion were not fought by ‘pastors and peasants, but kings and nobles with a stake in the outcome of the movement towards the centralized and hegemonic state’.⁹ Assuming that the processes of secularisation arose in order to prevent bloodshed obscures the transference of power that occurs with secularisation whilst blinding us to the reality that in the era of the modern state violence has increased: ‘the separation of the church from power did nothing to staunch the flow of blood’.¹⁰ Casanova argues that despite the separation between church and politics in Europe, the period between 1914 and 1989 was the most violent and bloody for centuries and was the ‘product of modern secular ideologies’.¹¹ Reading the process of secularisation as a device to end warfare projects ‘religion’ as a threat to internal and external security, to the extent that security is associated implicitly with secularisation.¹² Religion thus becomes a dangerous threat the moment it ‘goes public’.¹³

Originating in Europe in the seventeenth century, the Westphalian idea of self-determination eventually became a global principle in the era of colonial independence in the second half of the twentieth century, the ‘terminus of the long campaign of the state to capture the territory of the globe’.¹⁴ In this way, the dominant assumption, or myth, of Westphalia ‘creating’ an international society consolidated ‘a normative divergence between European international relations and the rest of the international system’.¹⁵ With this normative divergence in place, to achieve independence from colonial masters was to de facto embrace the European form of IR in order to ‘join’ the international system. Embracing IR in the European mould also implied a tacit acceptance of secularism.

Casanova argues that the philosophy of secularism is ‘to turn the particular Western Christian historical process of secularization into a universal teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief’.¹⁶ However, he argues that far from being a singular universal secularism there are competing and diverse secularisms that are not simply replicated and reproduced in Europe much less the non-Western world. Casanova claims that non-Western, particularly colonial states

are more likely to recognize the European process of secularization for what it truly was, namely, a particular Christian and post-Christian historical process, and not, as Europeans like to think, a general universal process of human or societal development.¹⁷

Much as the state system is viewed as value neutral in IR, so too is secularism. However, as the neutrality of the state is being questioned in IR, it follows that the neutrality of secularism is close behind, and this forms one of the common assumptions of the contributors to this issue.

This narrative has been probed by several authors who claim that this ‘simple, arresting, and elegant image’¹⁸ is nothing more than an invented template which is used to denote state sovereignty in contemporary IR theory but does not capture the historic complexities of the seventeenth century. Rather, the principles of autonomy and territoriality, which characterise the sovereign state, are in fact a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and legal thought¹⁹ and have been violated and compromised time and again in international history.²⁰ However, with regard to religion, the ‘fetishisation’ of the Westphalian Peace still serves a powerful argument to exclude religion from politics in order to avoid violent strife. It is in this logic that Barak Mendelson sees religion as ‘prominent in the current assault on the Westphalian order’,²¹ and it is this prominent envisioning of the Westphalian system that constitutes such ‘fetishisation’. Turan Kayaoglu, for example, highlights the treaty of Westphalia as perpetuating a European exceptionalism, which idealises ‘the European and Western order and elevates its ideals in International Relations scholarship’.²² European exceptionalism refers to the prominence of secular ideals, much in the way Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito use the work of Charles Taylor and Scott Thomas to point to the ‘turning of secularism into a condition of possibility for IR, rather than an object of its enquiry’.²³

The European exceptionalism, which elevates European ideals over others, also functions to create hierarchies between religions so that secularisation is a ‘process of disseminating the ethos, ethics, cosmology, and quotidian practices of hegemonic religions across secular societies, not simply sequestering religion’.²⁴ Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood reflect that ‘secularism does not merely organize the place of religion in nation-states … but also stipulates what religion is and ought to be’.²⁵ Through secularisation ‘religion’ thus becomes ‘Protestantized’²⁶ whereby all other ‘religions’ that do not fit neatly into what religion ‘ought to be’ become subordinate and problematic.

Using the example of the French ban on the veil, Brown et al. argue that under the Protestantised conception of religion the French ban does ‘not violate the religious liberty of Muslims because it does not intervene in anyone's beliefs (the proper locus of religion); the ban merely limits the public expression of those beliefs’.²⁷ However, using the example of Islam, the authors outline that non-Protestant religions do not necessarily hold private belief to be the primary factor. In Islam and other religions, outward behaviour and norms not only signify internal belief, but are necessary in constituting them through performative actions.²⁸ Thus secularisation not only privileges the non-religious public sphere over the private sphere of belief, but creates a hierarchy of religions derived from the perceived public/private distinction.

Acknowledging and appreciating the continuing religious influence in much Western political theory facilitates our engagement with alternative, non-Western, often religiously inspired, theoretical perspectives on global politics. Non-Western religious articulations of the political chafe under the self-imposed boundaries of the discipline; Dipesh Chakrabarty expands on the idea of boundaries when he states that secularism is simply one of the ‘relations that articulate hierarchy through practices of direct and explicit subordination of the less powerful by the more powerful’.²⁹

In one particular example of Chakrabarty's hierarchy, political Islam derives from a cultural and religious background that never experienced the kind of Reformation that occurred in Europe. Religion in the Middle East developed within a particular social, economic and political milieu that influenced, and was influenced by, prevailing structures and organising assemblages of various empires which based their political legitimacy on Islam itself. Readings of religion within this historical and geographical context deny a strict separation of religion and politics as one legitimates the other, though that is not to claim that there is uniformly no separation of religion and politics with regard to Islamic polities. James Piscatori, for example, points towards ijma’ al-fi'l, consensus of action, to highlight the pluralism in Muslim positions vis-à-vis politics³⁰; Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori argue that a separation between religion and state occurred after the passing of the Rightly Guided Caliphs,³¹ while Ira Lapidus claims this separation is marked by the resistance to Abbasid Caliph Ma'mun's imposition of Mu'tazilite theology in the ninth century AD.³² One might also argue, along the lines of Ali Abd al-Raziq, that the separation between politics and religion was present at the very genesis of Islam.³³ What these varied, if at times overlapping positions demonstrate, is that political Islam poses an ideal location to discuss the persisting intersection of religion and politics in ways alternative to the ‘Westphalian narrative’.

Expanding from a panel at the British International Studies Association-International Studies Association joint conference in Edinburgh 2012, this special issue explores the complex relationships and categorisations of religion and the political. The story of the failed predictions of secularisation theory has become a familiar refrain in academic scholarship for over two decades³⁴ and scholars are now taking up the important task of theorising new ways for understanding the complex and, at times, opaque relationship between religion and politics, public and private, sacred and profane.

The Promise of Post-Secularism for the Study of Religion and Politics

The problems of secularisation theory have become so recognised in academic literature that it is argued we have entered into an era of an emergent post-secularism.³⁵ This emerging era grants the opportunity to ask what new tools are available for scholars in IR and other social sciences to make sense of the contemporary relationships of politics and religion in a post-secular environment.

Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito have identified two broad usages of the term ‘post-secularism’. First, post-secularism can be used as a descriptive term to account for the ‘resilience’ of religion in the modern (or post-modern) industrial era, which entails attempts to ‘go beyond secularization theory’ to incorporate religions' sustained role in society.³⁶ Philip S. Gorski et al. warn that ‘we should be wary’ of employing the term post-secularism as simply the idea of the ‘resurgence of religion’.³⁷ The idea that religion would somehow decrease or fade away is simply not supported by empirical evidence. Peter L. Berger for instance argues less for the return of religion, and more for its continuation and escalation.³⁸

As such, it is the second reading of post-secularism that is of the greatest interest and holds the most potential for contributors in this issue. The second usage of post-secularism is arguably a radical critique of secularisation theory itself, prompted by the idea that ‘values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may well be a potential site of isolation, domination, violence and exclusion.’³⁹ Moreover, Jürgen Habermas has posited that in secularisation – by deliberately excluding, ignoring or downplaying religion – modern society has potentially lost a vital moral resource.⁴⁰ The German constitutional lawyer Böckenförde has summed up the significance of religion and religious orientations in his famous formula that the modern state exists on foundations which it cannot guarantee by itself.⁴¹ By excluding religion, secular society becomes impoverished.

Entering into a discourse regarding post-secularism does not imply that all contributors accept that previously there was a distinct divide between the secular and the sacred, but merely suggests that contemporary theories regarding post-secularism allow for a more nuanced engagement regarding politics and religion in scholarly research without being theoretically marginalised. Before the end of the Cold War, dominant theories in IR accepted the Enlightenment argument that with increased industrialisation, rationalisation and modernisation the world would become ‘disenchanted’.⁴² This argument holds that modern society would no longer ‘have recourse to magical means’,⁴³ for the scientific era meant that ‘one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’.⁴⁴ The assumption being made here is that it is impossible to be both rational and religious, as exemplified by Weber:

To the person who cannot bear the fate of our times like a man … The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him … One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’ – that is inevitable.⁴⁵

Yet this perspective is based on several key assumptions that this special issue aims to destabilise – whether politics and religion were ever neatly separated; whether secular politics is ‘rational’ and religion ‘irrational’; if ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ are useful concepts in understanding the intersections between religion and politics; whether distinct spheres of public and private life are accurate reflections of contemporary post-secular politics.

Westphalia and Secularisation

This is not to suggest that the Peace of Westphalia was logically secularist in this sense (certainly, few of its architects were in any sense anti-religion), but rather that it militates in favour of a political structure that practically and politically devalued religion with reference to the domain of the political. A crucial element of territorial authority was the right to designate the religion of state. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 granted a prince the authority to declare the religion of the territory of his rule. However, the 1648 Treaty of Osnabrück formally introduced the concept of religious toleration and the re-positioning of religion to the private sphere. The treaty stated, ‘Subjects who in 1627 had been debarred from the free exercise of their religion, other than that of the ruler, were by the Peace granted the right of conducting private worship’.⁴⁶ While the prince's authority was determined by his claim to rule through divine mandate, the Peace of Westphalia began to espouse the idea that religion belonged in the private domain and severely limited the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire. Leo Gross argues that the Peace of Westphalia:

marked Man's abandonment of the idea of a hierarchical structure of society and his option for a new system characterised by the co-existence of a multiplicity of states, each sovereign within its territory, equal to one another, and free from any external earthly authority. The idea of an authority or organisation above the sovereign state is no longer.⁴⁷

The framework of contemporary Western nation-states developed gradually from the components of the Peace of Westphalia. The critical elements of the Peace concerned sovereignty over a bounded territory and the privatisation of religion. It is now presumed that the individual is incorporated into one political assemblage which is ‘unaffected by any other affiliations’.⁴⁸ Many Western theorists of nation-states presuppose secularism (as a normative concept) for the nation-state framework, which is based on Western experience, but may not in reality be a necessary component to the nation-state model.

While some scholars held that modernisation would lead to the extinction of religion, others held more moderate views that sacred values ‘have retreated from public life … into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations’.⁴⁹ The re-placing of religion into the private sphere has not only theoretically separated religion from politics, but also devalued it, in that the public sphere is seen as politically superior to the private. The consequence of placing religion in the private domain has been that religion is ‘seen as a private matter or a group interest subordinate to what happens at the political level’.⁵⁰ However, Casanova argues that there is a ‘deprivatisation’ of religion, whereby ‘religions’ are refusing to ‘accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity and secularization reserved for them’.⁵¹ In fact, Casanova states that despite the assumption that modernity will inevitably necessitate the decline of belief, with the one exception of Western Europe, religion has either grown or stabilised.⁵² Cecelia Lynch, taking a post-Weberian perspective, echoes Casanova in claiming that

Weberian predictions that traditions based on ‘magic’ would give way to ‘rationalized’ world religions have not come to pass. Instead, technology and science intersect with human rights and tradition to create enduring yet dynamic relationships between local and world religions. These relationships continue to highlight the unstable nature of distinctions among religious traditions, with important implications for the religious/secular binary.⁵³

Based on the evidence of Western Europe alone, secularisation has been viewed as an unstoppable trend, where religion, at most, would remain a social force only in less developed societies.⁵⁴ It is this separation of the public and private – and religion's relegation to the latter domain – that informs this collection's understanding of secularism: a general undermining of religious beliefs so that ‘religion diminishes in social significance’,⁵⁵ and/or temporal matters dominate over sacred conceptions.

However in the late twentieth century, mainstream secularisation theory was undermined, and alongside it the dominant theories within IR. Much of this is a consequence of the Iranian Revolution's impact on Western political thinking at a critical juncture in the emergence of Anglo-American theorising about the nature of IR. This was compounded by the fall of the Soviet Union, which dislocated most of the established interpretations of IR that had grown up during the Cold War. Daniel Philpott notes that the challenge of 11 September 2001 to the United States did ‘not arise from great powers or state quests for security or any state at all’.⁵⁶ The events of 11 September 2001 therefore highlighted a substantial gap in dominant theoretical frameworks in IR with respect to religion.

A New Approach to Understanding Religion

Consequently there is a need to reassess the long-assumed conception that religion is absent from or irrelevant to IR, but in ways that go beyond the Clash of Civilization thesis,⁵⁷ and engages in the links between secularisation, post-secularisation and ‘religious innovation’.⁵⁸ The term ‘religion’ is both a commonplace within this collection and deeply problematic. Within Western scholarship it is often infused with secularised meaning shaped largely by Protestant theological concepts – that is, as a private practice or belief in the sacred.⁵⁹ In this way the terms ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ can only be understood by reference to their opposites.⁶⁰ Nor can it be stated that religion is a matter of individual consciousness as many ‘religious’ systems are ‘less matters of private belief than public practice … They are rituals that constitute various forms of community life’.⁶¹

Furthermore, ‘religion’ in this collection of articles should not be thought of as an essentialist category, but one that is consciously, and unconsciously, innovative and manipulated by state and non-state actors, both secular and faith-based. Religion is not simply concerned with supernatural entities and the nature and existence of a transcendental realm. It is also, crucially, a framework through which to interpret and respond to immanent contexts, events and experiences.⁶² Through symbolism, rhetoric, images, narratives, histories, myths, values and experiences, religious ideas and influences continue to intervene in, and unsettle, the supposedly ordered rational nature of secular politics.

Failing to interrogate the foundations of the secularist bias in IR analysis risks classifying political acts undertaken by religious adherents as ‘religious’ rather than ‘political’. By moving such actors out of the realm of politics and deeming them apolitical beings, their actions move beyond the lens of critical political enquiry. Alternatively, ‘religious’ understandings are at times undermined in favour of political or ethnic understandings of the groups that use them. Significant works regarding ‘political Islam’⁶³ emphasise political pragmatism over religious rhetoric, claiming that politics in general overrides religious influences and often specifically claim nationalism as the determining factor. For example, Olivier Roy argues that ‘the paradox of political Islam is that if the role of Islam is defined by the state, it means that political power is above any independent religious authority, and thus that Islam is subordinate to politics’.⁶⁴

Other theories accentuate the importance of ethnicity or race rather than religion in political movements such as V.D. Sāvarkar's argument that the Hindutva movement is racial rather than merely a political element of Hinduism:

Hindutva is not identical with what is vaguely indicated by the term Hinduism. By an ‘ism’ it is generally meant a theory or a code more or less based on spiritual or religious dogma or creed. Had not linguistic usage stood in our way then ‘Hinduness’ would have certainly been a better word than Hinduism as a near parallel to Hindutva. Hindutva embraces all the departments of thought and activity of the whole Being of our Hindu race.⁶⁵

In the above cases the term ‘religious’ is underemphasised and subsumed under other criteria. In this special issue, each article explores the often-missed dynamic between religion and politics that not only broadens the category of the political, but additionally sheds light on what can be considered religious.

Politics and Religion Intertwined

The intertwining of politics and religion is not a new phenomenon. Prior to the treaties of Westphalia, religion and politics were ‘profoundly mingled’⁶⁶ while the Westphalian model itself was in part a product of a dialogue between Christian theology and political theory, causing Daniel Philpott to argue ‘no Reformation, no Westphalia’.⁶⁷

It is important at this juncture to touch on existing concepts that have aided contributors to this journal, and scholars in general, in their explorations of the boundaries between the religious and the political: most particularly the concepts of political religion and civil religion. David Westerlund for instance has noted that religion's subordination to politics in secular societies has laid it open as a ‘societal resource’, arguing that ‘civil religion has developed, where religious symbols and practices are used politically to foster national integration’.⁶⁸ In this respect, civil religion is primarily a concept for exploring the interactions between the religious and the political within democratic states. By contrast, political religion is typically used to refer to the practices of totalitarian states, where the state itself becomes the object of worship.⁶⁹ Both concepts highlight a dominant trend within prevailing scholarship on the religious and the political: a predominantly state-based focus. Religion can impart legitimacy to prevailing values and practices, by providing a shared framework within which the day-to-day practice of politics can be conducted.

Conversely, pluralist theory teaches us that religion may serve as an essentially private resource for political and social criticism.⁷⁰ Kant's conception of pluralism is itself protected by the liberal state but only truly exists at the private level: ‘in the public sphere, the state itself is the ultimate good … it defends and imposes a particular set of goods … which excludes its rivals’.⁷¹ Thus, religion either legitimises and supports the state or serves as a private critique.

A large swathe of work, particularly since the events of September 11, has concentrated on militant political religions aimed at revolutionising state structures.⁷² Elizabeth Hurd comments that ‘in recent years religious fundamentalism and religious difference have emerged as crucial factors in international conflict, national security, and foreign policy’.⁷³ Arguably, the recognition of the importance of these phenomena began to emerge with the end of the Cold War. Scholars were no longer solely focused on the ideological contest between the USSR and the USA. Neither were political relationships configured through this overarching bipolar framework. The absence of this framework enabled scholars to observe new forms of the political, and along with them new relationships between the religious and the political. In this respect, Mark Juergensmeyer's work on religious nationalism was an important milestone.⁷⁴ It remains to be seen if the so-called ‘religious revival’ is a new phenomenon post-Cold War and thus representing a substantive shift (as Juergensmeyer suggests) or if the conditions of globalisation and the end of bipolarity have allowed previously unnoticed phenomena to come to the fore. The connection between religion and nationalism for instance was hotly debated in Islam at the turn of the twentieth century,⁷⁵ while Partha Chatterjee noted the importance of religion in the creation of Third World nationalisms.⁷⁶ Yet what each of these approaches retains is the focus on the nation-state. What other more recent events, such as 9/11, have highlighted is the increasing importance of the non-state actor.

In an era of globalisation, while the state retains a central role in international politics, it is difficult to deny that other political formations are emerging (and have already emerged) to play a significant role in an increasing plurality of political options that notably increase the role of non-state actors. There is a recognised escalating role of non-government organisations, lobby groups, multinational corporations and social movements: all of which have been recognised (albeit at times grudgingly) as political players in mainstream IR theory in, for example, the globalisation thesis⁷⁷ and, more recently, the Arab Spring.⁷⁸ Yet mainstream IR analysis concerning the role of religion within these new political entities has been slim, with notable exceptions, such as Marty and Appleby's voluminous Chicago Fundamentalisms project.⁷⁹ The increase of non-state actors not only allows for new players to enter the stage but also changes the stage itself. What is political is being expanded from the narrow boundaries of the state to other domains that are not necessarily privatised and non-political. These new stages may be transnational, criss-crossing state boundaries, or more localised sub-national spheres.

Themes

The issue of the secular and sacred is approached in this issue through three different yet interrelated lenses: territory and nationalism; non-state political actors, and; the public/private distinction.

Territory is one way in which we see the tensions between religion and politics play out. As Peter Mandaville notes, ‘[b]y locating “the political” within the state, conventional IR theory reproduces a set of political structures unsuited to circumstances in which political identities and processes configure themselves across and between forms of political community’.⁸⁰ Jeffery Herbst echoes this point when he argues that alternatives to the state are not possible ‘because the international community has been so conservative in recognizing the viability of alternatives’.⁸¹ While the conditions of globalisation create new (or unleash old⁸²) possibilities for political affiliation beyond and separate from the state, a constant assumption in IR is that supra-national organisations, for example, possess a secular outlook. As communities take a more prominent role in IR, religious communities represent a particular locus for debating and resituating the place of the secular and the sacred.

The state's continued central role in global politics is not being denied within this special issue. The articles by both Claudia Baumgart-Ochse and Samantha May offer innovative insights on the significant role that religion retains in shaping state identity. David Ingram problematises the assumptions of state secularism in contexts where secularity itself may be better considered as secularities in the plural, owing to high degrees of religious affiliation and religious diversity, as in the case of Indonesia. All three articles emphasise the ways in which religious symbolism (specifically territorial) and language legitimise state enterprises and help form political identities. These insights directly relate to Erin Wilson's argument, via Jürgen Habermas, in this issue that religious reasoning and language have a power to articulate and convey moral and political messages in a way that secular language alone does not.⁸³ As we have seen above, religious legitimation is a direct reversal of the political logic of the Westphalian state that assumes that it is the secular, ‘rational’ concept of the state itself which grants legitimacy.

Territory in the above articles is conceived both within and external to the framework of the Westphalian state. Territory becomes more than a delineated geography and becomes sacred ground used to formulate an otherwise diverse political community, as in the case of Israel, but also to delegitimise the ‘Other’ on both national and religious terms. Internally, religious understandings of geography can be utilised to resist the actions of the state, as seen in the Israeli settler movements, but also to de-legitimise the Other's claim to the same territory, exemplified by religious Zionist claims to Eretz Israel and Islamist claims to a Muslim Palestine. These examples challenge existing notions of national territory in that religious symbolism does not belong solely to the nation but to the wider religious community.

Crucially, non-state political actors and institutions are becoming visibly more important and are having a powerful impact on the structures and practices of politics and society, including religion. Yet, religion's relationship with these new political entities has not been adequately addressed in dominant IR literature.

To begin addressing these questions at a broad transnational level, Faiz Sheikh explores the intersections of the religious and the political in the super-state entity of the European Union (EU) in the context of the imagined global umma. Erin Wilson's article on faith-based actors and Matthew John Paul Tan's work on the political dimensions of prayer contribute to our understanding of how certain religious practices constitute political actors and actions, wittingly or unwittingly. While the contributors do not neglect the continued significance of the state in this special issue, the aim is to extend beyond state-centric theories to explore the ways in which religion is entangled in political formations that currently remain outside dominant IR articulations. Importantly, religion extends the boundaries of the political – what is political is continually challenged and reshaped through the language and symbolism of religion which continues to influence the public sphere, while religion, in turn, is reshaped and challenged in the same process.

Therefore, a third thread through which this issue attempts to trace these debates is the idea of a public and a private sphere. The complete separation of religion and politics implied by the public/private distinction does not provide an accurate reflection of social and political reality. Thus, while exploring the dynamics of the religious and the political in contemporary IR, this collection also, by necessity, problematises the divisions of the public and private spheres. Each author engages with this categorisation in different ways, but each notes that this division is somewhat arbitrary and largely a Western cultural construct, challenging in regions outside of the West and becoming more visibly problematic within Western liberal secular societies. For Wilson, the distinction between public and private that influences much of the debate on the post-secular derives from the work of Jürgen Habermas. Wilson notes that ‘non-belief is no longer the default position and is itself considered one option among many’, arguing that the plurality of options available has allowed religion to gain ground as a form of political activism to challenge the power and legitimacy of the state.⁸⁴ Building on the work of Wilson's article, John Rees discusses not the form religion takes in IR, but rather the means by which religion articulates itself in the international sphere. Rees argues that if the discipline is capable of understanding religion in its own language, without the need to ‘translate’ it into secular discourse, IR can attribute a structural dimension to religion. If Habermas challenges us to think of the ways religion can engage in public debate, Tan responds to this challenge by positing that prayer is a critique of the prevailing political order, and perhaps a political theory unto itself.

The categories of political and civil religion both focus predominantly on the state as the main political structure. This collection takes up the call from Daniel Philpott that if IR scholars and political scientists wish to understand the place of religion in the world better, they need to engage with theology. Wilson emphasises the metaphysical frameworks that faith-based actors employ when critiquing existing political frameworks, while Tan employs theology to challenge prevailing assumptions that prayer is a purely spiritual rather than also a social and political act. Baumgart-Ochse takes seriously the impact that Orthodox Judaism has had in rearticulating contemporary religious Zionism (alongside a simultaneous ‘secular’ Zionism), while May outlines the transnational consequences of understanding Palestine as Islamic territory based on Quranic terminology.

The Contributions

Erin Wilson reconsiders the political dimensions of religious activity in light of what some are describing as our post-secular society,⁸⁵ arguing that limited understandings of both religion and politics restrict the capacity of scholars and faith-based actors alike to perceive the significant influence that religious actions and rituals can have in the political realm. Wilson outlines the dimensions of a post-secular society, drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas, alongside recent critiques of his work by IR scholars such as Fred Dallmayr, Adrian Pabst, Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito. She then investigates existing approaches to understanding religion and politics within IR, putting forward an alternative framework for analysing the religious and the political in a post-secular society, before turning to an exploration of the activities of faith-based actors in the asylum sector in Australia. Wilson highlights the ways in which predominantly religious activities, such as prayer, charity and hospitality to the stranger, can have significant political implications, both in the immediate and in the long term. Scholars, policymakers and faith-based actors themselves need to develop more nuanced understandings of how religious actions take on political meaning, intended and unintended, in order to appreciate the growing influence of faith-based actors in post-secular societies.

Matthew J.P. Tan questions why the boundary between the religious and the political is a continuously vexing dilemma for Christians who want to contribute to public life and those who want to engage with public life in a manner that is consistent with their spiritual lives. Tan seeks to suggest an alternative and proposes that the spiritual life, enacted in the practice of prayer, is not incidental to public life, but actually constitutes a unique politics. Prayer bears within its practices a political theory that, on the one hand, provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many presumptions of the political status quo. First, Tan looks generally at the relationship between practice and theory, before analysing how the embodied nature of prayer implicates the contours of a new public body. This new body in turn suggests new contours of what it means to be a political subject, new terms of citizenship and, flowing from that, a new kind of political modus vivendi, exemplified by new attitudes to the necessity of survival in politics and new attitudes to political risk.

David Ingram examines the way in which the spread of ‘postmodern’ global capitalism has provoked a religious backlash. Ingram argues that although it pushes against an excessively materialistic form of secularism, this backlash also targets an idealistic variant: multiculturalism. However, arguably, this apparent hostility to secularism, pluralism and democratic compromise is belied by a further idealistic component within the Islamic/Christian imaginary: a transcendent commitment to social justice. Political opposition to postmodern capitalism's stratifying dynamic, which contradicts the holy command to combat material oppression on this earth, strongly encourages religious fundamentalists to pursue a secular agenda whose broad scope and success requires a modest acceptance of self-limiting compromise and political argumentation.

Addressing both Catholic and Islamic strands of religious politics along with their ambivalent relationship to secular democracy, Ingram demonstrates that religious politics and secular democracy shape each other, as both in turn respond to deeper socio-economic changes in their environment. Ingram distinguishes between different types of religious politics but also between varieties of secular democracy. Ingram argues that sometimes religious commitment can act as a stimulus to creating and preserving secular democracy.

Claudia Baumgart-Ochse asserts that in academic literature as well as in the liberal, left-wing political discourse on Israeli democracy one finds a recurring theme: the State of Israel, so the lamentation goes, has been hijacked by Jewish religious extremists and therefore runs the risk of inflicting serious damage on its liberal democratic political system. In this view, the national-religious settler movement has systematically penetrated the state apparatus in order to pursue its parochial interests and reformulate Israel's otherwise secular national identity and politics. However this argument ignores the complex interrelationship between them. It is argued that the mobilising force of Israel's basically secular national ideology – Zionism – has from its inception depended on a deep ambivalence towards the Jewish religion. Secular Zionism and politicised Jewish religion are part and parcel of a system of exclusion via grouping, which constitutes the boundaries of national identity. Although considerable tensions exist between the secular and religious camps in Israeli society, the state's political elite has so far managed to utilise these diverging ideologies and interests for maintaining the overall raison d’état as well as for the realisation of specific policies with regard to the conflict.

Samantha May focuses on Islamic understandings of territorial sovereignty, specifically the case of Palestine. The dominance of national understandings of territory has led to many theorists assuming that this is the only form of political geography. An examination of the conception of waqf lands (Islamic endowments) reveals a far more nuanced understanding. Using the primary example of the Palestinian movement Hamas, this article proposes that Hamas' understanding of waqf as both God's land in perpetuity and the territorial justification for an independent Palestinian state challenges Western assumptions of national territory and the monopoly of legitimate violence. Drawing on historical and Quranic conceptions of territory alters the Westphalian understanding of national territory as a delineated geography, but opens new avenues for understanding transIslamic dimensions to Islamic nationalisms.

Faiz Sheikh examines the ways in which the EU has successfully developed a legal identity that is externally affirmed by the international system, while the Muslim community, umma, struggles to do so with any great efficacy. In comparing the identity of the EU and the umma, the difficulties faced in virtue of their transnational character are raised. However, the umma identity is shown to face more problems than its erstwhile EU counterpart due to the overtly religious nature of the umma. Sheikh's article establishes constructivism as capable of explaining the creation of norms and identity in the international system, accounting for the experience of the EU's identity. The application of constructivism to the umma is shown to be more problematic due to the secular bias in IR⁸⁶ and, perhaps more importantly, the Islamic resurgence being insufficiently concerned with the constitutive elements within it.⁸⁷

John A. Rees outlines that the study of IR has taken a ‘post-secular turn’ in recent years, which has led to a renewed focus on the political agency of ‘religion’. This article employs the language and functions of grammar to explain the significance of post-secularism, forming three arguments. First, the article suggests that the challenge of studying religion and IR has shifted from one of morphology (i.e. the forms that religion takes) to one of syntax (i.e. the function of religious actors and interests). This marks an important shift in the research agenda from concerns with ‘what religion is’ to ‘what religion does’ in the international sphere. Second, Rees argues that a post-secular syntax allows religion to be understood through the full array of ‘cases’ in world politics. Third, the article proposes that whereas secularism attributes religion primarily with an accusative quality (i.e. suffering the action of other more dominant actors and interests), a post-secular approach broadens the research agenda by allowing religion to be situated throughout the discourse of power. Thus, post-secularism attributes religion with a structural quality because it can be found to influence the full array of actor behaviour in the political sphere. Understood in this way, post-secularism challenges scholars to produce a new understanding of how religion is ‘read’ in the construction of international affairs.

The articles in this special issue all provide unique insights on important topics that are being increasingly questioned amid the broader project of rethinking religion and its place in IR theory and practice. The power and role of the state, the neutrality of concepts such as ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’, conceptual and political boundaries and the utility of binaries, such as public/private, for understanding the relationship between the religious and the political are all questioned throughout the articles in this issue, providing further enrichment for the ongoing debate around the secularist bias and religion's place in global politics.

Notes

¹E. Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 1.

²For example, E. Hurd, ‘A Suspension of (Dis)Belief: The Secular-Religious Binary and the Study of International Relations’ in C. Calhoun et al. (eds) Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); L. Mavelli, ‘Security and Secularization in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:1 (2012), pp. 177–199; D. Philpott, ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’, World Politics, 52:2 (2000), pp. 206–245.

³E.K. Wilson, After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 2.

⁴F. Halliday, ‘The Middle East and Conceptions of “International Society”’ in B. Buzan and A. Gonzalez-Pelaez (eds) International Society and the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 18.

⁵Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2, p. 352; D. Held, Democracy and Global Order (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 33.

⁶S.N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 129:1 (2000), pp. 1–29.

⁷W. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State’, Modern Theology, 11:4 (1995), p. 398.

⁸Ibid., p. 398.

⁹Ibid., p. 403.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 414

¹¹J. Casanova, ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’ in C. Calhoun et al. (eds) Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 70.

¹²Mavelli, ‘Security and Secularization’, op. cit., p. 177.

¹³Ibid., p. 178.

¹⁴D. Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 153.

¹⁵T. Kayaoglu, ‘Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory’, International Studies Review, 12:2 (2010), p. 194.

¹⁶Casanova, ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’, op. cit., p. 59.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 64.

¹⁸S.D. Krasner, ‘Compromising Westphalia’, International Security, 20:3 (1995–1996), pp. 115–151.

¹⁹A. Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization, 55:2 (2001), pp. 251–287.

²⁰Krasner op. cit., pp. 116–117.

²¹B. Mendelsohn, ‘God vs. Westphalia: Radical Islamist Movements and the Battle for Organizing the World’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), p. 611.

²²T. Kayaoglu, ‘Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory’, International Studies Review, 12:2 (2010), p. 194.

²³L. Mavelli and F. Petito, ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview’, Review of International Studies, 38:5 (2012), p. 933.

²⁴W. Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmood, ‘Preface, 2014’ in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. ix–x.

²⁵Ibid., p. ix.

²⁶Ibid., p. xiii.

²⁷Ibid., p. xiv.

²⁸Ibid., p. xiv.

²⁹D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 14.

³⁰J. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 46.

³¹D. Eickelman and J. Piscatori (eds) Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 47.

³²I. Lapidus, ‘The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6:4 (1975), p. 383.

³³Ali Abd al-Raziq, ‘Message Not Government, Religion Not State’ in C. Kurzman (ed.) Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 29–36.

³⁴See for example: R. Stark and R. Finke, Acts of Faith (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000); D. Westerlund, Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2002); T.G. Jelen and C. Wilcox, Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); P.L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Eerdmans/Ethics and Public Policy Centre, 1999); R. Stark and W.S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); D. Philpott, ‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations’, World Politics, 55:1 (2002), pp. 66–95.

³⁵L. Mavelli and F. Petito, ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview’, Review of International Studies, 38:5 (2012), pp. 931–942; J. Habermas ‘Secularism's Crisis of Faith: Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25 (2008), pp. 17–29; J. Koehren, ‘How Religious is the Public Sphere? A Critical Stance on the Debate about Public Religion and Post-Secularity’, Acta Sociologica, 55 (2012), pp. 273–288; A. Morozov, ‘Has the Postsecular Age Begun?’, Religion, State and Society, 36 (2008), pp. 39–44.

³⁶Mavelli and Petito, op. cit., p. 931.

³⁷P. S. Gorski, D.K. Kim, J. Torpey and J. VanAntwerpen, ‘The Post-Secular Question’ in P. S. Gorski, D.K. Kim, J. Torpey (eds) The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 1–22.

³⁸Berger, op. cit., p. 2.

³⁹Ibid., p. 931.

⁴⁰J. Habermas, ‘Faith and Knowledge’ in The Future of Human Nature (Malden: Polity, 2001), pp. 101–115.

⁴¹E.-W. Böckenförde, ‘Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation’ in E.W. Böckenförde (ed) Recht, Staat, Freiheit – Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 92–114.

⁴²P. Lassman and I. Velody (eds) Max Weber's ‘Science as a Vocation’ (London; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

⁴³M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129–156.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 136.

⁴⁵Ibid., p. 145.

⁴⁶L. Gross, ‘The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948’, The American Journal of International Law, 42:1 (1948), p. 22.

⁴⁷Ibid., p. 29.

⁴⁸Kohn and Emerson, cited in M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 14.

⁴⁹Weber, op. cit., p. 145.

⁵⁰Westerlund, op. cit., p. 2.

⁵¹J. Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 5.

⁵²Ibid., p. 26.

⁵³C. Lynch, ‘Religious Humanitarianism and the Global Politics of Secularism’ in Craig Calhoun et al. (eds) Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 205.

⁵⁴Jelen and Wilcox, op. cit., p. 2.

⁵⁵S. Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 30.

⁵⁶Philpott, ‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations’, op. cit., p. 66.

⁵⁷S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

⁵⁸Stark and Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, op. cit., p. 437.

⁵⁹R. Maden, ‘What is Religion? Categorical Reconfigurations in a Global Horizon’ in P.S. Gorski, D.K. Kim, J. Torpey (eds) The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 23–42.

⁶⁰T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).

⁶¹Maden, op. cit., p. 29; M. Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

⁶²Maden, op. cit., p. 23.

⁶³The term itself neatly separates the political and the religious without problematising either categorisation.

⁶⁴O. Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I. B Tauris, 1994), p. 70.

⁶⁵V.D. Sāvarkar, ‘Who is a Hindu’, Essentials of Hindutva, 1923, http://www.savarkar.org/content/pdfs/en/essentials_of_hindutva.v001.pdf.

⁶⁶Philpott, ‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in IR’, op. cit., p. 72.

⁶⁷D. Philpott, ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’, World Politics, 52:1 (2000), pp. 206–245.

⁶⁸Westerlund, op. cit., p. 2.

⁶⁹E. Gentile, ‘Political Religion: A Concept and its Critics – A critical Survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6:1 (2005), p. 30.

⁷⁰Jelen and Wilcox, op. cit., p. 18.

⁷¹Cavanaugh, op. cit., p. 405.

⁷²See for example: M. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); E. Berman, Radical Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Boston, MA: MIT, 2009); J.L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror In the Name of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); G. Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London and New York: I.B Tauris, 2003).

⁷³Hurd, op. cit., p. 1.

⁷⁴M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994).

⁷⁵See for example: Y. M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (London; New York: Continuum, 2002); M. Moaddel and K. Talattof (eds) Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam: A Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

⁷⁶P. Chaterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books, 1986).

⁷⁷P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and The Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); V. Roudometof, ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Glocalization’, Current Sociology, 53:1 (2005), pp. 113–135; M. Rupert and M. Solomon, Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefied Publishers, 2006); S. Sassen, Territory, Authority and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).

⁷⁸B. Korany and R. El-Mahdi, The Arab Spring In Egypt: Revolution and Beyond (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012); I. Allagui and J. Kuebler, ‘The Arab Spring and the Role of ICTS’, International Journal of Communication, 5 (2001), pp. 1435–1442.

⁷⁹Titles from the Fundamentalism Project include: Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); Fundamentalisms and Society (1993); Fundamentalisms and the State (1993); Accounting for Fundamentalisms (1994); and Fundamentalisms Comprehended (1995). For more on religious transnationalism, see S.H. Rudolph, J.P. Piscatori (ed.) Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); T. Banchoff (ed.) Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); M. Juergensmeyer (ed.) Religion in Global Civil Society (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); P. Beyer and L. Beaman, (ed.) Religion, Globalization, and Culture, (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2007).

⁸⁰P. Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 5.

⁸¹J. Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure in Africa’, International Security, 121:3 (1996), p. 126.

⁸²Sassen, op. cit., p. 230.

⁸³Erin Wilson, this issue.

⁸⁴Erin Wilson, this issue.

⁸⁵L. Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell), p. 15; J. Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14:1 (2006), pp. 1–25; J. Habermas, ‘Notes On a Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25:4 (2008), pp. 17–29.

⁸⁶Hurd, op. cit.; Wilson, op. cit., p. 2.

⁸⁷A.K. Soroush, ‘The Evolution and Devolution of Religious Knowledge’ in C. Kurzman (ed.) Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 244–254.