The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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With the advent of historical religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Christianity, a more complex pattern began to emerge. Here, the religious sphere was gradually differentiated as being concerned with a supernatural order associated with the divine, as distinguished from a secular and natural order associated with mortal humanity. In short, a cosmological dualism appeared. Now, religious activity and belief began to carry with it the idea that there was a higher and better reality above and beyond ordinary reality to which all were in principle subject, including the king, the wielder of political power within that natural order. Thus there arose the possibility for some separation between the religious and political spheres, but also the possibility of tension and rivalry. For in articulating the imperatives of the divine and supernatural, the religious sphere prescribed specific values and behaviours within what was viewed as a subordinate order. In response, there emerged a variety of religio-political patterns. Some entailed very close relationships indeed where each supported and reinforced the claims of the other, or at least an accommodation was reached not to undermine the other’s position. In other contexts, an adversarial pattern developed whereby religion provided an institutional framework or ideological rationale for political revolution or reform by invoking the superiority of the divine and supernatural reality.

Within and between the two, many variations have arisen in the course of human history, as all the major religions have had a concern for the political realm. In so doing, of course, this has led the political realm to have a concern for religion. This dialectic has been particularly intense where the religious sphere has articulated its concerns through specific institutions such as churches, temples, mosques and synagogues, and expressed them through religious functionaries such as rabbis, mullahs, monks or priests. How all this worked out in specific historical patterns has been the intent of scholars through the ages to understand and explain, or to advocate for particular idealized relationships.

Religion and politics in the pre-modern period

In the lengthy era between the advent of the historical religions and modern times, much was written about the relationship between religion and politics, largely of a prescriptive variety. Religion loomed large in the wider culture and society and hence its manifestations were of considerable moment for the political realm.

In Judaism, a very substantial tradition exists of reflection on ideal political relationships from a religious perspective. These have their origins in the understandings of the nature and role of politics and religion as set out by the authors of the Hebrew Bible. Those authors were writing for a people who felt themselves in a close relationship with the divine and formed a community which, for much of its history, had a degree of political autonomy. As a result, much was written about the way that political life should be ordered, political affairs conducted, public policies formed and rulers rule (see Bauckham 1989). Fundamental was the idea that God was the sole creative source of all reality, supernatural and natural, and had entered into a special relationship with the people through a covenant, spelt out in laws set out in the Pentateuch, that governed all aspects of life, religious, social, economic and political. Provision was made, in other words, for a very close and intimate relationship between the religious sphere and the political. Indeed, the notion of the divine covenant was the main principle of cohesion for what was otherwise a relatively loosely articulated tribal confederation. Political power was exercised in different specific forms, an assembly of adult males in earlier times, judges and kings later. But all operated within a framework that was substantially religious. Kings, however, were not of the pharaonic type – they were primarily

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secular political figures confirmed and legitimated by religiously conveyed gifts. This in turn allowed some prophetic writers to be highly critical of the way in which kingly political Âleadership was undertaken.

Later Jewish political organization and prescriptive political writing built on this tradition. Ben Joseph Gaon Saadiah (882–942), for example, set out prescriptive principles for Jewish life, in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions (1948), which sustained the idea of the Torah as the appropriate framework for a Jewish political constitution (see Elazar and Cohen 1985). Later still, other Jewish writers such as Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) advocated a form of prophetic political leadership. The common pattern of such writings, however, is the idea of a nation or community that was both political and religious, thereby closely interweaving religious and Âpolitical ideas within one overarching system of thought.

The immediate context for writings in the Christian tradition was the presence of the Roman Empire, bitterly resented by many Jews. Within this emerged a Galilean Jew, Jesus, with remarkable gifts as a prophet and teacher whose attacks on established Jewish religious codes embroiled him in political as well as religious controversy. Some scholars, indeed, have cast him pre-eminently as a political revolutionary (Brandon 1967). From the New Testament record, however, his political views were essentially accommodationist, or neutralist, rather than adversarial. He is depicted as espousing a certain separation between politics and religion, and as expressing little direct interest in political affairs, and certainly not as encouraging nationalistic rebellion against the Romans.

In this vein, early Christian writings, represented by Paul (Romans 13: 1–13) and Peter (1 Peter: 2–3), reflect a fundamentally positive, or at least neutral, view of the Roman state (Cullmann 1957). Their concerns were with an ‘other-worldly’ agenda of conversion and awaiting the Parousia, Christ’s soon-expected second coming. In this framework, mundane politics played little part. But, as the Church spread and grew, it increasingly attracted the attention of the governmental authorities as an unauthorized and potentially seditionist association. Some interpret passages in the Book of Revelation as cryptic responses to the persecution of the Church under Nero and Domitian (Rev. 17: 3–6, 18). As such attacks were periodically renewed, Christian writers such as Justin Martyr sought to explain and defend the Church, attacking the injustice and irrationality of the state in punishing believers. These ‘apologists’ claimed that the Church was not seeking to undermine Roman authority but looked to promote peace and decency in building ‘God’s Kingdom’. Their posture, in short, was largely apolitical and pacifist (Bainton 1960: 53–84) but, as in other historical and religious contexts, this does not always produce a policy of neutralism or benign neglect on the part of government.

In any event, the whole context changed radically with the coming to power of Constantine. In contrast to his predecessor Diocletian who had pursued a policy of persecution under Constantine (312–37), the State and Church entered into a most intimate and mutually supportive relationship (Armstrong 1993). In short, there emerged in Western culture the model of the sacralized Christian polity, or ‘Christendom’, which has provided the framework for debates about Church–State relations ever since, not least in the United States where public religious observances and favourable tax treatment of religious groups, for example, remain topics of public debate.

Reactions to this Constantinian settlement varied. Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260– c.340) occupies an important place as perhaps the first Christian political theologian in that his central problem was to expound the virtues of a Christianized civilization and polity. To him, the close association of Church and Empire allowed for the possibility of realizing

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the image of the heavenly city on earth (Cranz 1993). In practice, however, by espousing Christianity, Constantine had moved to co-opt and control the Church for his own political purposes. In reaction, St Gelasius, Pope from 492 to 496, developed his notion of ‘two swords’, one to the emperor as a symbol of secular power, but the other to the Pope and Church as a symbol of spiritual authority. Indeed, he not only denied that secular power could be exerted over the Church, but also asserted the superiority of the ecclesiastical power to the civil, in the tradition of Israelite theocracy (Ziegler 1942). As such, his writings became the basis for later medieval papal claims to both religious and political authority – to hold both swords simultaneously.

Yet another response came from St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) in his celebrated De Civitate Dei (On the City of God). This, however, was heavily influenced by an Empire already falling into disarray with the collapse of Rome before the pagan Visigoths in 410. Augustine posited two ‘cities’, the ‘City of God’, which entails the establishment of a perfect peace and justice through fellowship with God, and a ‘City of man’, instanced for Augustine by the Roman Empire. Rooted, in his view, in materialism, violence and injustice, the ‘City of man’ can never be the subject of Christian sacralization. At best it is capable of only a partial and temporary good. As such, his position on Church–State relations was a mixed one, advocating what might be called a semi-accommodationist posture.

The theocratic claims of the medieval papacy in their turn produced a reaction, most notably perhaps in the writings of Marsilius (or Marsiglio) of Padua (c.1275–1342). In his Defensor Pacis (1522), he argued that it was the State, not the Church, which should be the unifying presence in society. Indeed, the Church should be subordinated to the State, not the other way around, with the Church’s decisions made through conciliar, rather than Papal, institutions. However, by this period, the whole medieval religio-political system was beginning to break down by the onset of the Reformation and the emergence of secular national political power.

What was unleashed was a whole range of arrangements and prescriptions about the relationship of Christianity to politics. On the one hand, in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, close relationships were advocated with the Church typically subordinated to the State. This is known as Erastianism after the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus who defended the supremacy of the secular power in his Ecclesiastical Polity (1594). But the Reformation also gave rise to more radical ideas about Church–State patterns. Calvin’s political views, for example, influenced developments in many parts of Protestant Europe including Scotland, England and Holland that in turn influenced Puritan politics in New England and later the founding of the American republic (Kelly 1992). What all of this demonstrates is that, within the historic Christian tradition, a wide variety of Church–ÂState patterns have been both advocated and institutionalized. These range from a monistic closeness and accommodation, on the one hand, to a dualistic tension and even adversarial separation, on the other, representing a diversity that persists through to the modern period.

The other major historical religions also developed distinctive views about the political realm. In traditional Islam, its core idea was the sovereignty of God over the entire community (the Ummah Wahida), manifested in public witness through prayer, fasting, tithing and pilgrimage. In other words, it emphasized a whole way of life embracing all facets of society, both ‘religious’ and ‘political’. As such, the Islamic tradition is analogous to biblical Judaism in that the two spheres, though distinguishable in principle, are in practice brought into a very close monistic relationship. Governing that relationship is a body of Holy Scripture (the Qur’an) and a body of sacred law (the sharia).

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Over the centuries since Muhammad (c.570–632), a number of writers developed these ideas in various ways. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), in his Muqaddimah, for example, argued that political rule was not directly drawn from divine sources, but arose from social solidarity within the ummah (Gibb 1962). Thus, while not espousing theocracy, he nevertheless saw a close relationship of politics, religion and law through their common roots in the ummah. Ahmad Ibn Taimiyya (1263–1328), on the other hand, developed a more direct and superordinate relationship between Islam and politics in which the Qur’an, the sharia, and hadith (collections of Muhammad’s sayings and actions) provided the framework for government. For Taimiyya, religion provided legitimacy to Islamic rulers while the state provided security and protection to the religious authorities. His ideas have since inspired the political ideas of modern Islamic religious leaders such as Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brethren movement, Abu-l-Ala al-Mawdoodi (1903–79) who established Pakistan’s Islamic Party and, not least, Ruholla Musavi Khomeini (1902–89), who inaugurated a theocratic system of government in Iran in 1979.

Buddhism also has a lengthy history of close entanglements with the political sphere. Buddha was himself, according to tradition, a political leader from Northern India who turned to an ascetic lifestyle and developed a set of teachings or truths about human existence (the Dharma). Critically, for its relationship with the political realm, Buddha attracted a set of followers, or ‘sons’, committed to the ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, a disciplined way of attaining the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana. These monks or clergy, known as the Sangha, formed the core of Buddhism as an institutionalized religion. However, Buddha’s emphasis on ascetic detachment from worldly possessions led the Sangha into dependency on worldly leaders with wealth and power to provide them support. Thus in Buddhist societies too there arose a close and mutually supportive relationship between the religious and political domains. The religious sphere, the Sangha, provided political rulers with moral legitimacy while the political rulers provided Buddhist clergy with protection.

Such arrangements emerged in areas of South and Southeast Asia where Buddhism gained ascendancy. The earliest model is provided in India by Asoka who provided patronage to the sangha during his rule from 270 to 230 bce. It was further realized elsewhere, notably in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar), Siam (Thailand) and Tibet. In Sri Lanka, for example, a Buddhist dynasty was, according to Âtradition, established by Asoka’s son and survived until its abolition by British colonialist Âintervention in 1815. But the tradition of a close association between Buddhism and polity has remained and become a major element within modern Sinhalese nationalism (see Smith 1978).

Similarly close ties developed in Tibet where Mahayana Buddhism became the central motif of political rule. Tibetan rulers came together with religious leaders (lamas) in a close system of mutual accommodation. The Dalai Lama emerged as the most powerful among the latter to become a cornerstone of state rule in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, from the seventeenth century onwards. Until the arrival of the Communist Chinese after the 1949 Revolution, Buddhist monks formed a core part of Tibetan government, with the Dalai Lama acting as spiritual guide to the lay political leadership. Not surprisingly, therefore, after his flight to India in 1959, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935–Â), set up a Tibetan government-in-exile, upholding Tibetan culture and the traditional association of Buddhism with the exercise of political power (see Goldstein 1989).

In Hinduism, the religion of some 800 million adherents mainly in India, there is also a tradition of very close associations with the political realm. Indeed, as in Islamic and Buddhist thought, Hinduism sees no clear distinction between the two. Both are part of

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a common overarching set of cultural assumptions. Politics is seen as a moral activity and morality is a matter of religion. Hence, religion has a legitimate claim over the political order. In Hindu thought, this comes about through the concept of the purushartha – that all action should conform to a set of moral or spiritual values that form the controlling framework for individual economic, social and political pursuits.

Such traditions, set out in classical Hindu texts as the Arthashastra of Kautilya from around 300 bce, provided the basis for Hindu princely states right down to the modern period of British colonial rule. They also informed Hindu revivalist movements in the nineteenth century, such as the Arya Samaj, or Society of the Aryas, founded in 1876, which helped establish the Indian nationalist movement. Subsequent writers such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1839–94) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) explicitly used religious ideas to link Hindu resurgence with political aspiration (see Jones 1989). And, of course, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led the independence movement in the twentieth century, was himself a deeply spiritual Hindu and espoused a strong personal moral code as the basis for his political activity (see Parekh 1989).

What these historical circumstances reveal is a common pattern in which religion, be it Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu, has typically, but not uniformly, maintained a prescriptive claim over the workings of the political sphere. Similarly, such claims have aroused strong political responses, again often resulting in the religious sphere being drawn within the orbit of the state. As such, in the pre-modern period, there is a wide, indeed global, pattern of intense if varying relationships between the religious and the political in which at times any demarcation between the two seems hard to discern. It is in the context of that legacy that the relationship between religion and politics in the modern period must be situated.

Religion and politics in the modern period

Amidst all the immense changes that mark off the modern context, religion still continues its claim to political relevance as the prescriptive arbiter of political and public morality and the repository of received, indeed, divinely inspired wisdom. Indeed, there has been much in the history of modern politics that has provoked, and continues to provoke, an affirmation of that claim. The scale and destructive capacity of modern warfare, the invention of nuclear weapons, the experience of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, the invention of new medical reproductive technologies, the recent phenomenon of global warming, the chronic disparities of material conditions within and between societies, are all examples of issues that have evoked a strong religious concern for the direction of public policy. Not least, the modern phenomenon of secularization has itself provoked a political response from the religious sphere. The whole movement of fundamentalism has been seen as a confrontation by traditionalists of those believed to be responsible for replacing a religious moral framework for politics and government by one that is humanistic and materialistic, and therefore, in their view, anti-religious (see Marty and Appleby 1991 and 1995).

Christian fundamentalism has been a significant presence in the United States throughout the twentieth century. First emerging in response to Darwin’s evolutionist ideas, the movement’s political influence rose but then declined following the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Until the 1960s, fundamentalists focused on building up educational and media institutions within their sub-culture. Then, with the rise of new issues evidencing a further erosion of the traditional religious and moral fabric of public life in the banning of

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prayer in public (state) schools by the Supreme Court in 1962–3, and the legalization of abortion on demand in 1973, they re-entered the political arena led initially by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Since then, Christian fundamentalism has been a significant political and electoral presence, forming an important part of the Republican Party’s base and motivated most recently by the question of legalizing same-sex marriage.

In taking, generally speaking, a strictly literalist and inerrant view of Holy Scripture, emphasizing being ‘born again’ as a marker of faith, and adopting uncompromisingly conservative political stances, Christian fundamentalists form at best a large minority of America’s Protestant constituency, and far less than that in other Western countries. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, contrary to the expectations of many scholars, it is a form of politicized religion that maintains a wide appeal (see Wilcox 1996).

Fundamentalist religious perspectives also have had a significant resonance within a number of contemporary Islamic countries (see Esposito 1997). Here, they have been associated with political opposition to the uncritical importation and adoption of Western secular values, which are viewed as having corrupted the community. Hence, to Muslim fundamentalists, what is needed is a rigorous re-establishment of Islamic law (Qur’an and Shari’a) as the sole framework for national political life. In pursuing such goals, they have been viewed on the one hand as passionate and dedicated believers but, on the other hand, they have also been seen as legalistic, intolerant, and authoritarian.

Such perspectives were first articulated by Hasan al-Banna who decried Western influence in Egyptian culture in the inter-war period. Through the Muslim BrotherÂhood, his ideas have since spread throughout the Islamic world to countries such as Pakistan, Algeria and Afghanistan. But perhaps their most enduring and notable resonance has been seen in the regime established in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini in replacement of the modernizing leadership of the shahs. Under their rule, a French-based legal code was substituted for the Shari’a and the educational system partly secularized. Khomeini then led a revolution in 1979 that brought him to power as ‘Supreme Leader’ and enabled him to put into effect his traditional Islamic ideas, set out in his Islam and Revolution (1981). To him, Islamic teaching demanded the merging of religion and politics and the establishment of a theocratic state. In this way, in Iran as in many other countries, fundamentalism has been a major modality for religion’s seeking a central place in contemporary politics and public life.

The present era has also seen the development of a renewed relationship between Christianity and the political sphere through ‘political theology’ (Forrester 1988). Its founder was Johannes B. Metz whose Theology of the World (1969) was an attempt to correct the privatizing influence of modern Western culture which had led, in his view, to a neglect of the public and political sphere in favour of the private and individual. It also was an attempt to provide a faith-based assessment of the basic precepts that should govern the public pronouncements of religious institutions and leaders. For Metz, the Church has always been a political force in history and to him all theology, being in part a critique of the ‘political implicatedness’ of the Church, is necessarily political. In the past, he argued, the Church allowed itself to become politically engaged too uncritically with Constantinian Christendom being not the outcome of an evangelizing imperative but the product of a process of cooptation by the state presented as if it were the will of God. Similar but more contemporary examples of the potential for the political exploitation of Christianity can be found in Nazi Germany, in apartheid South Africa and even perhaps, in a democratic context, the association of evangelicals with the political Right in the United States. In the latter case, what such Christians see as the political expression of authentic religious commitments can

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also be viewed as a conservative political coalition co-opting religion to legitimate its powerseeking goals.

Religiously-inspired critiques of political arrangements have also arisen in a number of other strands of Christian thought, notable examples being black theology (Cone 1975) and feminist theology (Ruether 1983) both of which have been influential in shaping new understandings of racial and gender issues in America. Those understandings have focused around the theme of liberation, which has itself become a significant theological and political current in its own right. The term ‘liberation theology’ originated in Latin America with the publication of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez (1974). With Bonino, Segundo, Boff and others, a powerful and radical religious critique of economic and social conditions was developed, focused on a commitment to the materially poor and the urgent need for political action to transform a fundamentally unjust society. Through the development of religious and social networks among the non-elite in Latin America called ‘base communities’ and strategic alliances with Marxist-inspired groups, liberation theology gave a whole new dimension to the way religion engaged with the Latin American political process.

A high-point was the Second General Conference of the Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Medellín, Colombia in 1968, which approved documents articulating a preferential option for the poor (1970). At the same time, however, it resulted in a clash with conservative religious and political leaders. Indeed, the linkage with Marxist analyses aroused opposition from the Vatican and the late Pope John Paul II whose experience of Communism in his Polish homeland had made him extremely hostile to such associations. For these and other reasons, since then the political impact of liberation theology in Latin America has diminished. Nevertheless, it has left a legacy in providing religious legitimacy for human rights that has resonated in other parts of the world, for example in Asia (Kee 1978: 127–50) and in South Africa.

In the latter case, there was a long history of human rights abuse, racism and oppression through the system of apartheid set up by the Nationalist Party when it came to power in 1948 and legitimated by the (white) Dutch Reformed Church in documents such as Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture (1976). Gradually, however, seeing this as a ‘pseudo-gospel’, religious groups became engaged with the resistance movement led by the African National Congress. Liberationist ideas influenced their contribution, especially in the Kairos Document (1985), which rejected both a ‘State theology’ of support for (white) political authority and a quietist ‘Church theology’ of focusing exclusively on saving souls. Instead, it called on the churches to engage directly in political action to challenge the satanic evil of apartheid (see Elphrick and Davenport 1997).

Outside of South Africa, however, liberation theology has had only a limited influence in African politics (Gifford 1998: 30). Instead, as in Latin America, Pentecostalism has recently had much greater sway and its political influence has generally been indirect, operating more within the cultural than the political arena (see Martin 1990). In its American roots at the turn of the twentieth century, Pentecostal movements were concerned above all with the imminent end of the world in divine judgement and the consequent need to evangelize (see Bloch-Hoell 1964). As such, Pentecostal Churches, such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ, were little concerned with worldly politics.

Since World War II, however, and the non-arrival of judgement day, Pentecostalists became more open to political action, broadly defined. Black Pentecostalists, such as Al Sharpton and Eugene Rivers, stimulated by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, turned to community involvement, tackling problems of juvenile delinquency and social welfare.

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But white Pentecostalists, such as Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson, inclined towards supporting the Christian Right, advocating prayer in public schools, and opposing abortion and homosexuality. It is this latter tradition which has had, through missionary action, a greater influence on the shape of Pentecostalism elsewhere. In Brazil, Guatemala and Chile, for example, Pentecostal leaders have tended to support conservative agendas, although a minority has also associated itself with calls for social and economic justice. In Africa, the ‘Faith Gospel’ of Kenneth Copeland and Kenneth Hagin has also led to a stress on individualistic and personalized prosperity, this-worldly success through faith now, rather than on any directly political agenda. By default, therefore, it has had a substantially conservative influence.

Of course, the contemporary relationship between religion and politics has not only been influenced by ideas and issues emanating from the religious sphere. Modern political thought has also had an immense influence, not the least being liberalism. Stressing, at its core, the value of liberty and, in particular, a conception of personal freedom from external interference, liberalism provided much of the ideological framework within which Western Church–State relations are now conducted. Through its roots in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, liberalism developed a powerful critique of traditional arrangements. The idea of an established church, for example, was seen in the emergent pluralistic culture as a threat to individual religious freedom. What was needed was a disentangling of Church and State and the creation of a private sphere in which religion could prosper.

These ideas found their strongest expression in the United States where figures such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were instrumental in providing for both the disestablishment of churches and the protection of religious freedom in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But, as the decisions of the Supreme Court in subsequent years have made clear, it is an ambiguous and tension-ridden provision. Weber (1998), for example, articulates five distinct interpretations of what separation of Church and State might mean, various combinations of which have been used to justify differing judicial outcomes. Thus, the Court tolerates paid chaplains for Congress and state legislatures, and official prayers at the opening of their daily sessions, but has prohibited similar prayers in state schools. Indeed, the school prayer issue is still alive as the Court continues to strive for a reasoned balance between the twin imperatives of non-establishment and religious freedom. All in all, the whole American model remains much contested, in part for the confusion and uncertainty it has produced, in part for the way it seems in practice to support secularism by restricting a public place for religion which puts in jeopardy the very religious freedom separation is supposed to procure.

Not surprisingly, therefore, other countries have adopted Church–State models based upon neutrality through pluralism rather than neutrality through separation, that is an acceptance by the state of a public role for religion but competing alongside other secular ideas for influence (see Monsma and Soper 1997). At the same time, however, American liberalism has clearly influenced constitutional arrangements concerning religion in many parts of the world including Turkey, India and Japan, all cases where the constitutions have been secularized and religious freedom mandated. Indeed, its pervasive influence is attested to by the rise of fundamentalism.

Marxism represents another modern political ideology that has had a major impact on the relationship between religion and politics. For Marx, the central value was equality, or rather the absence of it within capitalism, which engendered gross inequality, exploitation and alienation. To him, religion was a symptom of more fundamental social and economic

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problems, it was ‘the opium of the people’, a form of cultural distortion that veiled a deeper material alienation. Such a fundamental antipathy toward religion led communists in the Soviet Union to espouse a policy of hostile Erastian control over, and restriction of, all public religious activity. Under Stalin, religious liberty was effectively dissolved. All churches had to be registered, public religious education was barred, many seminaries closed and much church property confiscated. The Russian Orthodox Church was reduced to the role of a political puppet (Ramet 1988).

Following the Soviet lead, the communist countries of Eastern Europe adopted similarly hostile state religious policies. Albania became the extreme case with the communist authorities proclaiming the abolition of religion in 1967. But the collapse of communist rule in 1989–91 has led to an institutional revitalization of religion and a renewal of its autonomy and political presence throughout the region. In Russia, the Orthodox Church has sought to provide support and legitimacy for the new regime as well as seeking the reassertion of its traditional privileges amidst the flowering of religious pluralism. In Poland, the Czech Republic and the former East Germany, the churches entered the post-communist era with considerable prestige and influence, having actively assisted in the overthrow of Communist rule. In Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, however, such was the compliant closeness of the churches’ relationship with the communist state that the new political era has been less accommodating.

Meanwhile, the Marxist legacy continues in a number of countries still communist ruled. In Cuba, after the Castro Revolution of 1959, the new regime expelled priests, shut down churches, nationalized private schools and inducted seminarians into the military. And though Church–State tensions have eased in recent years, culminating in a papal visit in 1998, the political authorities still remain wary of any Church comment that might be deemed critical (see Kirk 1989). Similarly in the People’s Republic of China, a hostile Erastian religious policy is still largely in place. The State tightly controls religious institutions and restricts religious liberty. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 led to thousands of religious adherents being jailed or killed. With the subsequent ascent to power of reformists, however, a slightly more liberal approach has gradually been taken. But the recent resurgence of religious activity, notably in the ‘Buddhist Law’ cult and the Falun Gong movement, has ensured that the State still maintains very strict limits on what is permitted. In short, though now muted and even transformed, Marxism retains an important indirect influence over contemporary Ârelationships between religion and politics.

The Enlightenment also gave birth to nationalism which similarly contributes much to current relationships between religion and politics. For nationalism, the central value is ‘nationhood’ and loyalty to its manifestation in the nation-state. It has witnessed myriad different relationships with the religious sphere. In some cases, nationalism has remained largely secular, for example in Scotland, the Basque Country and Quebec. In other countries, however, religion has been woven into it. In the United States, Christian (and especially Protestant) religious symbols and images have been used to help form a ‘civil religion’, a political culture in which connections are drawn between national identity and the sacred. These range from mythic religious ideas about America’s founding, through religiously defined views of political authority, to religiously informed political rituals and discourse.

In other contexts, religion has clashed violently with secular nationalism and the State by being the basis for a radical form of avowedly religious nationalism. Such has been the outcome in many parts of the Muslim world. For example, in Egypt an attempt was made by the Muslim Brethren to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser for his brand of secular nationalism

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in 1954. A radical offshoot of the Brethren succeeded in killing his successor, President Anwar al-Sadat, in 1981. Similar tense confrontations occurred in Afghanistan where Muslim groups overthrew the communist government in 1992, to then be replaced by the even more radical Taliban who established a strict and autocratic Muslim state (Rashid 2000) that was only overthrown by American military intervention following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Equally, in the Palestinian territories, a civil war took place following legislative elections in 2006 between Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), a movement of militant Muslim nationalists, and the more secular nationalist organization Fatah (Palestine Liberation Organization). The result left Hamas in effective control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 while Fatah was left in charge of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

In South Asia, religious nationalism is at the root of continuing international tension between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. In India itself, Hindu nationalism has long been a militant force confronting both the religiously accommodationist nationalism of Mohandas K. Gandhi (who was assassinated) and the once-dominant Congress Party he led. In recent years, operating through a cultural organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), Hindu nationalists have also been in bloody confrontations with Sikhs in the Punjab, and with Muslims at Ayodya in Northern India (Van der Veer 1994).

Religious nationalism is also an important element in the politics of Israel that arose historically through Zionism, a nineteenth-century movement to attract Jewish settlement in the Biblical Promised Land. While itself largely secular, being rooted in European antiSemitism and persecution, its religious elements have been represented in modern Israeli electoral politics by the National Religious Party (Mafdal) which is dedicated to Israel as a Jewish state – ‘the Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel’ – and by Shas and United Torah Judaism, dedicated to an even more theocratic conception of the Israeli polity. A particularly extreme form of Jewish nationalism was developed by Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the now banned Kach Party, who argued for the Torah being the basis for Israeli law and clashed with both secularized Jews and all he perceived to oppose the establishment of a Jewish nation-state. In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was assassinated by a follower of Rabbi Kahane for being too accommodating to the Palestinians.

Christianity too has been appropriated for nationalist causes in Europe for many centuries. Orthodoxy played a role in nationalist movements of Eastern Europe. In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, for example, nationalist ideas were linked to the desire for an independent Bulgarian Church. Equally, in Greece, the Orthodox Church has long played a part in the nurturing of Hellenic national identity, and is represented in modern Greek electoral politics by the People’s Orthodox Rally. Perhaps most notably, the Orthodox Church, and the Moscow Patriarchate in particular, have been influential in the development of post-Soviet Russian politics.

In the West, Protestantism helped form British national identity and undergirded wars with Catholic France. Nationalism and religion also became closely interwoven within the politics of Northern Ireland. The nationalism of the Protestant majority took the form of loyalty to the British Crown while many in the Roman Catholic community aspired to join a reunified Ireland. The presence of a major religious element in these two rival national identities deepened the sense of mutual distrust, and provided symbols and rhetoric to castigate the opposition. Not least, it made the search for peaceful reconciliation both protracted and challenging, although some resolution seems to have been finally achieved in 2007.

Similar problems afflicted Yugoslavia. The legacy of history left the country with three rival religious traditions, each intertwined with local communal identities. Orthodoxy has