religion culture essay

Essay on How Are Religion And Culture Connected

Students are often asked to write an essay on How Are Religion And Culture Connected in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on How Are Religion And Culture Connected

Understanding religion and culture.

Religion and culture are two important aspects of human society. Religion refers to beliefs and practices related to the divine, while culture includes customs, traditions, and values that people follow. Both shape our identity and influence our behavior.

The Link Between Religion and Culture

Religion and culture are deeply connected. Religion often shapes culture by providing moral guidelines and rituals. For instance, Christian culture celebrates Christmas, while Muslim culture observes Ramadan. These religious events influence cultural practices, like food, clothing, and social gatherings.

Religion’s Influence on Culture

Religion can also impact culture by influencing laws and social norms. For example, many countries have laws based on religious teachings. These laws can affect various cultural aspects, such as marriage, dress codes, and food habits.

Culture’s Impact on Religion

Conversely, culture can impact religion too. Different cultures interpret religious teachings in unique ways. This can lead to different religious practices within the same religion. For example, Hinduism is practiced differently in India and Nepal due to cultural differences.

In conclusion, religion and culture are closely tied together. They influence each other and shape our societies. Understanding this connection can help us appreciate the diversity and richness of human societies.

250 Words Essay on How Are Religion And Culture Connected

Introduction.

Religion and culture are two important parts of our society. They are like two sides of the same coin. They shape our identity and guide our actions.

Religion and Culture: A Strong Bond

Religion is a belief system that people follow. It includes faith in a higher power and a set of rules to live by. Culture, on the other hand, is a way of life. It includes traditions, language, food, music, and more. Religion and culture are connected because religion often shapes culture. For example, religious festivals become cultural events.

Religion can greatly influence culture. For instance, in India, the religion of Hinduism has shaped the culture. Festivals like Diwali and Holi come from Hindu religious beliefs. These festivals are now part of Indian culture, celebrated by people of all religions.

Culture’s Influence on Religion

Culture can also shape religion. In different parts of the world, the same religion can be practiced differently. This is because culture influences how people interpret their religion. For example, Christianity is practiced differently in America, Africa, and Europe because of cultural differences.

In conclusion, religion and culture are closely connected. They influence each other and together, they shape the way we live our lives. Understanding this connection can help us appreciate the diversity of our world.

500 Words Essay on How Are Religion And Culture Connected

Religion and culture are two important aspects of human life. They shape our thoughts, actions, and how we see the world. While they may seem different, they are deeply connected. Let’s explore how.

Religion and culture are like two sides of the same coin. They both play a big role in shaping a society’s values, morals, and customs. For example, in a culture where Christianity is the main religion, you may see customs like celebrating Christmas or going to church on Sundays. In a culture where Buddhism is dominant, you might find people practicing meditation or following the teachings of Buddha in their daily lives.

Religion Shapes Culture

Religion can shape culture in many ways. It can influence the way people dress, eat, and behave. For instance, in Islamic cultures, women often wear a headscarf as a sign of modesty, which is a teaching of the Islamic religion. Similarly, in Hindu cultures, people often follow a vegetarian diet because their religion teaches them to respect all forms of life.

Culture Influences Religion

Just as religion can shape culture, culture can also influence religion. It can affect how people practice their religion and how they interpret religious teachings. For example, in some cultures, people might celebrate religious festivals with music and dancing, while in others, they might observe them in silence and prayer. This shows how culture can give a unique flavor to the same religion.

Religion and Culture: A Cycle of Influence

The relationship between religion and culture is not one-way. It’s more like a cycle of influence. As people practice their religion, they create cultural practices. These cultural practices, in turn, influence how they practice their religion. Over time, this cycle can lead to the development of unique religious and cultural traditions.

In conclusion, religion and culture are deeply connected. They influence each other and together, they shape the way we live our lives. So, when we study a culture, it’s important to understand its religious beliefs. And when we study a religion, it’s important to consider the cultural context in which it’s practiced. Understanding this connection can help us better understand the world and the people in it.

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Free Religion, Culture & Society Essay Examples & Topics

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, religion is an organized system of beliefs and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods. In comparison, culture is defined as the values, customs, arts of a particular society and group, place, or time.

As you can suspect, writing a religion and culture essay is truly exciting but not always easy. That’s why our IvyPanda team is here to help you explore this subject. Let’s start with the connection between the phenomena.

Culture and religion are interconnected, and some say that they are inseparable. This link is complicated, but our mind aims to simplify everything. For instance, can you be a Muslim yet belong to Western Culture? Can you be white and not be a Christian colonizer? Can you be an African and not be associated with African religions?

To accept that you can belong to the same culture but be different religiously is a problematic endeavor. One thing is clear: you cannot study one without studying another.

If you are working on a religion and culture essay, you have many approaches to explore. That is why it can be tricky to write about it. Whether you’re composing a paper on Buddhism or an Islamophobia essay, outlines are a great way to realize what you want to do. Here, we have written a step-by-step guide on organizing your essay. We have also gathered topics and samples for your inspiration.

How to Outline a Religious and Cultural Values Essay

How are religion and culture connected? Essays like this aren’t easy to plan, let alone write. Nevertheless, organizing beforehand lowers your workload. You can save a lot of time by writing your works with an outline.

Here, we have presented steps towards structuring your paper:

• Create the right research question. A great question asks “how” and “why” instead of “what.” It leads your research and the way you organize your paper. Your question can also be based on a puzzle or some form of contradiction.
• Make a strong thesis statement. It is the core of your paper that sets your position – even your outline has to showcase it. Two levels of thesis exist. The first one is thesis-as-a-thoughtful-answer. The second level is thesis as exciting and original. Try to keep both of them in mind while creating your own. Our thesis generator can help you find the right words.
• Begin your introduction. It should reveal the topic and how you intend to argue your position. First, hook your reader from the start and provide essential context. Then, give your reader an idea of where you are going with your essay by including your thesis.
• Structure your body paragraphs. Here, you will state your points and why you find them compelling. Generally, it takes three paragraphs to do so. Include at least two arguments and one counterargument to add reliability to your statement. Make sure to list all the crucial points in your outline. You can add supporting evidence later.
• State your conclusion. Here, you briefly summarize the arguments you’ve already provided. Additionally, you can include important implications and further research areas. In your outline, leave a place for a restatement of your thesis and a concluding sentence.

15 Stellar Religion and Culture Essay Topics

You can say a lot regarding religion and culture, and just an area of Christian festivals is abundant with topics. Yet, it is not easy to find a good idea for your essay, which is why we have tried to simplify your task.

Here are some religious and cultural values essay topics:

• Explain the creation/evolution controversy and why both can be seen as a form of religion.
• A critique of trinity doctrine in Christianity.
• Positive effects of religion in coping with mental health problems.
• The connection between mental health and prayers.
• The role of religion in American society and culture.
• Should American kids be taught Christian moral values in school?
• What is the history behind Christmas? Why do Christians celebrate it on December 25th?
• What are the Islamophobia causes and solutions?
• What are some similarities and differences between Buddhism and Christianity?
• What are the origins behind singing during Christian gatherings?
• Compare the creation myths in the Bible and the Quran.
• The roles and responsibilities of women in Hinduism.
• Describe the five pillars of Islamic religion and their significance.
• Why is Paul Tillich called the father of systematic theology?
• What are the major religions around the world?

Thank you for reading our article till the end. For more ideas, you can try out our topic generator . Or you can simply look through our religion and culture essay examples below.

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• Published: 19 June 2018

The future of the philosophy of religion is the philosophy of culture—and vice versa

• Mike Grimshaw   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-061X 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  72 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This paper reads the future of the Philosophy of Religion via a critical engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and diversions into other thinkers to support the main thrust of the argument. It takes as a starting point Tillich’s discussion of the relationship between religion and culture in On the Boundary (1967), in particular his statement “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (69–70). With (unlikely) diversions via TS Eliot and Karl Barth, the argument is developed through a re-reading of Tillich’s work on a theology of culture and in particular the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (264). Central to the rethinking of this paper is then the reworking of Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (52). While this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, this paper inserts culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a theology of culture also engages with a philosophy of culture; just as a philosophy of religion must engage with a philosophy of culture; for it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. The final part of this paper articulates a rethought Philosophy of Culture as the boundary space from which the future of the Philosophy of Religion can be thought, in creative tension with a Tillich-derived radical theology.

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Preface: setting the scene.

This is an essay in conjecture—and deliberately so. It seeks to find a point from which to tackle the question of ‘‘what if’’ and ‘‘what for’’ regarding the future of the Philosophy of Religion. In doing so, the central figure from which to base this engagement is the great German-American theologian Paul Tillich; but because this is a deliberately discursive, conjectural essay, other figures arise, are named, perhaps engaged with and other times just briefly alluded to. This is a deliberate approach, for this article is a type of thinking piece that seeks to exist as a type of collected signposts: signposts from the past in that Tillich himself died over half a century ago and so to draw upon him for the future is to claim some form of continuity from his ‘‘then’’ to our ‘‘now’’ toward some possible future. A central aim of this essay is to draw theology back into a critical engagement with the Philosophy of Religion, positioning a radical secular theology as a way to think a future secular Philosophy of Religion.

As the collection of papers to which this essay belongs addresses, there appears to be a widespread sense of crisis within the Philosophy of Religion. This seems to have arisen due to an overly focused attention and discussion on arguments as to the existence or non-existence of God. The issue is that having debated this, what can now be said? In short, it can be caricatured as: here is an argument for God’s existence or here is an argument against God’s existence. But for most people this is an increasingly irrelevant argument. Their response will be: yes, I agree or no, I don’t; but few will be convinced to change their mind from one view to the other. To be blunt, the crisis is one of relevance. Kevin Schilbrack has identified a similar set of issues, stating the traditional view of Philosophy of Religion is too narrow , intellectualist and insular (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10); from this critique he develops his own manifesto for a global philosophy of religion (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140) whereby “the future of philosophy of religion should be more inclusive, more focused on practice, and more self-reflexive, but I do not think that Philosophy of religion should give up the traditional normative task of evaluating religious claims about the nature of reality.”(Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140). And therein lies the nub of the issue—even for someone attempting to rethink the future of Philosophy of Religion—because, how is that reality performed and experienced, expressed and constructed? For most people, the question is twofold: firstly, what is done or not done in the name of religion and why; and secondly what can be done or not done in the name of religion and why? For religion is as much a way of doing as a way of thinking; or perhaps in a more nuanced way the question could be: how does the doing of religion affect our thinking and how does the thinking of religion affect our doing? Yet this is where theology can be of help, for theology has never just reduced itself or limited its main focus to the question of the existence or non-existence of God. Rather theology seeks to apply the critical thinking regarding questions of God and religion to all of existence. In particular, arising from the encounter with modernity, in the mid-twentieth century there emerged what can be termed ‘‘death of god’’ theologies and secular theologies that realized they could not just focus on arguments for or against God’s existence. Footnote 1 This is why the rethinking of Philosophy of Religion is undertaken via a critical engagement with Theologies that themselves had to rethink their future in modernity. It is also interesting to note that an important mid-twentieth century collection of essays on Philosophy of Religion that in many ways, from its own time, attempted to address a very similar question to that posed by this collection, labeled itself “New Essays in Philosophical Theology” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955). As the editors noted, their choice of title occurred because ‘‘Philosophy of Religion’’ “has become, and seems likely for some time to remain, associated with Idealist attempts to present philosophical prolegomena to theistic theology” (Flew and Macintyre, 1955, viii). Interestingly for this current essay and its call to engage with death of god and secular theologies, the editors of that collection observed: “We realize that many will be startled to find the word ‘‘theology’’ so used that: the expression ‘‘theistic theologian’’ is not tautological; and the expression ‘‘atheist theologian’’ is not self-contradictory. But unless this unusual usage of ours is adopted we have to accept the paradox that those who reach opposite conclusions about certain questions must be regarded as having shown themselves to have been engaged in different disciplines.” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955, viii). So, we could say at the outset, that the future of Philosophy of Religion is to regain that name of philosophical theology and so be open to the expressions noted above in 1955. This also provides a background to what is expressed in this essay, for I also venture a future via the early theology of Karl Barth because many who found themselves as death of God or secular theologians (in particular Altizer, Hamilton, Vahanian) had arisen out of the theology of Barth and, taking seriously Barth’s criticism of modernity, sought a new relevance in light of modern, twentieth century secular culture. For just as theology had to come through its own crisis of meaning in modernity, perhaps Philosophy of Religion (or a reworked Philosophical theology?) can now gain from an encounter with those forms of theology that arose seeking a critical engagement with meaning in late modernity. Crucially, such theologies understood theology to be a constructive task of critical engagement and meaning, and it is here that the theological thought of Paul Tillich provides both a model and resource. For Tillich’s theology occupies a boundary between theology and secularity and between religion and culture, attempting always to express just what it might mean to be modern—and what we may need to draw upon to do so; and here TS Eliot provides a way to rethink what needs to be recognized.

This is also a time in which I find myself increasingly referencing Mary Ann Caw’s definition of what she terms ‘‘the manifesto moment’’ that is positioned “between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential, in a radical and energizing division” (Caws: xxi), a moment of crisis expressing “what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change” (Caws: xxiii) . These first decades of the twenty-first century seem to be decades of crisis—whether economically, politically, or socially. These are times where on the one hand we believe that via technology anything is possible—and yet the choices made seem increasingly to be those that privilege the self—and/or sectarian interests. At such times, the manifesto arises as the claim of the need to rethink so we can act in new ways. As such the manifesto moment is where the critical thinking is done, thinking that is necessarily both conjectural and radical, thinking that seeks to overturn existing orthodoxies and expectations in the hope of creating the possibility of something new, something better: a call for emancipation. What follows is an attempt to do via considering the future of Philosophy of Religion.

The time of crisis and the ‘‘necessary problem’’

We find ourselves in a time of crisis for the Philosophy of Religion—a crisis of meaning, a crisis of focus, a crisis of intent. Of course, it would be easy to state that such a crisis is inevitable given the two constituent elements of philosophy and religion; that is, what we have is the magnification, the concentration of existing crises in philosophy and religion. These are crises of meaning and crises of what future—if any—they hold that is positive. Yet is perhaps the sense of crisis is to be expected. If philosophy and religion do not think of themselves as existing in some form of crisis in modernity then we have, in effect collapsed out of modernity into that situation defined by Jean-Francios Lyotard whereby the post-modern is the return to pre-modern ways of thinking (Lyotard: p.79). For I would claim religion is ‘‘a necessary problem’’ for modernity that modernity seeks to continuously define itself against. Central to this is the challenge modernity throws down regarding religion as collective expression and claim of truth and religion as individual belief. We can trace this to the rise of the Enlightenment and the challenge to religion as political, cultural, and intellectual power. To be modern, I would argue, is to find some problem with religion as collective and individual claim; that is, to find a problem with how religion both seeks to interpret the world and human existence and meaning—and more so, how religion as collective entities and religious individuals may seek to challenge and undo modern understandings and values. For to be modern is to seek to live after religion—and yet religion continues, as both collective and individual claim, signaling that modernity is a project and not a realized state. This is why ‘‘religion is a necessary problem’’—for it reminds us that modernity is an unfinished project of emancipation within this world. Furthermore, if we trace religion back to relegare (to bind together) and to relegere (to re-read) then religion operates as the claim of an alternative to how things are organized and thought in modernity. To be modern is perhaps to attempt to live after religion—yet not be able to properly do so. To be modern is to recognize the existence of religion as a collective and individual sign that the hopes and dreams of modernity have yet to be realized. Therefore, when religion is not seen or experienced as a problem perhaps that is when we have slipped-over into the post-modern? For in the post-modern, religion becomes something we need not be emancipated from; rather it either becomes the source of an emancipation from the world and/or a means of accommodation to the world: in Marxist terms, the return of the opiate of the masses (Marx, 1844 ). As we shall see, the postmodern is also perhaps the end of the hopes and dreams of modernity, a type of collective and individual giving up of the modern aim of emancipation. We saw this shift into the post-modern with the rise of religion as just yet another lifestyle choice and part of identity-politics. That is, religion for many was not viewed as either an individual or collective problem, rather it did not matter whether people were religious nor what type of religious. We could say that such a turn to religion became an uncritical form of what Foucault termed the technologies of the self. (Foucault, 1988 ) Religion became a personal choice and expression and was not regarded nor experienced as a challenge nor critique of the collective status quo of contemporary society. Instead we saw a retreat into prosperity gospels, ecstatic Pentecostalism, and forms of evangelical emotionalism and pietism all focused upon personal salvation, often in a perverse combination of spiritual and economic divine favor. We also saw the rise of various forms of New Age beliefs as well as the turn to western Buddhism. In neo-Weberian terms, this is re-enchantment of the self, within capitalism.

Of course, such expressions are not pre-modern as per Lyotard’s description, but in their underlying endorsement of the status quo (often especially the economic status quo) and the retreat to personalist responses they signaled a shift whereby religion was, in the main, no longer experienced in the west as a problem or societal critique. Or perhaps, to be more accurate and in particular, Christianity was no longer experienced as such. At most, Christianity was regarded as a personal and collective oddity— and importantly, often regarded and dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary society. Even the rise of American evangelical Christian politics can be understood as part of this postmodern turn because this was a retreat into a form of Christianity that, in the main, turned its back on the challenges of and from modern theological and biblical scholarship. Also, its pursuit of various forms of Christian theocracy (if often never named as such) was in itself the pursuit of a pre-modern Christian governance.

Likewise, the rise of Islamic politics was and is in its own way a retreat into types of postmodern identities—whether in the rise of the revolutionary Islamic state in Iran or that of Isis, which combines postmodern identity-politics, social media religion, and nostalgic Islamist politics to tragic ends. For a theocracy can never be modern, but it certainly can be postmodern and the theocratic tendency is one form of the postmodern in the contemporary world. Similarly, the only form of religion that is really regarded and experienced as a problem in the West is that labeled radical Islam or Islamist and is so regarded because of terrorist actions and its challenge to both secular and Christian social and cultural norms. Yet here we need to be clear that whereas Christianity was regarded as a type of ‘‘necessary problem’’ for the modern West to define itself via and against, Islam is not seen or responded to in this way. Rather Islam is more often regarded as an alien problem, an external problem, a problem not central nor internal to Western self-definition. For Islam is often regarded as expressing a non-Western religion and culture (despite—or rather perhaps because of, the long history of Islam in the West). For Islam in the West is still a minority identity (despite the scaremongering of ‘‘Islamic demographics’’ evident in Europe) and so is also still responded to as part of both Western postmodern identity-politics and the identity-politics of multiculturalism.

A central theme of this essay is that while Christianity exists as and continues to be a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for Western modernity, this means it is also an intellectual and cultural resource to both draw upon—and react against. To understand how this may be so, it is useful to consider what TS Eliot expressed in the appendix to his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). First delivered as radio talks to the recently defeated Germany in 1946 and arising from Eliot’s pre-war The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he now expanded his central theme of the unity of European culture as expressed by the arts and ideas that arose out of a common Christian culture into a wider post-war discussion of culture. Eliot also saw the possible reconciliation of Modernism and Christianity as the way to restore an anti-romantic modernity against the newly defeated Volkgeist of Germany. He was, however, careful to state that the basis of European unity in a history of Christian culture did not necessitate or imply a unified contemporary Christian culture. Rather, in the modern world, the acknowledgment of a shared heritage to be drawn upon does not necessarily involve a shared belief in the present day. Developing the line of argument that would later become his famously all-inclusive definition of religion as culture and culture as “part of our lived religion” (Eliot, 1948 : p.31) Footnote 2 , Eliot commented: “It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of the Christian faith for its meaning.” (Eliot, 1948 : p.122).

This is why Christianity was expressed and experienced as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity, for modernity in the West was a modernity that arose from and in reaction to Christianity—and most importantly, from and against a Christian culture. Importantly for our discussion, Western philosophy arose primarily from a combination of, reaction to, and various rejections of classical thought and Christianity—especially, Christian theology. Therefore, any attempt to rethink philosophies in the West needs to take heed of Eliot’s insight; even if the philosophy is directly situated to reject Christianity or a Christian-derived culture, it does so because of the culture and context that sits behind it.

As has been argued, the shift to the postmodern was a shift that at a cultural level no longer saw any need to seriously engage with or even acknowledge this Christian cultural heritage. While there may have often been an uncritical turn to ‘‘the religious’’ and ‘‘the spiritual’’ in the postmodern shift, it tended to do so in a highly individualistic manner. The postmodern, especially in popular and mass forms, too often and too easily drew upon religion and that nebulous criteria deemed ‘‘the spiritual’’ as resources for identity-politics, becoming primarily used in an eclectic personal assemblage.

I have referred to Eliot because I believe he expresses a cultural truth that we seem in danger of either forgetting or misinterpreting today. For on the one hand, the emphasis on a shared or common heritage is either conveniently forgotten and/or summarily dismissed by those seeking to emphasize difference. While there was indeed the need of a corrective turn toward the acknowledgement of plurality away from a mono-cultural, mono-theological hegemony, this can and did, too often and too easily, result in a dismissal of any shared heritage or cultural lineage as merely hegemonic imposition. Yet conversely, from within such a postmodern turn, in the face of competing pluralities and identities, there is an increasingly conservative retreat into cultural, religious, and theological singularities that result in the promotion of a purist cultural and religious sectarianism against often ill-defined ‘‘others.’’ Therefore, in the case of both extremes, I wish to position Eliot’s statement as a necessary reminder of what is at stake at a time when many in our globalized societies are attempting to reconcile postmodernism and religion in forms that are types of Volkgeist . This in itself raises serious issues for Philosophy of Religion, for does it follow such moves down an essentialist, romanticist line and become in effect a de facto justification for such forms of postmodern religion? For as noted earlier, the Post-modern openness to a plurality of beliefs and cultures and viewpoints has also, unfortunately, resulted in the rise of conservative—and increasingly extremist—religio-cultural claims that increasingly circulate through both non-digital and digital outlets, expressions and networks: political parties, lobby and protest groups, print and digital media, social media, and the internet. This rise in what can be termed counter-modern positions has occurred because the theory of postmodernism as applied to beliefs, spirituality, and cultural difference (to challenge hegemony and allow difference) as has been replaced by the bureaucratic politics of postmodernity as applied to cultural identity (the creation of new hegemonic demands of classification, reordering, and rights). In particular, the shift from the Enlightenment’s suspicion and rejection of religion to the notion of the equality of all beliefs in a relativist fashion in a spirit of tolerance has had the unforseen result of the revival of intolerant expressions of faith as identity-politics. In short, we have seen the rise of the demanded tolerance of the intolerant.

What makes Eliot’s statement concerning a shared heritage different from postmodern essentialist claims is the recognition the heritage does not have to be believed in . In effect, Eliot’s statement is one of religious and cultural agnosticism, in that the agnostic (and also it could be argued, the atheist) assumes their position in reference to particular statements and expressions of belief. This issue of particularity sits at the center of Eliot’s cultural criticism. European culture has a particular legacy that each particular individual responds to by dint of being European. Yet this legacy of Christianity and Christian culture is not a collective demand as a belief upon any European individual as an individual . The individual, although they may find their thought, actions and creations occurring under the cultural influence of the legacy of Christian culture, are not, as individuals required, demanded or imposed upon to believe in Christianity. A cultural secularity has occurred that guarantees the freedom of the individual, even though the religious legacy continues, both implicitly and explicitly—to shape and define the culture they live, work, think, and create within. This is the background to the state of crisis we find ourselves in.

On how to rethink the crisis; or, hopes and dreams?

As for our present situation, the cultural critic Dick Hebdige described it thus: “Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable” (Hebdige: p.195). While Hebdige was writing 30 years ago, in many ways we still find ourselves in what could be called the postmodern interregnum: a modernity beset by postmodern banalities and exclusions without the possibility—it seems—of hopes and dreams to make the present bearable. What we have instead of hopes and dreams is a culture of distraction, the digital intensification via social media and the internet of that situation so telling dissected by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). So, to veer via Marx and his famous critique of religion as the opiate of the masses (1844), we find ourselves in a new form of digital capitalism where the opiate of the masses is a combination of postmodern identity-politics and data screen distraction.

A Barthian interlude?

I know this essay is really meant to be about what Tillich can offer us, but bear with me please for just one further deviation. If we are to think philosophically, religiously, and theologically about the crisis of modernity then we need to also look back a century to what Karl Barth did in Der Römerbrief of 1918/1919, for as Robert W. Jenson claims, Barth’s commentary “theologically divides the twentieth century from the nineteenth” (Jensen: p.2). With Barth’s Der Römerbrief a new type of theological modernity came into being: a rupture against the failures of the hopes and dreams of nineteenth century liberalism—whether theologically, religiously, or culturally. In many ways—and I acknowledge that it is perhaps heretical to say so—Barth’s Der Römerbrief was a type of proto-post-modern moment in and of itself, for it signaled a theology ‘‘without the hopes and dreams that made nineteenth century theology and culture bearable.’’

It is well known that Barth’s commentary arose as reaction to the manifesto of support for the Kaiser in 1914 signed by 93 of the most eminent German intellectuals. This occasioned nothing less a crisis of faith in the liberalism that provided his theological and cultural world up to that time. As Barth writes in 1915, “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herman, Rade, Euchen and company to the situation” (Busch: p.81); later reflecting in 1927, “they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war” (Busch: p.81). Barth regarded this failure to be an ethical one that in turn prompted him to proclaim “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order” (Busch: p.81). This is the context in which Barth turns to Romans , a turn to this text as part of a challenge to contemporary German culture Protestantism, liberal theology and a rejection of that which had developed in the wake of Schleiermacher. Romans was, therefore, positioned also against the romantic movement, idealism and pietism. (Busch: p.100) So a perceptive reader can see that while, on the one hand, I have stated that Barth’s Der Römerbrief could be a proto-postmodern rejection of nineteenth century theological and cultural modernity, on the other hand, Der Römerbrief is positioned against the forerunners of todays’ postmodern crisis. It is this that makes both Barth’s Der Römerbrief and the original Romans of Paul such fascinating—and troublesome—documents to engage with today.

One of the interesting moves of continental philosophy in the first decades of the twenty-first century is a turn to Romans , a turn back to Paul Footnote 3 —but not so much a turn to the possibilities offered by Barth. For Barth proclaims a problematic neo-orthodox theology in a critical confrontation with modernity. That is, Barth’s theology demands to be a necessary problem for modernity, holding modernity to account: modernity as theological event and modernity as cultural event. Barth’s turn to Romans is driven by the centrality of the term and idea of KRISIS Footnote 4 as biblical event that demands a theological response. For Barth, the crisis of the War and the support of the German theologians for war led to the KRISIS that asked as biblical and theological question ‘‘what decision is to be made?’’ For Barth the KRISIS was how could theology be done given the support of theologians for what had occurred? This act and the resultant KRISIS signaled the end of theology as was and the need for a new theology. Here Barth links the War to a central theological issue. The crisis of the war and more widely of modernity occurred because theology became religion. Theology gave up its role as what can be labeled corrective KRISIS and became that which celebrated human hubris in acts of divisive and destructive idolatry. For in Barth’s reading of Romans he finds the centrality of a theology opposed to all human attempts to reach God and express God’s will. These failures are identified as religion. Against religion stands Christianity and in Barth’s expression of Christianity, it rejects all human attempts to order and dominate. In his commentary Barth gives a list of all that Christianity does not support: Individualism, Collectivism, Nationalism, Internationalism, Humanitarianism, Ecclesiasticism, Nordic enthusiasm, and Devotion to western culture. Furthermore, Christianity “observes with a certain coldness the cult of both ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘civilization’’, of both Romanticism and Realism” (Barth: pp.462–463).

Barth’s turn to Romans is, therefore, a turn to a text of KRISIS in response to what he perceived as a contemporary KRISIS. In this re-turn to biblical theology and exegesis Romans became the text from which a critique of modernity and its hubris could occur and in doing so Barth repositions Romans as a text for the later critics. This turn occurs also as part of what Graham Ward identifies as the post-1914 crisis of confidence regarding language and representation, a “crisis of legitimization and confidence in Western European civilization” (Ward: p.7).

In Barth’s Der Römerbrief we have the situation of crisis (intellectual, cultural, political) as the problem of the age and the challenge of KRISIS (theological and biblical) expressed as time of decision, challenging that which is and demanding a decision in response. The war is, therefore, both crisis and KRISIS for Barth, and the crisis of the culture is symptomatic of the wider KRISIS of the age. The war, therefore, expresses clearly the KRISIS that the modern world finds itself confronted with. As the Jewish critic Will Herberg observed in 1949 , Barth’s Der Römerbrief “put to an end the smug self-satisfaction of western civilization and therewith to western man’s high illusions approaching omnipotence and perfectibility” (Herberg: p.50). Furthermore, as Herberg reminded his contemporary post-WW2 audience, crisis occurred as two types. There was the contemporary sense of crisis of seeking a truth but of which we cannot be sure we have reached and the Greek KRISIS, which is that of judgment. (Herberg: p.50).

Getting to Tillich via the ‘‘neo-”

Barth serves his purpose here with the twin signposting of crisis and KRISIS. I would suggest that as we proceed we need to also hold onto Herberg’s delineation, for the crisis of the future of Philosophy of Religion is perhaps because it has veered back from KRISIS. That is, does Philosophy of Religion involve judgment? Or is it, as Schilbrak critiqued, too narrow , intellectualist and insular? (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10).

So, when does Tillich make his appearance—and how? To get to Tillich and what he can offer, I suggest we should also remember James Clifford’s aphorism that “ ‘‘Post’’ is always shadowed by ‘‘neo’’”(Clifford: p.227). The crisis of religion can, therefore, be understood via this as the rise of the neo-modern. And what of the crisis of philosophy? Again, I would also situate philosophy as the alternate ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity; for both religion and philosophy attempt to hold the modern—that is the modus (the just now )—to critique and challenge (or in Barthian terms, to the judgment of KRISIS). Likewise, modernity was often suspicious of the basis and authority of claims made by the religious and the philosophical, especially if they claim a non-material basis. What occurred was a type of unresolved dialectic whereby any synthesis occurred within modernity and with a greater compromise of either religion or philosophy than of modernity itself. The question became one of what degree of accommodation could modernity make? Or more truthfully, what degree of accommodation was modernity prepared to make? This saw the rise of secular religious thought as a rethinking of religion as ‘‘necessary problem’’ within modernity. For philosophy, the issue was a different one. Lacking the public impact and collective identities that religion its various forms could call upon, philosophy either retreated to the academy or became political philosophies that in mass movements such as fascism or state communism were tragically—and inevitably I would argue given their hegemonic ideological collectivism—expressed in totalitarian regimes of oppression and mass death.

Conversely, in the turn to the postmodern—which is as Lyotard observes also the turn to the pre-modern—religion and philosophy hold a less problematic place; why is this? Because religion and philosophy become in effect, lifestyle choices, reduced to the personal away from the public and so while we may be in a crisis we lack the corrective of KRISIS.

Why Tillich matters

It is now time, finally, to bring in Paul Tillich (1886–1965) as a resource for a rethought neo-modern possibility that restores religion and philosophy as the necessary problems of the neo-modern. I want to begin with his famous statement (almost now a Tillichian cliché) from On the Boundary (1967), that “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (Tillich, 1967 : pp.69–70). Yet what is often forgotten or perhaps even deliberately excluded, is the equally important statement that precedes this: “The relationship between religion and culture must be defined from both sides of the boundary” (Tillich, 1967 : p.69). This is why I included the earlier digression via Eliot for he attempted such definitions in his analysis.

Tillich’s starting point is that “religion is an aspect of the human spirit” that “presents itself to us as religious” when “we look at the human spirit from a special point of view” (Tillich, 1959 : p.5). Tillich clarifies this by stating “religion is not a special function of man’s spiritual life, but it is the dimension of depth in all of its functions” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.5–6), and then he provides his famous description: “Religion, in the largest and most basic sense if the word, is ultimate concern, and ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.7–8).

This provides our entry point for reconsidering the future of Philosophy of Religion. For as Tillich articulates, to attempt to separate thinking about religion from thinking about culture—and vice versa—is to fail to properly engage with either religion or culture. Yet, to be clear, this does not mean that our thinking on either involves an uncritical engagement, for as has been outlined, the issues of postmodern culture are expressed in postmodern religion just as the turn to the uncritical self helped to drive the worst excesses of postmodern culture.

Of course, both religion and culture are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down and define, which is a central reason why they are often engaged with academically via the interdisciplinary lens of ‘‘studies.’’ So, let us attempt a clarification here: to think about religion and culture via Tillich is also to think about these concepts and experiences via the legacy of Western Christian thought and culture. Of course, the expressions of religion and culture can be expanded outwards from this legacy, but this legacy is, as argued via Eliot, central to Western modernity and what we are arguing for here is a neo-modern turn and engagement that restores religion and philosophy as ‘‘necessary problems.’’ Therefore, to think about religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ via Tillich is also to think about religion as ultimate concern present in all creative functions of the human spirit. That is, the ‘‘necessary problem’’ that takes form as ultimate concern in culture. Religion is, therefore, to be thought about as that which raises ultimate questions within cultural expressions. However, to remember the other side of Tillich’s insight, these cultural expressions also put forward that, which as ultimate concern, is to be thought of as religious. These may—and indeed probably will and I would argue should—challenge that which we wish too easily, from the side of existing religion, philosophy of religion, theology and their institutions, to prescribe and define as ‘‘religion.’’ Otherwise, in our thinking about religion, we are only thinking about that which we (from the side of religion) expect to be religious and accept as existing religion. We forget that cultural expressions arise out of the concerns, questions and experiences of culture. In our view culture includes that heritage Eliot emphasized and, importantly its current expressions that arise out of—and against—that heritage.

Ultimate concern is, therefore, an expression arising from hermeneutics: how do we interpret the times we find ourselves in and what do we give rise to that offers a critique? It is in this way both religion and philosophy occur as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity because they exist as problematic critiques of and from within modern culture. That is, religion and philosophy exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in three ways: as resources to draw upon; as ways of thinking to enable us to express those hopes and dreams that make modernity bearable; and as ways to critique that which makes modernity seem unbearable. However, we must be clear that to make modernity bearable is not the same as to make it enjoyable. Rather, in my understanding from Hebdige, ‘‘bearable’’ means making modernity meaningful—and meaningful in a way that is not just for me and my own pleasure. To draw upon Barth in the way a pure Tillichian never would, ‘‘bearable’’ means engaging with the crisis of modernity via expressions and thoughts of KRISIS. And what is the crisis of modernity? It is nothing more nor less than the secular turn of living ‘‘after God.’’ The crisis of modernity is realizing that ‘‘after God’’ we humans are responsible for the world and what happens in it. Ultimate concern is, therefore, our response today, to modernity after God. Here, we start to see the possibilities emerge for a secular Philosophy of Religion.

Towards a secular religious thought

Werner Schufler notes that when we understand via Tillich that theology is necessarily a theology of culture then everything becomes a theme for theology. (Schufler: p.15) I wish to expand this in two ways. Firstly, via Tillich we can understand that religion as ultimate concern is necessarily a religion of culture and, therefore, every cultural creation that deals with issues of ultimate concern becomes a theme for thinking about religion. It is here that the crisis and the KRISIS of religion and culture in modernity exist in creative tension. But then, I would argue further—via Gabriel Vahanian’s tracing of secular back to saeculum : the world of shared human experience (Vahanian: p.21)—that under-sitting all of this is what I would term secular theology; and culture is both wherein and whereby theology is created and also what theology is created in response to. Here, I acknowledge that cries of ‘‘crypto-theology’’ will be raised by those seeking a Philosophy of Religion (Continental or otherwise) after—and/or against theology. But I would argue that our thinking and understandings of religion are derived from theology and that there is no sui generis ‘‘religion’’ that exists in and by itself—even as a concept. Rather, religion is the forms our theological thinking takes: the forms in social organization, the forms in cultural and political expression. So, to think about religion is, at root, to think about theology and to think theologically. And what is the root, the radix of this theology? It is the noun ‘‘God’’, which I express and understand as the claim that holds within it both the excess and limit of possibility. Religion is the social and cultural response to this, expressed as ultimate concern. Theology is, therefore, a secular exercise and critique (arising out of and in response to the world of shared human experience) and is far more secular than the often sectarian and anti-secular expressions of religion. A Philosophy of Religion can, broadly speaking, proceed in two directions. It can be a Philosophy of Religion that, in its engagement with philosophy of culture, be a form of secular theology and, therefore, exist as continuing the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Or it can retreat into sui generis , essentialist, idealist and romanticist notions of religion that privilege the self and become unproblematic for modernity. In short, in the second option, it stops trying to make modernity bearable and rather attempts to make postmodernity enjoyable—for me. The question of the future of Philosophy of Religion is, therefore, also a political one and situated in response to how we may wish to engage with modernity—and for whom? I would argue that this political question—who are we thinking for and why —is what enables us to make sense, today of the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (Tillich, 1964b : p.264). In this way, a Philosophy of Religion that engages with ultimate concern is never static and it finds its expression in continuous new ways. If we are unable to think this, if we are unable to engage with this from both sides of religion and culture then we find ourselves unable to properly engage in either Philosophy of Religion or Philosophy of Culture. In understanding this we need to think through Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). While on the one hand this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, I wish to insert culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a Theology of Culture also engages with a Philosophy of Culture, just as a Philosophy of Religion must engage with a Philosophy of Culture. For it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. Even more than this, culture is the central expression of the human spirit and occurs as language, artistic and intellectual creations, popular and elite expressions and manifestations of human identity. We also need to remember critic Raymond Williams’ comment that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (Williams, 1976 : p.87). Culture, for Williams, can take three broad forms: that of individual enlightenment; that of the particular way of life of a group; and as cultural activity, often expressed and organized though cultural productions and institutions. What is important to note is that these can and do compete against each other and in such competition we can see ‘‘culture’’ used in a polemical fashion. We should also note that those cultural expressions of religion, theology and philosophy can also take polemical forms. But we must remember that Culture is also ‘‘ordinary’’, for it encompasses all the diverse means by which people are shaped and in turn give shape to their lived experience. This ‘‘shaping and giving shape’’ is where theology, religion and philosophy arise—as does politics. That is, they arise as the means in which lived experience is shaped, whereby what we can call the second-tier expressions of philosophy and religion (and of course politics and theology) arise out the primary tier of culture. Here, we slightly part company with Tillich, remembering that for him ‘‘ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit.’’ I would wish to ensure that ultimate concern is not given an essence or an agency for it is but short step from there to idealism and even to sui generis notions of ultimate concern. Rather than ultimate concern being manifest, I would argue that ultimate concern can be interpreted as being manifest, that is, ultimate concern is a hermeneutical category and activity. That is, ultimate concern is not a thing in itself, existing separate to or separate within human construction, expression, and creation. Therefore, what ultimate concern is interpreted as being and expressing is also a question of politics. Here, we can draw again on Barth and use his twin categories of crisis and KRISIS for it is via these, in a hermeneutical activity, drawn from the positions of philosophy and religion as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity that the politics of ultimate concern can be articulated. That is, why do I wish to identify this as ultimate concern in these creative functions and what are the implications of my doing so? What is the crisis that this ultimate concern speaks to and what is the KRISIS judgment it articulates? And just as importantly, via Elliot, what traditions do I draw upon in order to make such an interpretation? Therefore, only by thinking seriously about culture (Philosophy of Culture) can we think seriously about religion (Philosophy of Religion)—and vice versa. It is only through this, I would argue, that we can hold in creative tension that identified by Tillich as “the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). Confronted the void, the abyss of existence, we respond by creative functions of the human spirit. Yet it is only via theology that we can understand these as expressing a justification of the human spirit that does not become idolatry. For I would argue that theology is a response to the void that seeks to make life meaningful for others . It draws on a tradition in which the individual is called upon to act for others in the name of love: love expressed as the excess and limit of possibility; Love that is expressed also as crisis and KRISIS. Footnote 5 It is this that makes religion a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity. Conversely, a response to the void that only makes or only seeks to make life meaningful for me is theologically an act of idolatry and anti-human in intent.

What I arguing for, via Tillich, is therefore a re-thought Philosophy of Religion that exists in a creative, hermeneutical tension with a Philosophy of Culture that views religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity; it is from this position that a future for Philosophy of Religion can begin to be articulated. A re-thought Philosophy of Religion exists as the critical engagement with culture whereby what is created and presented as ultimate concern is held up to hermeneutical engagement in light of the tradition from which the culture and religion arise. In this, religion and theology exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’—unable to be dismissed or excised but neither able to singularly determine what occurs nor what is to possibly be. Culture likewise is rethought as that which gives rise—in various creative expressions—to that determined through hermeneutical engagement and KRISIS to be ultimate concern. In all of this therefore, the future of the Philosophy of Religion occurs as the politics of what I term a radical secular theology: seeking to ask questions of and critique ultimate concern in and for this world of shared human experience in the name of the excess and limit of possibility arising from an emancipatory hermeneutics of tradition and culture. How we might approach this via Tillich proceeds from some insights from his Systematic Theology 1 . Firstly: “…in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern can actualize itself” (Tillich, 1964a : p.16). Or, as I would secularize this: in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern is able to be possibly interpreted and responded to . Secondly, we must also hear Tillich’s caution of culture in that “idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy”. (Tillich, 1964a : p.126). Thirdly, the basis for a secular theology (a theology from and of the word of shared human experience) is made clear: “…on every page of every religious or theological text these concepts appear: time, space, cause, thing, subject, nature, movement, freedom, necessity, life, value, knowledge, experience, being and non-being”.(Tillich, 1964a : p.24).

A secular theology is how these concepts are interpreted and expressed, critiqued and engaged within ways via theology and religion that express them as part of the ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity and also, most crucially, in ways that can make modernity bearable for others . What makes such a secular theology radical is that such a theology occurs as hermeneutical event out of the tradition yet also after the abyss of the void of the death of God that institutes modernity. That is, what can the name God mean as hermeneutical critique, event and thought in the world of shared human experience to act as crisis and KRISIS to make modernity bearable for others ? Tillich becomes our guide because as he remarks: “Since the split between a faith unacceptable to culture and culture unacceptable to faith was not possible for me, the only alternative was the attempt to interpret the symbols of faith through expressions of our own culture”. (Tillich, 1964b : p.5). It is this that provides the first half of a re-thought Philosophy of Religion, acknowledging religion’s unacceptability as the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Similarly, we remember—via Eliot—that culture arises from the traditions formed by faith and now secularized. Drawing on Tillich, both are ways to express those responses to the ‘‘necessary problem’’, which can be labeled ultimate concern. Yet neither religion or culture nor the thinking about them can be properly engaged with from a Tillichian-derived perspective unless we engage with the other; otherwise neither faith/religion nor culture are secular, becoming instead sectarian idolatry and concerned with the self and not for others.

In considering how to proceed, it is useful to draw upon contemporary radical theology. Here I consider one of central statements to be that made by Robbins and Crockett regarding the role of theology in the work of Charles Winquist: “Theology was a discourse formulation that functioned to fissure other discourses by pushing them to their limits and interrogating them as to their sense and practicality” (in Winquist: p.10). We can also note similarities with Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School that Tillich found much in common with. The Frankfurt School, even though a neo-Marxist movement, recognized the value of theology because, as expressed by Eduardo Mendieta: “…critical theory…is reason criticizing itself” (Mendeita: p.7). In contemporary Modernity, theology, once vanquished, and religion, once segregated by the Enlightenment, are both being reemployed by critical theory because of their value as self-reflexive, critical tools. In particular theology, in its critique of existence itself, as “reason in search of itself” (Mendeita: p.10) acts as the self-critical reflexion on both society and religion. It is here that Tillich’s position as theologian of the boundary readily enables such a critique. The future for such a Philosophy of Religion as I am outlining also occurs because, as critical theorist Helmet Peukert declares, both Enlightenment and theology are unfinished projects in that both are continually to having to self-reflexively prove themselves anew as critical endeavors. (Peukert: p.353) As such, modernity occurs as a series of on-going ‘‘necessary problems’’ that seeks to make life bearable— for others . Therefore, how we think critically in modernity is the basis of how we choose to act for others . This is the future for the Philosophy of Religion and, as discussed, it occurs in a critical hermeneutics with Philosophy of Culture; that is, philosophy undertaken for others to make modernity bearable.

It is important to clarify that theology, as expressed by the Frankfurt School, is “inverse, or negative theology [that] must reject and refute God, for the sake of God, and it must also reject and refute religion for the sake of what the religion prefigures and recalls” (Mendeita: pp.10–11). Therefore the radical secular theology I am arguing for is not theology as commonly understood, but rather a self-reflexive, critical, secular theology that stands as “argumentative discourse” (Peukert: p.368) in critique of both institutional, orthodox theology and those forms of Philosophy of Religion that seek to shy away from its role as argumentative discourse within modernity.

Carl Raschke, like Robbins and Crockett engaging with the legacy of Winquist, in tracing a lineage back to Kant argues, “To think intensely what remains concealed in the depths of thought is to think theologically”, and yet, because of the Enlightenment, such theological thinking has become “a very difficult, if not impossible, peculiar labor” (in Winquist: xiii). Here, we also hear a challenge from situating theology in dialectic with deconstruction, whereby in Modernity, theology is now “a thought that has learned to think what is unthought within the thought of itself” (in Winquist: xv). The challenge from this for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Culture is clear. If religion and culture wish to be meaningful within an ongoing Modernity and so engage with that which is—as of yet—unthought within religion and culture they too must engage with the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of theology. For theology in modernity had to become a problem unto itself and for everything else: a crisis and KRISIS of its own thinking and articulation to ensure it retained its necessity and could not be consigned to irrelevance. Or, as I would state, in Modernity, theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and ‘‘religion.’’ I realize that this may be a difficult concept and even more difficult expression to comprehend. So, let me try and put it this way. Theology, if it seeks a meaningful engagement with the world of shared human experience (the saeculum ), is where and whereby we become aware of and critique what secularity and religion prefer not to think. As such, it is theology from which we stand—with Tillich—on the boundary between secularity and religion, between religion and culture. The crisis and KRISIS for both Philosophy of Culture and Philosophy of Religion is actually their desire not to engage with theologizing, that is ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’; for the challenge of theology is that of a self-reflexivity regarding that which we designate ‘‘religion’’, ‘‘the sacred and the profane’’ and ‘‘the secular’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ The centrality of theology occurs because theology is self-reflexivity about being human and what, in Tillichian terms we designate ‘‘ultimate concern.’’ Here, we can also draw upon what Charles Winquist notes regarding the self-reflexivity of theology—that is thinking about thinking—in that theology demands that then “we have to decide why we are calling any particular datum ‘‘religious’’” (Winquist: p.182). To this I would add that theology demands further decisions regarding the designations ‘‘sacred’’, ‘‘profane’’, ‘‘secular’’, and ‘‘culture’’—and of course ‘‘ultimate concern.’’

Radical secular theology is, therefore, done in modernity ‘‘after God’’, as a self-reflexive human activity of ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’ as to what is to be done for others , undertaken on the boundary between religion and culture. It is secular because we remember Vahanian’s maxim that, “in a pluralistic world, it is not religion we have in common. What we have in common is the secular” (Winquist: p.96). As to what this might mean and entail, a way to ‘‘think the future’’ is to consider another option from the past. In 1970, the theologian Van A Harvey reflecting on his own “zig-zag career—from department of religion (4 years) to seminary (10 years) back to department of religion” (Harvey: p.17) raised the issue of “the possibility and even the relevance of traditional systematic theology in our pluralistic and secular culture.” At that time, Harvey saw a new home and possibility for theology in Religious Studies, that included the possibility of “a new and probably non-Christian theology of some sort” being developed that is “ more strictly philosophical and does not at all understand itself as a servant of a church or a tradition.”[emphasis added] (Harvey: p.21). Referencing Victor Preller of Princeton, Harvey termed this a “meta-theology” (Harvey: p.28) or “a genuinely secular theology” (Harvey: p.28).

The future for Philosophy of Religion as I envisage it via Tillich is also in line with this option arising from Harvey. Yet both secular theology and a radically secular Philosophy of Religion are yet to find homes in either religious studies or philosophy. Rather, in a very Tillichian fashion, they exist ‘‘on the boundary’’ between such disciplines: too theological for philosophy and too secular for many in religious studies. Instead, such thinking tends to arise from those who find themselves ‘‘on the boundary’’ between disciplines which means there a critical tension between such thinking being written and such thinking being taught. This is not to say that there are not religious studies departments and philosophy programmes where such thinking is both taught and written. But they are few in number. What is interesting is how much of such thinking occurs from individuals located in various disciplines and departments neither labeled religious studies nor philosophy and who yet manage to write—and surprisingly often (if somewhat subversively) teach such thinking. Usually such departments are engaged in the critical study of culture in some way and these thinkers—often without even knowing they are doing so—are engaging in the critical hermeneutic of religion and culture argued for in this paper. Therefore, in many ways the future of Philosophy of Religion is already being undertaken, but we have to increasingly look outside of the expected places and voices to find it. Drawing on such places and voices, in finding a way beyond the split of religion and culture unacceptable to each other, we seek a rethinking of religion and culture each as ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity, necessary problems that articulate ultimate concern for others . Tillich’s thought can, therefore, be a basis of emancipatory potential for a secular radical theology of religion and culture as hermeneutics, in the name of that noun and its tradition used to express the limit and excess of possibility in the name of love for others.

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Perhaps still the best introduction to these debates regarding the challenges of theology in modernity is that set out in AN Prior’s “Can Religion Be Discussed?”. Written in 1942, Prior was a theologian, who at this time was in transition to becoming a philosopher and in particular, a noted logician. See AN Prior, “Can Religion Be Discussed?”, in A Flew and A MacIntyre New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1963) [orig. 1955].

Eliot’s inclusive definition of culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby day, Henley regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.” TS Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1948), 31. As Eliot goes on to note “bishops are part of English culture and horses and dogs are part of English religion.” Op.cit.32.

This ‘‘turn to Paul/Romans’’ includes: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism , trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses. Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul. On Justice . (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul , ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich and Christoph Schulte (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute—or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London/ New York: Verso, 2000), Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The perverse core of Christianity , (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003). It is noted that the re-turn to Paul extends beyond Romans and that this re-turn has become an ever-expanding sub-field in both Continental thought and political theology. For an interesting overview, see Matthew Bullamore, ‘‘The Political Resurrection of Saint Paul’’ TELOS 134, Spring, 2006: pp.173–182.

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Grimshaw, M. The future of the philosophy of religion is the philosophy of culture—and vice versa . Palgrave Commun 4 , 72 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0129-1

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11 Culture and Religion

Matt Waggoner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Albertus Magnus College, New Haven, USA.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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This article surveys trajectories of religious inquiry whose antecedents commonly stem from the classical sociological tradition, but whose outcomes vary with respect to the way they deal with reductive tendencies in the social sciences. To whatever extent contemporary studies of religion remain divided, as has been suggested by Russell T. McCutcheon, between essentialist theories and social-constructivist theories, the discussion argues that the key contribution of cultural analyses of religion consists in the way it has problematised this well-worn impasse by positing the possibility of a non-reductive yet thoroughly sociological study of religion. It examines the thinking of Durkheim, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida on culture and religion. The article also provides a historical and sociological critique of the notion of religion as a state of affairs, rather than a state of mind, a debate that in the social sciences goes back to Durkheim and Marx.

Introduction

Like other disciplines in the humanities, over the course of the last couple of decades, religious studies has fashioned itself in relation to the discourses of ‘culture’ and, indirectly, cultural studies. In practical terms this entailed the importation of new avenues of inquiry, with new vocabularies, enlisting headings like postcolonial theory, feminist theory, gender theory (women's studies as well as masculinity studies), gay and lesbian studies (or queer theory), critical race studies, diaspora studies, media studies, and more. This new face of the discipline shapes the conference programs of groups like the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the International Association of the History of Religions (IAHR), the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and related organizations. It also prompted the creation of new journals like Culture and Religion , the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory , the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture , and others. Peruse the table of contents of an anthology such as Critical Terms for Religious Studies and notice the virtual absence of entries with explicitly ‘religious’ connotations; they include, instead, standard categories in the lexicon of cultural studies: body, gender, modernity, conflict, culture, experience, image, liberation, transformation, transgression, performance, person, territory, writing (M. C. Taylor 1998 ).

In entries similar to the current one that appear in recent anthologies in religious studies, historians of religion Bruce Lincoln and Tomoko Masuzawa approached the subject of culture by surveying the history of the term and theories that emphasize conflict, power, negotiation, and fluidity (Lincoln 2000 ; Masuzawa 1998 ). Their essays model a study of religion as culture: that is, a human social production in which the rhetoric of gods and transcendence encodes social preoccupations with power, privilege, and identity formation. The reader is strongly encouraged to seek out these essays as indispensable resources for any attempt to consider the relationship between religion and culture. The present contribution differs slightly. It regards the association of religion and culture as a signifier for certain methodological and theoretical innovations. Here the question is not, What is culture and how might we study religion as culture? , but instead, How has ‘culture’ become emblematic of certain orientations toward agency and structure, ideology and system, subjective experience and subject formation? How have these intervening orientations informed the study of religion, challenging which rubrics of analysis? What fruitful lines of inquiry remain open to studies of religion situated at the intersection of ‘religion and culture’?

In what follows I survey trajectories of religious inquiry whose antecedents commonly stem from the classical sociological tradition, but whose outcomes vary with respect to the way they deal with reductive tendencies in the social sciences. To whatever extent contemporary studies of religion remain divided, as has been suggested by Russell T. McCutcheon, between essentialist theories (with roots in the phenomenological tradition) and social-constructivist theories (with roots in the social sciences), it will be argued here that the key contribution of cultural analyses of religion consists in the way it has problematized this well-worn impasse by positing the possibility of a non-reductive yet thoroughly sociological study of religion (McCutcheon 2003 ).

The Marxist Tradition: Culture, Cultural Studies, and Ideology Critique

Historically, ‘culture’ evoked the accoutrements of bourgeois life, intimating standards of taste, the greatest products that civilizations had to offer, the best books, musical compositions, and works of art. It implied a notion of canon as inclusion within what a given class in society privileged as uniquely emblematic of a culture. As such, ‘culture’ sanctioned a sphere of art and ideas which would preserve a dominant faction's definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful (Williams 1977 ; 1983 ; 1985 ).

Marginal currents of twentieth-century Marxism later radicalized the concept and political significance of culture, the result of a specific history of reflection on the significance of culture dating back to the Enlightenment. Expanding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Romantic ideal of the ‘voice within’ as a guide for remaining true to oneself or authentic, Johann Gottfried Herder considered the way in which nations coalesced around essential value sets, structures of feeling, and ways of being, unifying members into coherent communities with shared, authentic life ways. For G. W. F. Hegel, culture expressed more than the pure particularity of national life ways; the specificity of historical communities and their cultural practices participated in the epic realization of the Absolute (Spirit, Reason, or Geist ) in history. Hegel invested culture with the significance of history's movement toward concrete forms of reason in history, its endpoint the achievement of societies attaining freedom no longer as an abstract concept (as he maintained Immanuel Kant's was) but as an embodied experience mediated by the cultures and polities of modern republican states (Taylor 2003 ).

In the shadow of Hegelian philosophy, German and, later, British Marxism resuscitated a new form of ambivalence towards culture, this time as either the domain of ruling-class ideology or the terrain in which the struggle for freedom occurs. In Britain especially, the New Left and cultural studies emerged in the 1960s as attempts to interrogate this ambiguity by working with and against traditional Marxian-Hegelian paradigms. A founding figure within that tradition, Raymond Williams's late twentieth-century work concentrated largely on the question of culture's place in histories of Marxist thought, wresting Marx's texts from the way in which orthodox, scientific Marxism interpreted them. Distancing himself from a mechanical style of Marxist theory and practice, Williams noted that Marx's early philosophical writings, which had suffered obscurity for many years after Marx's death, conveyed rather different attitudes toward the relation between structural and cultural formations. He argued that Marx rarely, and unsystematically, employed many of the concepts commonly associated with him, such as false consciousness and base/superstructure. And many of the early texts, as well as Engels's clarifications after Marx's death, flatly contradicted the spirit of those earlier readings. Instead of economic determinism, a view of ideology as an active and equally determining sphere in its own right (rather than the passive product of more substantive processes) emerged from close readings of the early Marx (Williams 1977 ).

E. P. Thompson

A lesser-known feature of the history of Marxist thought consists in its long-held preoccupation with religion, not just in the form of a critique of religious ideology, but through its attempts to comprehend religious movements that in some ways mirrored Marxism's own desire to mobilize the working classes to spontaneous outbursts. One example of Marxism's complex engagement with religion is the case of English Methodism. The combination of working-class support systems and collective eruptions led Marxists and other historians of Britain's failed revolution to want to understand in political terms the social significance of revivalism.

This debate became closely associated with Elie Halevy, Eric Hobsbawm, and Thompson. At mid-century, Hobsbawm and Thompson responded to Halevy's early twentieth-century thesis that Methodist revivalism frustrated revolution in England, thwarting the proletarianization of the working classes by distracting them with other-worldly concerns. Halevy ( 1961 [1911] ) maintained that revivalism compensated for its political quietism with ritual histrionics. In the 1950s, Hobsbawm ( 1957 ) challenged Halevy's thesis by pointing to evidence that the correspondence between church membership and radical society rosters seemed to indicate that revival-goers were no less politically engaged than others, and that, in fact, Methodism seemed to support working-class agitations. Six years later, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) Thompson introduced a complex account of the way in which Methodist revivalism ebbed and lowed in tandem with swings in radical political activity, concluding that religious spontaneity provided outlets for pent-up political frustrations. Thompson labeled this cathartic function of revival religions ‘psychic masturbation’; Methodism's revival tendencies were emotional surrogates for unexpressed political grievances.

Arguably, Thompson's conclusions advanced very little beyond orthodox Marxism's ideology critique of religion as a dead-end distraction, if not a smokescreen benefiting and perhaps even propagated by the ruling classes. In the end he viewed Methodism as an impotent and misdirected response to political conflict, a ‘reactive dialectic’. In any case, the seriousness with which Thompson contemplated Methodism's place in the making of English class consciousness improved upon the mechanistic model in other ways. In particular, Thompson rethought class, no longer in rigid economic terms, where one's class identity mirrors one's position in dominant modes of production, but instead in terms of ‘class consciousness’ (citing Georg Lukács's use of that term earlier in the century, cf. History and Class Consciousness ). Thompson argued in the introduction to The Making of the English Working Class for an experiential understanding of class consciousness, reliant upon modes of feeling and perception shaped not only by structural conditions but by cultural practices as well, including religious ones.

Whatever their limitations were, Thompson's arguments about English Methodism affirmed that the cultural and the political are linked inextricably. Even if Thompson toed the Marxist line by reducing cultural processes to underlying structural realities, he did at least unsettle the formulaic shape it usually assumed. The radicalization of what remained implicit in Thompson's argument eventually constituted the central claim of cultural studies in Britain, both in the works of Raymond Williams and under the intellectual leadership of Jamaican-born British sociologist Stuart Hall.

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall's writing demonstrates how influential the claims of Raymond Williams were that Marx was susceptible to plausible, alternative readings which militated against the reductionism normally attributed to him. In ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees’, Hall performed his own exegesis of Marx's texts, concluding, with Williams, that only a narrow reading of Marx sustains the view of culture as secondary and epiphenomenal. Hall argued that for Marx culture instead exists in a ‘co-determining’ relation to productive forces in society. Moreover, Marx appeared to regard culture as part of a process whereby societies (or factions within them) do not simply deceive themselves and others; rather, culture comprises the ‘processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into historical action against the prevailing system’ (Hall 1996c : 27).

Hall's work added to Williams's contribution the insights of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose early twentieth-century writings from prison had only recently been recovered after a period of obscurity, much like Marx's. Hall was largely responsible for bringing Gramsci to a wider audience and distilling from his texts implications for the study of class, culture, race, and ethnicity, as well as his critique of economic reductionism and his more optimistic view of the role that ideologies play in what Gramsci called the ‘hegemonic’ process (Hall 1996b ). In short, Gramsci imagined a position marginal to the orthodox Marxism of his day by considering how non-metropolitan, ‘subaltern’ classes do not follow the trajectory of normative proletarianization that both Marx and Marxists predicted on the basis of their analyses of productive processes in the centers of industrial Europe.

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks criticized and undermined analyses of economic determinism that relegate culture to the status of a derivative reflection of more determinate processes. He considered the role that popular religion (as well as street theater, music, and other things) played in facilitating among subaltern masses a sense of identity and opposition to dominant social forces (Gramsci 1971 ). Hall wielded Gramsci's notes as an affirmation of ideology in the process of subject formation in ways that could not simply be regarded along traditional lines as duping, but instead as critical engagements with hegemony, or what he and others began to call counter-hegemonic discourses. In the spirit of Gramsci, Hall's phrase ‘Marxism without guarantees’ continues to serve as a kind of slogan for the anti-reductive claims upon which cultural studies was founded (Hall et al.   2000 ).

These recollections of the emergence of cultural studies suggest that the intersection culture-religion carries with it an implicit theoretical rejection of reductive approaches, retaining, however, the claim that one can study religion methodologically as a social phenomenon. In other words, they suggest the compatibility of sociological with non-reductive studies of religion. To whatever extent this narrative of the relationship between a cultural turn in religious studies and the history of Marxist cultural studies is anything like correct, we should not overlook an important irony with respect to other traditions of cultural and religious study. That is to say, while the influence of Marxist cultural studies on religious studies consists primarily of a shift away from reductive theories, the general pattern elsewhere among scientific approaches to the study of religion has been less consistent.

Social-Scientific studies of Culture and Religion

The study of religion as just one among many cultural formations (with no more privileged status than any other) characterizes much of the social-science tradition since at least the nineteenth century. Yet these traditions yield no consensus with respect to the question of reduction. In this section I briefly survey how a few key contributions to the sociological study of religion outside the Marxist tradition imagined religion's relation to culture; secondly, I comment on how these classical approaches in the sociology of religion inform contemporary work in religious studies, where questions of culture and reductionism prevail.

The Classical Tradition

Whereas according to traditional readings Marx reduced religion to socioeconomic causes, according to an equally traditional reading Max Weber reversed the order by arguing that one religion—namely, Protestantism—significantly contributed to the formation and success of socio-economic patterns in Europe such as capitalism. In fact, however, Weber proceeded with indefatigable caution in order not to suggest that Protestantism acted as a determining cause; he claimed only to show that Protestantism enabled the ideological atmosphere in which capitalism could and did thrive in Europe. In any case, Weber's legacy in subsequent sociology and religious studies runs counter to explicitly reductive approaches by considering how ideologies are not simply by-products of underlying processes but also play determining roles in the construction of society.

Alongside Marx and Weber, Émile Durkheim introduced a third classical source of sociological inquiry in the study of religion. Durkheim's thesis in Elementary Forms of Religious Life that collective consciousnesses project the sacred—that societies construct religion, and that religious formations enact social formation through a kind of group transference—represents another version of the claim about religion's essential sociality. Like Marx, Durkheim treated religion as a product of the imagination—‘religious society is only human society stretched ideally to beyond the stars’ (1972: 220)—but, unlike Marx, he regarded the function of an imaginary locus of group identity as indispensable to the construction of societies; there can be no society without this collective identification with an external object which simultaneously transcends and congeals the group. To simplify, we might say: for Durkheim religion occasions the social; for Weber religion shapes the social; and for Marx religion symptomatizes the social.

The Contemporary Tradition

Secondly, W. C. Smith's view of ‘religion’ as a modern, Western concept resurfaced a few decades later in one of the most frequently cited remarks in Religious Studies: Jonathan Z. Smith's argument in the introduction to Imagining Religion that ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious— there is no data for religion . Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy’ (J. Z. Smith 1982 ). J. Z. Smith's thesis has been debated and commented on at length, in part because of its susceptibility to so many interpretations. Did he mean that religion ‘in itself’ eludes our grasp, and that we are left with no other recourse than to imagine it? Did he mean, alternatively (and most probably), that religion has no existence apart from our fabrications of it? In another register, did he mean to suggest that the history of the production of ‘religion’ as an object of study was the result merely of academic reification, and not of a certain cultural politics beyond the academy? Did the invention of religion and religions not also take place within the context of the colonial imagination and those other settings in which comparisons of peoples and their cultures informed the self-fashioning of Europe and its justification for dominating and conquering non-European others?

These questions highlight similarities between Smith's thesis and Edward Said's only three years before in a seminal text of post-colonial theory, Orientalism : that the ‘Orient’ as such does not exist, but is instead a reified product of the Western imperial imagination (Said 1979 ). One might also compare J. Z. Smith's claim, in ‘Map is Not Territory’ (1978), that within the framework of the history of religion, primitive peoples literally do not exist, because they fail to register within the discourses of ‘religion’ codified by the academy, to Gayatri Spivak's ( 1987 ) provocative suggestion (in another seminal work in postcolonial theory) that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ because her speech is incomprehensible to dominant discourses of meaning, speech, agency, and recognition.

In any case, J. Z. Smith's remark seems at least to acknowledge, as W. C. Smith's had, that the contemporary habit of imagining religion as a discrete object, embodied by a number of discrete entities (‘religions’), indicates less the way things are and more the way we imagine them to be —a social-constructivist thesis (Smith identified it with Kant, presumably with the idea that we do not grasp things themselves but must instead represent them to ourselves, a process involving imaginative acts of cognition and classification). But, unlike W. C. Smith, J. Z. Smith refused to subscribe to a notion of religion as ‘faith’ or anything like it. Religion, for J. Z. Smith, can be grasped only as a fiction, even if, as he was not at all reluctant to state, a necessary fiction. In other words, while we must study ‘religion’ and ‘religions’, we must do so cognizant of the fact that these reifications simply assist us in the taxonomic effort of studying the ways in which humans construct worlds and world views (J. Z. Smith 1996 ). The requirement of the scholar of world-construction processes is that she not naively imitate religious participants' mental errors by mistaking the discourse of ‘religion’ for a real object. Although Smith likened his approach to Kant's, I would argue that his ‘imagining religion’ thesis fits better with the empiricism of David Hume, who similarly maintained that while we cannot live without the inferences we routinely make (e.g., about causation), we must remain cognizant of the real limits, even impoverishment, of our knowledge.

Particularly in his very important Discourse , Lincoln aligned himself with Marxists like Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci as someone interested in relations of power as they permeate culture. He argued that culture, especially religion, serves as a site for ongoing negotiations for power and privilege in society, or the ‘hegemonic struggle’ (Lincoln 1992 ). In retrospect, Lincoln's nearly three decades of writing tend to emphasize only one side of culture's role in the hegemonic struggle: its ideological role, e.g., its effort to cloak its own historicity through transcendental claims meant to authorize one position and de-legitimize others. That is to say, he does not examine the way in which the hegemonic struggle for Gramsci and those he influenced (Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, cf. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1986 )) referred not simply to constructions of power and authority (by those in power), e.g., co-opting and appropriating dissent, fabricating authority and so forth; the hegemonic struggle also referred to efforts to challenge and de-legitimize those fictitious claims to authority, power, and privilege, precisely by rendering visible the arbitrariness of their claims.

Thus, Lincoln's combination of neo-Durkheimian and neo-Marxist orientations to the study of religion and culture consists of three main features. First, he proceeds from the supposition that societies construct religion, and that this construction lies near the heart of the process of social formation. Second, he stresses that religion comprises a rhetoric of power, and that, as in all cultural instances, one has to view religion within the context of operations of hegemonic struggles. Third, he makes a methodological suggestion: in the study of religion one must regard with suspicion religion's own claims, rather than treat them as first-hand evidence, since religious rhetoric functions by concealing its own culturally and historically specific origins, claiming instead the authorship and authority of transcendent, supra-historical origins.

These, then, illustrate some of the important recent interventions in the social-scientific study of religion which take seriously the role of culture, by (1) viewing religion as a subset of culture rather than something sui generis (see further McCutcheon 2005 ); by (2) stressing the ways that religion, too, participates in the hegemonic struggle; and by (3) marking the way in which the very category of religion already betrays the cultural specificity of the modern West. In the final portion of this essay I reflect on the problem of reductionism in religious studies by exploring some of the ways that the cultural turn has resulted in a shift from consciousness-based orientations to one that emphasizes the way in which something like religion may reside not within consciousness but instead within culture itself. I conclude by summarizing the argument put forward here that one of the most productive contributions of the ‘culture and religion’ intersection may be the shift towards an analysis of religion as it is inscribed within cultural formations, rather than within the hearts, minds, or bodies of participants. I take this to be one of sociology's promising contributions to the study of religion, even if sociology remains often enough just as susceptible to belief-centered approaches.

Religion as a State of Affairs (Not a State of Mind)

Notwithstanding the importance of Jonathan Z. Smith's contribution to the scholarly study of religion, would it be possible to acknowledge that religion is more than subjectively ‘imagined’ by conceding that religion's existence has its locus beyond brains and bodies, beyond myth and performance, i.e., in something like a culture or a social system, in technologies of representation and of the self, in discourses of truth and subjectivity? I conclude by proposing the need for the study of religion to consider what it would mean to disarticulate religion from individual and group consciousness as the primary unit of analysis, to imagine instead how ‘religion’ resides in another locus exterior to one or more subjects. If the general trend within Marxism and the social sciences was to reduce religion to a subjective construction, how might we rethink religion as an objective social phenomenon in order to grasp how it continues to structure late modern society?

This approach complies with what sometimes goes by the name of discourse theory, but can be traced to elements within the thinking of Marx. To begin with, Marx showed that insofar as social realities may be ideological, they arise from objective conditions. Even the subject with ‘consciousness’ and beliefs emerges out of determinate conditions in Marx's analysis. While the religiousness of believers is to be expected, given their estrangement from the mechanisms that actually govern their lives, the real site of mystical phenomena and theological sleight of hand, for Marx, occurs at the structural level of the political-economic organization of society.

To illustrate this, notice how Marx's well-known comments in Capital on the ‘fetishism of the commodity and its secret’ did two things (Marx 1977 : 163–77). First, it satirized ‘Enlightened’, demythologized society, which looked condescendingly at African and New World fetishism. Western society regarded these things as superstitious attributions of value to inanimate objects, while Europe, at the height of its highly advanced and civilized social development, constructed a socioeconomic system with attendant political formations on the basis of an equally mystical transformation of human processes and raw materials into special objects with inexplicable values, which is to say, commodities (see further Mulvey 1996 ; Taussig 1983 ). Secondly, Marx's critique of commodity fetishism broke with the common sense that regarded religion as a state of mind. If religiousness exists in the minds of individuals, it is because the conditions that give rise to those beliefs are already mystical in nature. The most ideological thing of all would be to look no further than cognition for an account of religion, for that would foreclose an analysis of the circumstances which engender religion as their cultural consciousness.

The problem, historically, is that sociology has tended to rely almost as much as psychology on the framework of consciousness; it merely provides a different account of its formation, as illustrated by a particular moment in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life . In the following excerpt, Durkheim specified what can qualify as sacred, and in doing so excluded, contra Marx, anything which could not be explained in terms of projections of individuals or group consciousness:

It is not enough that one thing be subordinated to another for the second to be sacred in regard to the first. Slaves are inferior to their masters, subjects to their king, soldiers to their leader, the miser to his gold, the man ambitious for power to the hands which keep it from him; but if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things whose eminent value and superiority to himself he thus recognizes, it is clear that in any case the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and that there is nothing in these relations which is really religious. (Durkheim 1976 : 37)

As if to challenge Marx's claims about the religiousness of social systems, Durkheim differentiated religion from relations of exchange, domination, and valuation in society stemming from structures of power and political economy. In doing so he avoided reference to anything identifiably modern, limiting himself to generic relations between slaves and masters, subjects and kings, soldiers and commandants, the power-seeking and the power-keeping. Interesting in this is the inclusion of gold fetishism, as if to say that while pre-capitalist fetishism may be religious, its capitalist counterpart surely is not.

Durkheim's effort to justify this distinction requires him to reduce all those examples of structurally derived relations of power and alienation to subjective phenomena: ‘if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things …’. The reduction from structural to subjective conceptualizations of value enables Durkheim to disqualify political economy as ‘religious’ for the same reason as he later disqualified magic; magic and commodity fetishism are, notwithstanding their secondary associations with collective supports (e.g., priesthoods or modes of production), fundamentally individual activities. The man who ‘makes a religion’ of gold apparently does so independently of historical circumstances in which gold is revered as an inexplicably valuable object; his fetishism is therefore cognitive in nature, a mental mistake, and is to be distinguished from ‘really religious’ instances in which societies collectively regard beings and objects as inherently valuable.

By assigning metaphorical status to the colloquial ascription of ‘religion’ to class structures and commodity fetishism, Durkheim clings to the code of regarding the products of Western culture, such as capitalism, as just what they claim to be: that is, rational and secular. Excluding the designation ‘religious’ from anything which cannot represent itself in the form of a consciousness, Durkheim effectively foreclosed the possibility of analyzing the religiousness of the cultures, discourses, apparatuses, technologies, rules, and systems that coordinate the conditions in which attributions and perceptions of value take place. Durkheim upholds the supposition rejected by Marx, who recognized religion in objective states of affairs and not just in states of mind.

Among recent theories of discourse and the subject, an alternative to the persistent subjectivism of both essentialism and anti-essentialist constructivism has taken the form of a turn to the exteriority of the subject, conceding that the locus of the self is in something like language or discourse. This axial turn emerged in the twentieth century primarily by way of Freud and Lacan, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other. It is thus curious that Freud and Foucault continue to be regarded as polarized figureheads for the essentialist-constructivist controversy.

She suggested that Foucault's concept of ‘relations of power’, which took shape in the late 1970s, depicted a notion of power working on and in the body, but independent of consciousness, and in that case must be read in the context of (Lacanian) constructions of the subject constituted ‘in the field of the Other’—that is, through a linguistically organized unconscious. My point is not to agree that Foucault achieved no more than what psychoanalysis had by then already asserted; it is to identify the emergence of models of subjectivation which locate the origin of subjectivity in modes of discourse and representation that exist outside and independent of the subject's ‘imagination’, consciousness, cognition, or whatever other metaphors for the locus of subjectivity one employs. By implication, neither the object ‘religion’ nor the processes of ‘imagining religion’ are adequately viewed as housed within the heads and hearts of folks. Heads and hearts, minds and bodies, fail to exhaust the operation of culture and discourse.

The linguistic turn challenged the model of a connection between individual and society which presupposed mechanical processes between discretely organic entities: on the one hand, individuals, bounded by their bodies, and on the other hand, societies, as mere complexes of individuals. With a theory of signification, what emerged was the possibility of saying, as Foucault did, that ‘something like a language, even if it is not in the form of explicit discourse, even if it has not been deployed for a consciousness, can in general be given to representation’ (Foucault 1970 : 361). To the extent that Foucault's history of the human sciences in The Order of Things stemmed from his critique of psychoanalysis, what remains evident is that the error of Freud was not to have posited a behind-the-back determination of the subject by the unconscious; it was his failure to follow through with a conception of the subject and of the unconscious as an effect of language, and therefore to conceive of them as entities whose locus is not in themselves but in something external to them. De Lauretis may be right that Freud did so in his theory of the drive; in another way, this was Lacan's achievement when he redescribed the unconscious as something structured like a language: the subject's locus is in the other, and the locus of the other is in language.

The future study of religion, I argue, will find it increasingly necessary to take seriously the exteriority of religion to the subject in ways that make the ‘imagining religion’ thesis less pertinent than it has been regarded in the past. Such a study may find models in the work of someone like Jacques Derrida, who contributed a number of books and essays on the topic of religion during the last decade and a half of his life. Derrida analyzed television, telecommunication, jet travel, and other components of globalization as instances of what he referred to as the ‘afterlife of religion’ following the so-called ‘death of religion’. His argument, seminal to what has come to be called philosophy's ‘religious turn’, was that religion is hardly dead in the midst of secularization. This is because there is a kind of rebirth, or perhaps intensification, of the religious within the structures of the global engineered by the process of expansionist capital, by the instantaneous proliferation of the word (through communication) and presence (through travel), and by juridical discourses of the global such as human rights (Derrida 1996 ; 2001 ). There is not space here fully to explicate Derrida's argument; suffice it to say that in Derrida's view we do not see religion today as much in the beliefs of individuals as in the cultural logics of the late modern world. I suggest that a sociology of religion relevant to the developments of late modernity will be one capable of attending to this model of religion as a state of affairs rather than a state of mind, and that to do so will require the field of study to relinquish long-held predispositions toward ‘reducing’ religion from a perceived objective reality to something merely imagined. The question may instead be: In what ways is the world we inhabit structured religiously even as it clings to the guise of secularization?

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The Interplay of Religion and Popular Culture in Contemporary America

• alternative spirituality |
• American religion |
• Clifford Geertz |
• Embodiment |
• Popular Culture |
• March 12, 2016

In exploring the interstices running along the contours of religion and popular culture researchers must not neglect the embodiment and praxis of religious expression in popular culture and vice-versa. There was a time when the realms of popular culture and religion did not meet — at least in an academic or analytic sense. The space betwixt, between, around, and interpenetrating each was relatively unexplored. Into that gap came God in the Details: Share this response

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Ken Chitwood holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, where he wrote on Puerto Rican Muslims and the idea of cosmopolitanism with the Department of Religion and the Center for Global Islamic Studies. His academic work focuses on Islam and Muslim communities in the Americas, American religion, religion and culture, Christian-Muslim relations, and ethnographic methods and manifestations of religion-beyond-religion in a global and digital age. Additionally, he has published work on Judaism in Latin America and the Caribbean and the idea of global heroism. Ken is also an award-winning religion, travel, and culture newswriter with bylines in  Newsweek, The Washington Post, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Religion News Service, The Houston Chronicle,  and many other publications. Currently, he is a Journalist-fellow with the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s “Engaged Spirituality” Project, teaches courses on religion and theology with Concordia College New York, and is conducting research under the auspices of a grant with  the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University. He is based in Germany.

Ken Chitwood

Popular Culture Studies and Bruce Springsteen: Escaping and Embracing Religion

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Faith, Reason, and Culture

An Essay in Fundamental Theology

• © 2020
• George Karuvelil 0

Faculty of Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

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• Explores the rationality of faith in the contemporary world
• Addresses multiple issues of contemporary culture, including: secularism and atheism, science-religion relations, religious diversity and inter-religious dialogue
• Conceives fundamental theology as a discipline which seeks religious truth in the midst of diverse perspectives

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front matter, reason: the multi-coloured chameleon.

George Karuvelil

Religious Diversity and Theology

Science and religion: some parables and models, science and religion: autonomy and conflict, communication, culture, and fundamental theology, justification: beyond uniformitarianism, perception: its nature and justification, nature mysticism and god, religious diversity, christian faith, and truth, pulling together, back matter.

• apologetics
• Gerald O’Collins

About this book

“The effort developed by Karuvelil is impressive, without a doubt, and – from my point of view – this is clearly a theological essay that brings more fresh air and a much needed renovation to FT. … Scientific reason is not everything, but neither can we ignore the objections of such people when it comes to practicing the healthy dialogue to which Karuvelil’s impressive work invites us.” (Lluis Oviedo, ESSSAT News & Reviews, March, 2021)

“George Karuvelil’s mastery of epistemology has enabled him to make a truly major contribution: he has justified brilliantly the essential rationality of religion and theology. This book has re-established a philosophical base for fundamental or foundational theology. Only a scholar with such epistemological expertise could have achieved this remarkable break through and elucidated a true and convincing starting-point for theology.” ­— Gerald O’Collins, SJ, former dean of theology, Gregorian University, Italy

“Faith, Reason, and Culture is an impressive and comprehensive engagement with some of the most difficult questions facing us today on religion and its role in society and the academy. Karuvelil robustly engages a wide range of classical and contemporary Western scholars who debate religion’s place and role in society, while remaining ever attentive to his home context in India. He is conscientious in considering a wide range of views, yet steadfast in his defense of religion’s enduring importance and relevance in every contemporary debate. This book will open doors on the philosophy of religions and fundamental theology for beginners, while yet too catching the attention of established scholars in the field.” — Francis X. Clooney, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA

“There have been many books on faith and reason but none comes close to the erudition and comprehensiveness that characterize this book. Karuvelil’s resourcefulness in philosophy and his long experience in interreligious dialogue enable him to explore important theological themes in original and highly informative ways. Thoroughly researched and rigorously argued, this book will prove indispensable for both theologians and philosophers who want to explore new frontiers in in the area of faith, reason and culture.” — Louis Caruana SJ , Dean, Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Gregorian University, Italy

“George Karuvelil’s Faith, Reason, and Culture: An Essay in Fundamental Theology is a real tour de force, which will delight those interested to explore the complex issue of the rationality of religious belief. Integrating Kierkegaard’s insistence on religious belief as existential concern and adroitly pressing into service Wittgenstein’s concepts of ‘language game’ and ‘grammar,’ Dr. Karuvelil has developed a convincing case to justify religious belief. In this process, he has built on the work of contemporary philosophers whose analyses he has found fertile while not mincing words in his critique of authors whose thinking he judges has gone astray, being particularly severe on those who are wedded to scientism as the last word in human rationality. Lucid writing, helpful introductions and summaries and numerous examples make this book intelligible to non-professionals while professionals will find the acute analysis and meticulous argumentationworth careful attention.” — Lisbert D'Souza , Emeritus Reader in Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (Pontifical Athenaeum), Pune, India; former Assistant to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus.

“With skillful and patient archeology of the divide between reason and faith, especially in modernity and Western thinkers, resulting in severe harm for both, George Karuvelil convincingly shows that to successfully meet the challenges of contemporary religious pluralism we must, as Pope John Paul II says, breathe with both lungs and fly with both wings, namely, reason and faith. With this work, Karuvelil establishes himself as a first-class authority on fundamental theology. At a time when truth is dismissed as ‘alternative facts,’ Karuvelil's robust confidence in both reason and faith is all the more needed and urgent.” — Peter C. Phan , The Ignacio Ellacuria , S.J. Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University, USA

“In its grand sweep of the history of philosophy, theology, and modernity, the book provides a remarkably open access to a theological project that is rationally based, and addressing the intellectual debates of our contemporary times.  The author opens up a splendid panorama of reason and critically challenges its Procrustean curtailment by scientism and positivism. The book is deep, and at the same time, highly engaging and accessible to a wider readership, thanks to its clarity of thought, expression and cogency.” — Felix Wilfred , Emeritus Professor, University of Madras, India

Authors and Affiliations

About the author.

George Karuvelil received his PhD from the University of Delhi and has a background in philosophy and theology. He is the editor of Romancing the Sacred (2007) and was the editor of Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies .

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Faith, Reason, and Culture

Book Subtitle : An Essay in Fundamental Theology

Authors : George Karuvelil

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45814-0 Published: 25 July 2020

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45817-1 Published: 26 July 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-45815-7 Published: 24 July 2020

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVII, 402

Number of Illustrations : 8 b/w illustrations

Topics : Christian Theology , Philosophy of Religion

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Q&A: The relationship between religion and culture

October 28, 2021

Image by truthseeker08 from Pixabay

Do people who affiliate with the same religious traditions share cultural traits—even across geographic distances and political boundaries?

To answer this question, a team of researchers explored different cultures around the globe for evidence of common cultural traits across religious groups. They found that people who share religious traditions were more culturally similar than those who do not.

The research,  Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries , published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , informs cultural evolutionary theories about the place of religion and secularity in the world’s cultural diversity.

The co-authors are former UBC Psychology PhD students Dr. Cindel White and Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, and UBC Psychology Professor Dr. Ara Norenzayan.

Dr. Cindel White , now an assistant professor in the department of psychology at York University, and Dr. Ara Norenzayan discuss the findings and share some surprising results.

What was the impetus behind this research?

Cindel White

White: The world we live in is teeming with cultural diversity. What are the origins of this diversity? While we know that geography, social class, ethnicity and national culture are well-known sources of the world’s cultural diversity, less is known about religion’s role. For many people, religion is an important part of their identity and guides beliefs about what is true and right, and how to live one’s best life. Also, many established religions have been around for a long time. Therefore, religious traditions could be a potentially important source of variation in cultural traits around the world. We wanted to look broadly across a range of many different cultural traits, to see whether there was evidence of distinct patterns of cultural traits across members of different religious groups around the globe. We also compared the relative importance of religion and country in the way people come to share cultural traits.

How did the study work?

Ara Norenzayan

Norenzayan: We analyzed patterns in how groups of people responded to the World Values Survey: a large dataset with over two hundred thousand individuals from 88 countries, who reported their attitudes, beliefs, and preferences across many different domains in life. This included reports of religious and moral values, but also topics that were not obviously relevant to religion, such as attitudes towards finance, politics, child-rearing, social relationships, and law. Collectively we can treat these as shared cultural traits that characterize groups. We borrowed a technique from population biology to measure cultural distances between groups. The most interesting question to us was whether religious traditions spill over into aspects of cultures that do not have religious content at all. All of these were traits that could be potentially culturally transmitted, within religious or national groups. We wanted to know: how much of the global variability in these cultural traits can be traced to religious denominations, strength of religious commitment, and the country in which people lived?

What type of cultural similarities would we see in world religions, despite the geographic and political boundaries?

White: We found that affiliation with a particular religious tradition predicted a unique pattern of cultural traits. Furthermore, people who share a religious affiliation but live in different countries tended to be more similar to one another than they were to people with different religious affiliations. For example, all else being equal, Buddhist practitioners in Thailand to some degree shared cultural traits with Buddhist practitioners in China. What’s interesting about this is that co-religionists were culturally similar despite the geographic, ethnic, and linguistic divisions separating them. These patterns were present across many different domains of culture, showing a pervasive signature of religion in the way that cultural traits are distributed around the world. This implies that global religions foster super-ethnic cultural identities that reverberate in global events today.

What does this research tell us about the place of religion and secularity in the world’s cultural diversity?

Norenzayan: Although living in different countries was associated with much larger cultural differences than having different religious affiliations, one’s religious denomination and strength of religious commitment consistently explained unique variation in cultural traits: Those who shared a religion (or conversely, shared a secular, non-religious orientation) also shared cultural traits that distinguished them from other religious groups within the same countries. This means that we can look to variation in religious traditions – how religions are distributed through the world and how they are changing – to help us understand a variety of other cultural traits that vary across human populations. This cultural variation is not explained by other better-studied group markers, such as ethnicity, language, and nationality. Therefore, unpacking the relationships between religion and culture will be a necessary part of understanding the diverse array of attitudes, beliefs, and preferences around the world.

Did anything surprise you about the results?

White: One of the more surprising findings was the cultural similarities among co-religionists weren’t only present among those who were highly religious and committed to the same tradition.  People low in religious commitment – those who don’t identify themselves as religious and don’t attend religious services very often – were also similar to one another, and culturally different from highly-religious individuals.  It isn’t merely the type of religious affiliation, or strength of religious commitment that matter; these factors jointly predicted cultural similarity.  This provides evidence of a unique cultural signature of secularity. There is something to the idea that a global secular culture is emerging around the world.

Another surprising finding was that followers of the “Big Five” religions with a worldwide presence – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Hinduism – tended to cluster together, and collectively they were more distinct from smaller, local folk religious traditions (such as ancestral worshipping or spiritualist and pagan groups). On the whole, followers of these five world religions endorsed quite similar patterns of cultural values. There is a lot that adherents of these religious traditions share, despite contemporary anxieties about religious divides on the global stage.

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Culture and Religion

Remarks on an indeterminate relationship.

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Religion is often viewed as a subset of ‘culture’, that is, the two terms are often used interchangeably. At the same time, it is possible to view religion and culture as clearly distinct, perhaps even opposed to each other. This article ponders the ways in which what counts as religion in the present day is intertwined with a concept of culture. Each has an essentialist and postmodern variant, and how they are related, whether conflated or separated, carries normative claims about each. Bringing together theoretical insights on these two highly debated concepts, this piece offers an analysis of the nested indeterminacies between both and urges analytical attention toward them in the interplay of essentializing and de-essentializing practices.

About eight years ago, I took a group of students on a guided tour of a large, ornate mosque in a city center in southwestern Germany. Our guide, a knowledgeable young German woman of Turkish origin, was clearly well practiced in interreligious dialogue and its style of speaking. As she led us through the various rooms, she pointed out the many similarities between Islamic and Christian spaces and beliefs. In so doing, she often addressed our (by all appearances homogeneously white, middle-class) group sweepingly as ‘Christians’. In our follow-up discussion in class, some students expressed irritation at being referred to as Christian (“How could she just assume …?”), either because they identified as non-believers or felt that their religious orientation was a private matter. A classic teachable moment. Categorizing the group as ‘German and therefore Christian’, the young woman turned the tables on us by applying the same logic with which her community is confronted every day (‘Turkish and therefore Muslim’), in schools, supermarkets, government offices, the media. Religion and nationality (or ethnicity), she seemed to be saying, are so closely linked as to be practically interchangeable. By addressing us as members of a ‘Christian culture’, she likely did not mean to suggest that we are particularly devout. My students, however, felt that being called ‘Christian’ was tantamount to being called ‘religious’. This led to a lively discussion about why it is easier for us to think of Muslims as a cultural group than to think of Christians as such. How are religion and culture related to one another? Is ‘religion’ another way of saying ‘culture’? Is religion a subset of culture? Or is religion, in fact, clearly distinct from a more general culture that it may in fact reject or, conversely, strive to influence?

Since multicultural societies are also multi-religious societies, the question of how religion and culture are related to one another is not trivial, and the answer is not immediately obvious. Since that ‘aha’ moment years ago, the necessity to think clearly about what we mean when we say ‘religion’ seems ever more urgent, as this category gets drawn into identity politics—and the increasingly tense debates around them—and is taken up in the public discourse that emanates from powerful institutions (the law, bureaucratic apparatus, the media). In the following, I would like to offer a comparative analysis of these notoriously fraught concepts by pointing to two paradigms that both terms share, moving between everyday speech, public discourse, and scholarship with a focus in Europe. Each of these paradigms is problematic in various ways: contradictory, often essentialist, and deployed for specific projects and agendas. 1 Considering then, that these concepts are not firm, but rather the result of strategic categorizing practices constantly in flux, the relationship of culture and religion to one another remains indeterminate. I will argue that what deserves closer attention are the practices of defining and relating, which can engender open discussions such as the one I had with my students. Who is deciding in a given situation what religion and culture are, how they are set in relation to one another, and to what end?

• Two Ways of Speaking about Culture and Religion

As a starting point, German migration scholars Paul Mecheril and Oscar Thomas-Olalde (2011: 38–45) provided me with a useful distinction between two ways of speaking about religion in the social sciences, which also enter into public discourse: a ‘paradigm of appropriation’ and ‘religious identity as destiny’. The first paradigm builds, I would argue, on what Charles Taylor (2007: 297–419 ) calls the ‘nova effect’: the explosive diversification of the religions on offer in the modern era, including the possibility not to believe in God at all. In this discursive mode, religion is viewed as something that, in principle, every individual does as they please. This freedom is tied to an extensive deinstitutionalization of religion. It is not just that modernity accepts a wide array of alternatives to the major churches in the West (Eastern religions, New Age, esotericism, etc.), but also that traditional forms of belief are being combined in personalized ways with other bits and pieces, regardless of how the churches feel about it. Religion is viewed as a freely chosen stance and practice that can be switched out, modified, or completely abandoned at will. This ‘paradigm of (individual) appropriation’ treats religion as a question of personal style, aesthetic preference, and individual opinion, and it is found often in discourses dealing with ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ religiosity. People decide for themselves what they believe, which practices they attach to their convictions, and with what level of intensity and discipline they live them out. Religious pluralism is represented as a free market of options for believers ( Stark 2006 ), and thus is hardly viewed as a problem or source of conflict. Research in this vein focuses on practitioners’ creativity and agency and the fluidity and hybridity of their practices. In public discourse, it is treated as how religion is ‘supposed’ to be: a private, personal matter of belief , something you freely choose and design to your own needs. This ideal type I will refer to as ‘Religion 1’.

The other discursive mode, which I will call ‘Religion 2’, understands religion as a group or institution that offers and/or assigns fellowship, community, and identity. Whereas Religion 1 can offer no clear answer to the question “What religion are you?”, Religion 2 allows for unequivocal categorization. It is the paradigm behind the survey that produces a pie chart of the relative distribution of religions in society. Here, diversity is represented not as a market, but territorially. The size of the slices becomes important: the churches worry about their slices shrinking, while right-wing populists are preoccupied with the relative size of the Muslim slice. In this paradigm, where religions are thought of as definable units, diversity can be seen as a threat to society, a source of conflict and social disintegration. But Religion 2 is not merely an artifact of the governmental gaze; it is also very much a feeling that people can actively cultivate. Built on the assumption that we are born into a religion and remain fundamentally shaped by it for our entire lives, ‘religious identity as destiny’ is not just a personal preference. In this discursive mode, religion is the practice that a family and community shares; it is seen as heritage and a tradition that must be passed down. Unlike Religion 1, it cannot be a purely individual and private matter, as the community needs organizations and spaces for common worship and religious education for the children, creating situations of unequal treatment among religious communities by the state. Thus, Religion 2 is central to the politics of multiculture. It is useful when demanding political power, rights, and equal privileges. Talk of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue belongs to this paradigm, producing difference even as it pursues the peaceful co-existence of clearly defined groups that mutually recognize each other as religions ( Bender and Klassen 2010 ). The paradigm of Religion 2, then, places emphasis on community and identity , which, as will be discussed below, makes the question of belief somewhat secondary.

There is a clear tendency in both public discourse and many sectors of the social sciences to assume that Religion 1 is the ‘proper’ religion in Europe today, while Religion 2 is what is being brought in by migrants (cf. Mecheril and Thomas-Olalde 2011). 2 In other words, discussions on religion rely on an implicit modern/pre-modern divide in which Religion 2 is used to construct the Other and their “failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity” ( Asad 2003: 10 ). In Germany, this discourse has a long tradition. It is the mode in which Catholicism was construed as backward and repressive during the Kulturkampf era in the late nineteenth century (e.g., Gross 2004 ); it is how Islam is often spoken about in Germany today. 3

When looking at these two modes of talking about religion, I am struck by similarities to the two understandings of culture often debated in anthropology. The holistic concept of culture, which is usually traced via Franz Boas back to Johann Gottfried Herder, has similar characteristics as Religion 2, so here I will call it ‘Culture 2’. In this way of speaking about culture, it can be thought of in the plural; one can speak of more or less clearly definable units of language and custom, ‘cultures’ that could theoretically fill a pie chart of the world. Culture 2 is behind the idea of multiculturalism, in which ‘culture’ is a synonym for ‘ethnic group’, ‘ethnicity’, sometimes ‘race’. This culture is destiny; it is no more a matter of personal choice than one's native language(s). 4 It belongs to you, and you belong to it. Culture is a source of identity by virtue of being one's ‘origin’ or ‘home’, two very politically laden concepts closely tied to this way of speaking about culture. Essentialism seems built into Culture 2—the notion that there is a core, even changeless truth that defines a culture. Deeply determining how its members think and feel, it is expressed in their art, crafts, and lifeways. The Boasian school turned this notion of a cultural essence that deserves to be preserved for its own sake into an instrument of anti-colonialism and anti-racism that is still mobilized to articulate both the idea of rightful cultural property (and accordingly, the notion that it can be stolen) and a right to cultural survival. But it is also the basis for neo-racist assumptions and sentiments. A statement like “that's their culture, it's just how they are” could just as easily be read as an expression of respect and recognition as it could be one of othering and exclusion.

This is one of the reasons that sharp criticism of this concept of culture emerged, pointedly formulated by Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) in “Writing Against Culture.” She proposed replacing “culture” with “practice” and “discourse,” as “they were intended to enable us to analyze social life without presuming the degree of coherence that the culture concept has come to carry” (ibid.: 147). An anti-essentialist understanding of culture, which I will call ‘Culture 1’, recognizes that people simultaneously take part in various cultures, those of classes, genders, and generations as well as ethnic groups. The socio- or ethno-cultural practices that individual actors take up depend on the concrete situation; thus, these practices, which can be switched or combined, are constantly in flux—something that happens rather than something pre-existing and static that must be passed down and cared for. Arjun Appadurai (1996: 12) proposed using the concept of culture primarily in the “adjectival form of the word, that is, cultural ” precisely with the aim of recognizing and expressing that it is a dimension, not a thing. German philosophers Byung-Chul Han (2005) and Wolfgang Welsch (1999) have proposed speaking, respectively, of ‘hyperculturality’ or ‘transculturality’ as a way of loosening the moorings that tie cultural elements to a culture, making them more mobile, less the property and inheritance of a single society or ethnicity, and capable of combinations and hybrid forms. Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2019: 36) has drawn on this concept to emphasize how culture works for a specific “cosmopolitan middle class, which mostly gathers in urban centers of Western societies”: for them, culture is “the plurality of cultural goods that circulate in global markets and provide the individual resources for their self-realization ” (my translation; emphasis in the original). 5

As a dimension or recombinant practice, Culture 1 is not countable; the mere use of the plural form ‘cultures’ makes proponents of this paradigm cringe. Here, identity is not destiny but something you do (cf. Brubaker and Cooper 2000 ), based on the assumption that the subject is the agent of this doing. Belonging is demonstrated and lived out through the taking up of particular cultural elements: home is not objectively ‘there’; rather, we create it ourselves through practices that frame a place as home and create a sense of belonging ( Binder 2008 ). By recognizing such processes, Culture 1 places the emphasis on the actors themselves, on how they deal with their different cultural belongings and live them out in different variations and intensities.

In her piece on how Muslim practitioners in migrant communities in France, Germany, and Great Britain implement the discourse of culture, Jeanette Jouili (2019: 231) notes that they must also negotiate between two competing concepts:

My European Muslim interlocutors tried to distance themselves from an association with the all-encompassing and oppressive culture (as past and obsolete custom) concept and to lay claim instead to a more ‘humanist-inclined’ (universal, timeless, and/or future-oriented) concept in order to overcome the stigmatization and exclusion stemming from their assumed incapacity to endorse and enact the ideal of individual freedom.

Her observations grew out of fieldwork conversations about the relation of the religion of Islam to culture in Europe, specifically, and she contrasts the ‘high’ and ‘low’ definitions of culture (the arts vs. everyday life; creativity vs. custom), whereas I have chosen to highlight the overlaps of static/identitarian vs. processual/individualized understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’. But we come to the same conclusion in one respect: the dichotomizing operation reproduces the structure-agency duality. In the case of Culture and Religion 2, structure is emphasized and can lead to a cultural-determinist kind of argument that tends to be applied mostly to ethnic and religious minorities. In Culture and Religion 1, the focus is on actors and their boundless agency and creativity, attributes that align with ‘European values’. It is based on this paradigm that the culturally competent, responsible subjects who optimize themselves for the market and/or integration into majority society are interpellated.

Like the actor-structure divide itself, neither paradigm is completely right or completely wrong. In fact, upon closer inspection, the binary disintegrates: Culture and Religion 1, apparently based on individualism, can be seen as a collective phenomenon and the result of a liberal dogma that itself brings an identity into being (‘moderns’), whose ‘creativity dispositif’ ( Reckwitz 2017 ) is their destiny. And conversely, groups of people assigned to cultures and religions are, on the ground, far less homogeneous and static than the discourses of Culture and Religion 2 suggest. Ultimately, it is important to produce ethnographic descriptions of how and where these distinct yet labile discursive constructs can interact and even transform into each other. There is a lot to be learned from how these seemingly dichotomous discourses are handled in everyday life, at once upheld and parodied, deployed and undermined, as shown by Gerd Baumann's (1996: 34) concept of “dual discursive competence” and the wealth of ethnographic work it has inspired.

• Essentializing Strategies: Affective and Political Advantages

Banning the concept of culture altogether has not proved to be a very feasible proposal ( Fox and King 2002 ), but many scholars in the social sciences have been able to get behind a whole-hearted rejection of Culture 2. They urge that Culture 1 be the model with which we analyze data, thus maintaining ‘culture’ as an anti-essentialist analytical concept, understood as practice and discourse, a perpetual process rather than a ‘thing’ that can serve racist agendas. Culture 2 would then only be found in non-scientific ways of speaking, in everyday practices, public discourse, the media, legal decisions, and so on, as a misnomer and wrong understanding of what culture ‘actually’ is. Culture 1 is used to deconstruct Culture 2, just as Religion 1 can be used to deconstruct Religion 2. But the recourse to essentialist conceptions of culture and religion in public discourse is so ubiquitous and undying that rather than simply critique it as wrongheaded and dangerous, it is worth asking why it retains its appeal, even and especially for those without the intention or means to enforce it. So before I discuss the relationship of religion and culture in the final section of this article, I will suggest why some issues may actually call for a careful defense of Culture and Religion 2 against its ‘cultured despisers’.

First, it is not as if Culture and Religion 1 are completely unproblematic. The tendency to essentialism of Culture and Religion 2 has been roundly criticized, less so the problem with concepts such as ‘hyperculture’ and the religious ‘market’, that is, their built-in modernization-as-secularization theory. When culture and religion are characterized as constructed, hybrid, changeable, and freely selectable, people who show themselves to be aware of or even bound to tradition appear strangely intransigent. Not only do anti-essentialist concepts tend to over-individualize and overemphasize agency, they can also have a normative effect, producing an expectation of religious hybridity by scholars in the field and, ultimately, the state. The policy conclusion might well be: “If religion everywhere is hybrid anyway, what is the problem with asking Muslims in Denmark to make theirs a little bit more Protestant?” It is just for this reason that the strong counter-discourse offered by Religion 2 is useful; it should not be met with blanket critique without a careful examination of how the anti-essentialist option works out for different groups. Instead of dismissing it as a backward, pre-scientific way of speaking based on false understanding—since it proves useful for social scientists of religion, too, when we need to construct more or less clearly definable units for the purpose of a research question (cf. Woodhead 2011 ), or as heuristic concepts in conversation with other disciplines that still use them—we should examine strategies of essentialization and what they can accomplish, without neglecting to note where they are in danger of falling into familiar traps.

Second, hybridity and fluidity rely on the very plurality provided by clearly defined phenomena. Culture 1 works by manipulating and recombining Culture and Religion 2. A hyphenated identity such as German-Turkish is made up of two imagined cultural units that are bound together in one person or family. Developments in one's biography construed as cultural (“I've become more and more British since moving to Durham”) or religious conversion narratives only make sense when two distinct cultures or religions are postulated. Clearly defined communities can also be the basis of conviviality in a pluralist society. In daily interactions, cultural and religious difference is named and acknowledged in order to accommodate and recognize it, as an offering of sensitivity and friendliness: colleagues offer to switch shifts with those of another religion in the spirit of helpfulness; at parties, dishes are planned in order not to compromise various religious and cultural preferences as a sign of hospitality. At the same time, such recognitions of identity can be quickly modified or abandoned. Differences are asserted and then almost immediately downplayed, perhaps to counter stereotypes, perhaps from a fear of being (or being viewed as) a bigot. Very often, people find similarities and postulate equivalencies across difference, like our tour guide in the mosque. The borders between the two ways of speaking flicker between fixedness and fluidity according to the strategy and the situation. As Baumann (1999: 93–94 ) elegantly puts it: “In some situations, they can speak of, or treat, their own culture or somebody else's as if it were the tied and tagged baggage of a national, ethnic, or religious group … In other situations, however, they can speak of, and treat, their own culture or somebody else's as if it were plastic and pliable …, something you make rather than have.” The use of Culture and Religion 2 is not always already exclusionary.

Third, essentializing practices can be emotional practices and thus provide affective satisfactions. Far more effectively than the free-floating, radically individualized Culture and Religion 1, notions of belonging can serve as vehicles of emotional effects, both serious and ironic. Serious—and to be seriously challenged—are those practices that use Culture and Religion 2 as vehicles of hate in order to exclude and even perpetrate racist, culturalist, fundamentalist violence. But people are also seriously in need of essentialist concepts for inclusionary purposes or when they want to maintain and pass down a tradition, especially when that tradition seems threatened. The feelings that are mobilized in this process—the sense of ‘we’, the pride and satisfaction at passing on something personally significant in as intact a form as possible—reward the use of a concept of community or culture as homogeneous and insular. The balancing act between strengthening one's own identity and remaining inclusive is not easy, while judgments of identity practices as per se exclusionary are quickly made. Looking closely at how actors manage to enjoy cultural or religious pride without postulating their own superiority can help us understand the integrative work of some essentializing practices.

Not least, we are attached to essentialisms because they can be fun. Laughing together at our community's quirks is a practice of cementing bonds. Clearly, ironic practices and humor that play with culturally or religiously coded elements are risky; enjoying that humor with someone from outside the group invokes trust (“a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar”), and when this is done misguidedly or even coercively, it must be called out. But humor is important because it can also do subversive work, undoing essentialist concepts. Ironized cultural and perhaps even religious performances demonstrate the instability of Culture and Religion 2. That these performances give pleasure does not make them harmless; they can quickly slip into flat and thoughtless reproductions of stereotypes and racist representations. The post hoc framing as “just for fun” is no excuse; attention must be paid to the intention behind the balancing act.

One could argue that most essentializing practices—not just the intentionally humorous ones—are balancing acts, oscillating between emotional seriousness and a distancing irony. Tourists seek to experience the ‘authentic culture’ of another country while knowing that their activity is vaguely exoticizing. People participate in religious rituals or traditional customs for the pleasure of it (see the undying enthusiasm for the ‘white wedding’), knowing at the same time that they are antiquated and likely misogynist and racist. Finding a way to open up the space within that wavering into a deeper conversation about the effects of essentializing practices might change people's tastes and pleasures. But I would suggest that it is unlikely that Culture and Religion 2 will ever disappear because affective ties to essences—ranging from the playful and pleasurable to the serious and respectful—grant them significance. The playful, ironic mode promotes self-conscious uses of essences and awareness of their inventedness, and the serious, respectful mode can take place within a framework of inwardly directed identity constitution without making claims to rightful hegemonic status in society. Identifying where the line is crossed and difference is enforced, discrimination promoted—that is the daily challenge of living with essentializing practices.

Finally, essences also offer a source of power and thus political advantages. For emancipatory movements and the politics of anti-discrimination, the highly individualized way of speaking used in Culture and Religion 1 is counterproductive because it weakens any claims to recognition of a group as a group, robbing them of their clout. Religion and Culture 1 are the paradigms of the privileged, ‘modern’ ways of engaging with belief and lifestyles framed as self-determined and private matters, so that labeling specific groups (as Religion and Culture 2 do) is viewed as a discriminatory practice, akin to racialization. But as we know, color blindness does not guarantee equity, and self-ascription of religion-as-destiny can provide advantages. In daily life, essentializations grant bargaining power, not least because Culture 2 emerged from an agenda of respect for all cultures, and Religion 2 can draw on notions of religious freedom. Identity politics builds on “I was born this way” precisely because this essentializing discourse latches onto the veracity of the ‘natural’, precluding any possibility of free choice or negotiation. Paradoxically, this claim is an empowering strategy; it is also risky. “The strategic use of an essence as a mobilizing slogan or masterword like woman or worker or the name of a nation is, ideally, self-conscious for all mobilized,” Spivak (1993: 3) notes, but she worries: “Can there be such a thing?” (ibid.: 4). In order that essentializations not become traps, in order that we not to succumb to their “fetish-character,” their constructedness, historicity, and social embeddedness must be kept uppermost in the minds of strategists, “even when it seems that to remind oneself of it is counterproductive” (ibid.). Spivak sees this kind of self-consciously strategic use of essentialism at work in the mobilization of developing nations post-1989, in which “ethnicity and religion are negotiable signifiers in these fast-moving articulations” (ibid.: 15), but do important work.

To sum up, there is quite a lot at stake when one considers discrediting Culture and Religion 2 as paradigms, and Culture and Religion 1 are not completely blameless when it comes to politics. The interesting research question, then, is not which discourse is correct, but instead how actors implement either or both paradigms and to what end.

• Culture and Religion in Relation

Having recapitulated that what counts as religion and how we conceive of culture comes into being through strategic discursive practices of both de-essentialization and essentialization, we can now think about how their relationship to each other is constituted. Distinctions between culture and religion and the nature of their relationship are neither ‘simply there’, nor have they arisen on their own from supposedly autonomous processes of differentiation and modernization; they are also made in strategic discursive practices and serve various purposes, institutional and personal. Who divides culture from religion? Who joins them together, and why? What rhetorical or political advantage, what emotional-aesthetic attachment stands to be gained in doing so?

The sphere of legal discourse shows very clearly how dividing religion from culture can have strategic advantages. In the debates in Europe over the headscarf or male circumcision, those who wish to forbid such practices find it advantageous to connote them as cultural, for if they are religious, they could be protected under the premise of religious freedom. This happened in 2012, when a court in Cologne ruled against allowing male children to be circumcised (a ruling later overturned). In the public debate that ensued, the ‘true meaning’ of circumcision was aired from a variety of perspectives, with different outcomes for Muslims and Jews. Some participants in this debate used the strategy of division to assign religious significance to one practice, brit milah, and cultural origins and purposes to the other, sünnet or khitan, meaning that only the first should be protected by law and the latter could be forbidden. 6

In the realm of scholarship, a marked distinction between a theological and a social science approach to the relationship between religion and culture emerged over the course of the twentieth century. In the founding era of the social sciences, they were close: religion was treated as a foundational element of culture and society. While Emile Durkheim's theory tended to conflate religion and society, Max Weber's lifework of studying the economic conduct supported by various religions was based on a notion of religion as a factor distinct from economy and society, to allow it the status of a more or less independent variable. He agreed with the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, with whom he shared an intense intellectual conversation, that a sound knowledge of religious history was indispensable to the understanding of a society's broader historical trajectory. This was not only in line with Christian conceptions of religion being a moral foundation for the culture at large, but also with Weber's methodological individualism, which viewed ideas (including religious ideas) as the driving force in history, since they motivated human action and shaped ethical conduct.

However, following Weber's concept of increasing rationalization, modernization theory in the social sciences prophesied the retreat of religion. Since then, religion has been treated as a quantité négligeable in many social science research designs—or else, in a functionalist sense, it is merged with the notion of a ‘value system’. Working closely with sociologists, Clifford Geertz (1973) participated in this sort of merging when he formulated his influential definition of religion as a cultural system. Like culture, religion provides meaning, orientation, and above all the power to bind people together, all of these functions being regularly actualized in rituals (ibid.). 7 Thus, the concepts become interchangeable: whatever entity ‘primordial loyalties’ ( Geertz 1994 ) are able to attach themselves to—ethnicity, nation, or religion—they all serve the same purpose. Samuel Huntington's (1996) sketch of a global cultural conflict quite illustratively reproduces this assumption, with spatial, ethnic, and religious designations for ‘culture areas’ standing beside each other as more or less functionally equivalent: the West, the Islamic world, Orthodoxy, Japan, India, Latin America, Africa.

If sociology and anthropology have tended to conflate religion and culture, theologies still tend to divide religion from culture. With its echoes of the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine, the definition of religion as independent from culture may seem to have been particularly important in Protestant theology, 8 but it is also useful for other theology departments and seminaries, or any scholarly endeavors centered on religion, particularly when conceived of as a sui generis phenomenon. 9 By removing religion from the cultural sphere, refusing to see it as ‘just another form of cultural expression’, scholars of religion push back against the tendency to subsume and secularize their research object, similar to how the study of literature, art history, and musicology also became sciences of ‘culture’ once these texts, images, and sounds were removed from the religious sphere. This would appear to echo the strategies of distinction between religion and culture performed by pious believers. In an illuminating comparison of young evangelical Christians and reformist Sunni Muslims in the Netherlands, Daan Beekers (2020: 120) has shown, for example, that both groups distinguish their faith not only from the surrounding secular ‘culture’, but also from the “unreflective religious cultures they had been raised in.” They view a religion distinct from culture as a truer faith, “personal, self-reflective, and committed” (ibid.) and oriented toward “feeling close to God” (ibid.: 121). The demarcation against ‘culture’ allows them to determine what should actually count as religion.

The strategy of division between culture and religion would appear to support Religion 2 and its essentialist tendencies. Indeed, a rejection of the ‘world’ and its impious, even sinful ‘culture’ has been a central argument of religious groups from all traditions seeking to offer their communities as alternatives. Olivier Roy (2004) views such ‘deculturation’ of religion as highly problematic, leading inevitably to radicalization. 10 But the division of religion from culture can also been a feature of liberal reform movements whose aim is to find the essence of a given religion outside of culture so that it can adapt to the modern world, or become more easily transportable. Division can have emancipatory effects, as Jouili (2019: 208) reports about the revivalist Muslim women in France and Germany:

Among these women, I found a consistent emphasis on the necessity of separating religion from culture. The women critically conceived ‘culture’ as the locus for those passively inherited customs with which Muslim societies are often associated in public discourses. This particular distinction between culture and religion enabled them to criticize certain patriarchal practices they discerned within their communities.

Clearly, ‘deculturalization’ is not always per se reactionary. It is necessary to look closely at the actors and their goals.

By the same token, strategies of conflating religion and culture are not necessarily progressive but can also be quite the opposite. It can manifest, for example, as a religionization of culture . A typical example in European public discourse would be the subsuming of many different ethnic designations (particularly of immigrant groups such as Turkish, Bosnian, Pakistani, Syrian, etc.) into a single religious one: Muslim. People who have never set foot in a mosque are labeled Muslim because of a presumed cultural membership, often deduced from nothing more than a name and/or skin color. This strategy must be critiqued as a homogenizing practice of othering and exclusion when performed from the outside (such as when populists decry the “Islamization of European culture”), as opposed to when actors decide for themselves that it is advantageous to subsume their cultural origins under a religion, for instance, to avoid a perceived conflict between two national affiliations. The label Muslim French, British, or German can better depict an unambiguously felt national affiliation without totally effacing one's family history, or can be used to create a distinctive artistic culture. Jouili (2019: 208) recounts how British Muslim art practitioners spoke of culture “especially in the sense of self-expression, creativity, and arts. They emphasized the intrinsic link between Islam and cultural expression,” seeking to create “an ‘authentic’ British Muslim culture.”

The converse operation, the culturalization of religion , is very often seen as a practice of identification, one that takes the ‘religious identity as destiny’ notion of Religion 2 seriously, but without necessarily engaging in the practice or avowing the beliefs. To take a complicated but obvious example, identifying as Jewish is often not ‘just religious’—despite a few examples, such as the Protestant concept of religion-as-belief, which shines through German administrative categorizations of Judaism as a ‘confession’, or American habits of referring to ‘being Jewish’ as a person's religion. Jewishness is arguably most frequently referred to in the sense of belonging to a specific community with a specific history and culture, to the point that active religious practice can be secondary: non-religious people who come from Jewish families still call themselves (atheistic or secular) Jews. As Stacey Gutkowski (2019) explains, the question of what makes one a ‘Jew’ is complicated: adherence to Jewish law ( halakhah ) is more important than any given set of beliefs. Yet even a self-declared atheist can be considered Jewish if her mother is Jewish: “One need not behave in accordance with Jewish law, nor believe in its divine mandate, nor indeed believe in God in order to be considered a Jew by the Orthodox rabbinate” (ibid.: 126). This slippage between religious and cultural identity affords obvious advantages for the Israeli state, which builds on the religious-secular hybrid that is Zionism (ibid.: 127). There are other examples of the ways that culturized religion supports an understanding of nationhood. Jason Ānanda Josephson (2012) has shown how Shinto was transformed in late-nineteenth-century Japan to make it appear more modern and at the same time embedded in what it means to be Japanese.

Perhaps this tendency explains why a growing body of literature is grappling with the ways in which religion becomes culturalized (for an overview, see Astor and Maryl 2020 ), particularly for majoritarian religions. In European countries, the strategy of identifying oneself with Christianity as culture rather than belief is common (in spite of what my students felt). Not long after Grace Davie (1994) described the phenomenon of ‘believing without belonging’ (an example of Religion 1), scholars noted that the reverse phenomenon, ‘belonging without believing’ (reinstalling Religion 2 in a variant without belief), was alive and well. 11 Like the subsuming of religion under culture in the social sciences, culturalizing religion in everyday discourse ‘disenchants’ it, strips it of its mysterious or supernatural qualities and downplays its function of communicating with deities or ancestors. As N. J. Demerath (2000: 136) notes, the assumption that one is merely ‘culturally’ a member of a religious group is “a way of being religiously connected without being religiously active.” He takes this very seriously as a secularizing impulse, claiming that cultural religion is “a tribute to the religious past that offers little confidence for the religious future” and is thus the “penultimate stage of religious secularization” (ibid.). The placement of cultural religion on a secularization trajectory might be empirically difficult to substantiate, as it is quite possible for a group's serene understanding of itself as ‘culturally religious’ to become the fertile ground for their suddenly emotionalized identification with a religion and even religious revival.

It would appear to be one of the foremost operations of secularism to claim that religion is a thing of the past and significantly so, thus transforming it into (national) cultural heritage. Christianity is frequently spoken of as ‘cultural heritage’, 12 valued as an ethic and/or narrative, while sidestepping its cultic dimension ( Hervieu-Léger 2000 ). One can do without the Trinity and distance oneself from an antiquated morality, yet still identify with the historical community of a church and its culture (especially in the sense of high culture: art, music, architecture), whether out of conservationist conviction or mere habit ( Engelke 2014 ). Religion-as-culture (or heritage) has been mobilized in legal arguments against the removal of crucifixes and prayers from public spaces. Lori Beaman (2020) shows in several detailed examples how this strategy reinstates privilege to majoritarian religions, even in a society committed to secularism. But following Talal Asad (2003) , secularism is not the end point of a social trajectory away from the influence of religious institutions in society anyway. Secularity is the concept taken up by the state to enshrine the post-religious stance of the dominant culture and frame it as the religiously neutral ground of citizenship, thus producing ‘religious minorities’ who cannot be religious and citizens at one and the same time (ibid.: esp. 159–180).

Thus, although culturalizing religion may seem to be a fitting strategy for religion to find a place in a secular nation—and many churches in Europe do embrace this strategy, emphasizing their cultural importance in order to hold on to their privileges—it, too, is risky. It can “depoliticize[e] religion and tam[e] its divisive potential,” as Astor et al. (2017: 139) have argued for the Spanish case. But with the rise of right-wing populism, the culturalization of religion has been twisted into just the opposite: a weapon against what is viewed as an encroaching Islam, consciously using the word ‘Christian’ to denote a ‘way of life’, or as a member of the German AfD party has put it, a national “feeling of life.” 13

Whereas the liberal argument for majoritarian hegemony mediates between religion and culture by using the language of ‘values’, that is, culturalizing religion by turning it into an ‘ethics’, the AfD phrasing goes a step further, activating emotional attachments to a religious past. For societies that trace their heritage to Christianity, the celebration of Christmas ranges high among the affective ties to religion, even without belief in its tenets ( Klassen and Scheer 2019 ), presenting annually recurring challenges to states who view themselves as secular. 14

• The Consequences of Indeterminacy

Just as there is no ‘correct’ definition of culture or religion, neither can there be a correct determination of their relationship to one another, but only situated understandings, which have as much to do with the current social and political context as with common academic usages in varying disciplines and countries. Rather than trying to nail down the ‘actual’ or even ‘proper’ relationship between the two, anthropologists of religion can more fruitfully attend to the ways that these concepts are deployed—by whom and for what purpose—and how these strategies change over time and why. As we have seen, this is currently being applied in the research on the rise of ‘religion as heritage’, which also shows how important it is to take the positionality of the practitioners into consideration. When culturalizing religion works to the advantage of the majoritarian religion again and again, it helps us understand why some groups choose a different strategy. Acknowledging that both essentialist and anti-essentialist ways of speaking have their strengths and weaknesses can facilitate this work. Instead of pitting one way of talking about religion and/or culture against the other, we should look at the ways they are combined and why. When essentialism is used for exclusionary aims and to justify violence, it should be called out for that reason and denaturalized. When it is used to include and empower, particularly for the benefit of marginalized groups, it can do important political work—although this may also entail exclusionary tendencies and will therefore always remain potentially dangerous (see Kurzwelly et al. 2020 ).

In the course of analyzing this complex relationship between religion and culture, it seems clear that being attuned to the built-in biases of the discursive modes described here, as well as how they are set in relation to one another, can generate new questions, offer new perspectives. With Religion 1 in mind, even the most conservative religious groups could not be reduced to an identity, community, or institution: the creative, hybrid, and heterogeneous religious practices of their members would also come into view. And even the most hybrid, individualized exemplars of Culture 1 build their practices on understandings of bounded units (Culture 2), which could be acknowledged as providing affective rewards, or critiqued as insufficiently reflected upon, as in the case of the white privilege that many such ‘modern’ actors enjoy. At a historical moment in which public debates over these two very issues in particular—religion and culture—are being conducted from increasingly entrenched positions, the anthropology of religion might have a role to play in nuancing the categories being deployed and the associations being drawn.

• Acknowledgments

This article is based on my inaugural lecture for the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Historical and Cultural Anthropology, which was presented at the University of Tübingen on 25 April 2015 and published in German in the Zeitschrift für Volkskunde in 2017. Many thanks to Diana Madden for her translation of that manuscript into English and to Pamela Klassen for her critical reading and suggestions as this English version evolved. Heartfelt thanks also to the participants and organizers of the Copenhagen workshop in June 2020 who offered important insights, to the editors of this Symposium, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Discussions of the concepts of religion and culture abound in many areas of the study of religion and society, but this article is not intended to deliver a review of all the relevant literature. Given its nature as a ‘think piece’ I have limited my bibliographic references to the most essential.

Linda Woodhead (2011) presents an excellent assessment of concepts of religion in the social sciences that is slightly different from, although not entirely incompatible with, what I have sketched out here. What is missing from her analysis, in my view, is an acknowledgment of the value judgments embedded in the various concepts of religion she describes and, ultimately, their politics. Furthermore, we should keep in mind, as Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 4) point out, that “such concepts as ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or ‘nation’ are marked by close reciprocal connection and mutual influence among their practical [i.e., ‘folk’ or ‘lay'] and analytical uses.” Religion and culture are among these concepts that flow freely between everyday and scholarly usage, so it is particularly important to be aware of how each discursive context affects the other.

In other parts of the world, these histories and trajectories will play out differently. As one anonymous reviewer of this article pointed out, in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, both Christianity and Islam are viewed as ‘freely chosen’ religions, as opposed to traditional practices given by ‘culture’. The focus here is on Europe, with the hope that, mutatis mutandis , the insights offered will inspire work outside Europe as well.

See Brubaker's (2013) comparison of language and religion and their meaning for the construction of ethnicity and nationality.

In this book, Reckwitz makes a distinction, which first appeared online in 2016 ( https://www.soziopolis.de/zwischen-hyperkultur-und-kulturessenzialismus.html ), between Hyperkultur (hyperculture) and Kulturessenzialismus (cultural essentialism) as two modes of the ‘valorization’ of the social through its ‘culturalization’ and marks them the same way I did in my 2015 lecture as ‘Culture 1’ and ‘Culture 2’. I was not yet aware of this coincidence when I prepared that lecture for publication in 2017. Reckwitz (2019) does not discuss religion but analyzes how these two modes of valorization and culturalization interact, postulating a ‘third path’ that would be less conflictual.

Cf., for example, a report published in Süddeutsche Zeitung at the height of the debate ( Schulte von Drach 2012 ).

Talal Asad's (1983: 238–239 ) equally influential critique of Geertz's definition of religion begins with remarks on how a (problematic) definition of culture forms the basis of Geertz's proposal for an anthropological definition of religion. Inspired by a Foucauldian approach, Asad also criticizes the melding of religion to culture in an attempt to provide a universal definition of both as systems of meaning. Instead, Asad proposes, anthropologists should investigate “social disciplines and social forces which come together at particular historical moments, to make particular religious discourses, practices and spaces possible” (ibid.: 252). He criticizes the fact that Geertz is working with a conception of Culture and Religion 2: “Universal definitions of religion hinder such investigations because and to the extent that they aim at identifying essences when we should be trying to explore concrete sets of historical relations and processes” (ibid.).

A classic discussion of the problem can be found in H. Richard Niebuhr (1951) .

Of course, this is a concept heavily critiqued from within religious studies (see, e.g., McCutcheon 2003 ; Proudfoot 1985 ).

An implicit strategy of dividing religion from culture has also been criticized in the work on ‘everyday Islam’ ( Fadil and Fernando 2015 ).

See also the concept of ‘nominalism’ in Abby Day's (2011) Believing in Belonging , which was discussed in the Author Meets Critics section of this journal in 2016.

The Horizon 2020 HERA Project “HERILIGION—The Heritagization of Religion and the Sacralization of Heritage in Contemporary Europe” conducted research on this topic from 2016 to 2020. See https://www.cria.org.pt/en/projects/heriligion-the-heritagization-of-religion-and-the-sacralization-of-heritage-in-contemporary-europe .

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) politician and self-declared Kulturchrist (cultural Christian), Alexander Gauland explained in an interview why the party program contains a reference to “Western and Christian culture” in spite of the party's lack of support in the churches: “We are not defending Christianity, but rather the traditional feeling of life in Germany, the traditional feeling of home” ( Löbbert and Machowecz 2016 ).

With regard to France's position as a secular state, see Beaman's (2020) analysis of a 2016 ruling by the French Administrative Supreme Court on the presentation of a crèche in a town hall in the Vendée department.

Abu-Lughod , Lila . 1991 . “ Writing Against Culture .” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present , ed. Richard G. Fox , 137 – 162 . Santa Fe, NM : School of American Research Press .

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Contributor Notes

MONIQUE SCHEER is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, where she also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Religion, Culture, and Society (CRCS) and as Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Diversity. Her research interests include aesthetics, images, practices, and emotions in Catholic, Protestant, and secular contexts in Europe. Recent publications include Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (2020). E-mail: [email protected]

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Article contents

Culture, religion, war, and peace.

• Yehonatan Abramson Yehonatan Abramson Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.44
• Published in print: 14 December 2013
• Published online: 30 November 2017

Religion and culture have historically been neglected in international relations (IR) theories and in political science more generally. It was only recently that IR began to consider the role of culture and religion in war and peace. Several main scholarly trends in the study of culture, religion, conflict, and peace can be identified, starting with the definitional problems that IR scholars had to deal with as they tried to incorporate culture and religion. The first major attempt in the IR field to understand war almost exclusively through the religious prism was that of Samuel Huntington, who in his Clash of Civilization (1993, 1996) identifies two main reasons why religion can cause war: first, religion can be considered as a primordial and immutable identity; and second, religion is a form of ideology rather than identity. The scholarly literature has also addressed themes such as religious fundamentalism and violence, the role of religious actors in international conflict, the practical use of religion and culture to promote peace via diplomacy, and engagement of religion and culture in existing peace theories such as democratic peace theory. Avenues for future research may include the relational and constantly changing aspects of religion; what, when, and how various religious interpretations receive political prominence in promoting conflict or peace; how religion can be used as an independent variable across cases; and the hidden set of assumptions that are embedded in the cultural and religion labels.

• international relations
• Samuel Huntington
• religious fundamentalism
• democratic peace theory

Introduction

Historically, international relations (IR) theories neglected ideational factors such as identity, religion, and culture. Although culture was a part of political science since Almond and Verba's seminal book in 1963 , IR's dominant schools of thought (Realism and Liberalism) overemphasized material, structural, and “objective” factors in explaining states’ behavior. Religion was ignored altogether not only in IR, but also in political science in general (Wald and Wilcox 2006 ; Bellin 2008 ). In recent years, IR began to consider the role of culture and religion. Culture as a variable appeared during the end of the Cold War together with the “constructivist turn” (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996 ; Checkel 1998 ; Finnemore and Sikkink 2001 ). Religion entered the field a decade later alongside a scholarly focus on ethnic and religious conflicts and religious-inspired terrorism (Fox 2001 :53; Philpott 2009 :184; Snyder 2011 :1).

This essay reviews the main scholarly trends in the study of culture and religion as sources for conflict and resources for peace. After a brief survey of the early works of political theorists regarding religion and war, this essay turns to review how the topic has been understood within IR. As the essay demonstrates, the attempt to deal with religion and culture as part of identity is a source of much confusion. In order to avoid confusion and reiteration of other comprehensive review essays on culture and IR (such as the essays titled “Culture and Foreign Policy Analysis” and “Nonrealist Variables: Identity and Norms in the Study of International Relations” in this work), this essay gives special focus to the topic of religion in studies of conflict and peace. In IR, religion is usually an independent variable that causes war or peace, or an intervening variable that shapes the probability of a conflict and its violent potential (Hasenclever and Rittberger 2000 :644–8). Some scholars focus on what religion says, while others research what religion does; some scholars deal with religion in the individual level, while others emphasize the societal and organizational aspects of religion (Haynes 1998 ). The next section reviews the ways IR scholars define culture and religion and suggests that religion should be viewed as a part of culture. The following sections discuss the clash of civilizations debate; the relationship between fundamentalism and violence; religion as a cause of war; religion and the intensity of war; culture, religion and diplomacy with some references to cross-cultural negotiation; and culture and the democratic peace with some references to the debate regarding religion and democracy. The essay concludes with suggestions for future directions for research.

Conceptualizing Culture and Religion in IR Scholarship

Despite some exceptions, such as Adda Bozeman ( 1960 ), Jack Snyder ( 1977 ), and to some extent Robert Jervis ( 1976 ), IR scholars did not realize the importance of culture and religion to the understanding of peace and conflict until the post-Cold War era and the introduction of constructivism. The first task facing IR scholars trying to incorporate culture and religion is the task of definition. The understanding that these concepts can be rather distinct, but at the same time intrinsically connected has been a source for much confusion and contention. As this section suggests, different IR scholars treat culture and religion in different ways and sometimes use these concepts interchangeably with other concepts, such as norms, identity, and ethnicity.

The first example for such confusion exists in the writings of IR scholars from the English School, who understand religion as the main component in a society's culture. To Bozeman ( 1960 , 1971 ), for example, culture means civilization, and what dictates the mode of thinking and the normative order in a civilization is religion. Similarly, as Buzan ( 1993 :333) and Thomas ( 2005 :153–4) describe, Martin Wight argues that international societies can be formed on the basis of shared culture, but underlines the role of religion in not only promoting such peaceful unity but also holy wars. This view of religion as the core component of civilization is also shared by non-English School scholars such as Huntington ( 1996 ) and some of the authors in the volume edited by Katzenstein ( 2010 ).

While English School theorists understand culture as part of religion, the constructivist theoretical framework does the opposite. In constructivist studies, culture includes religion as well as other concepts such as identity, norms, or ideas (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996 ; Katzenstein 1996 ; Checkel 1998 ; Desch 1998 ). Cohen ( 1997 :11–12), for example, defines culture as “an acquired unique complex of attributes of a society that is subsuming every area of social life,” and we can find a similar approach in Mary Adams Trujillo et al. ( 2008 ). For others, such as Avruch ( 1998 :17) and Abu-Nimer ( 2001 :687) who draw on Theodore Schwartz's definition, culture is a less homogeneous and static concept and it “consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organized, learned or created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodement and their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries, or formed by individuals themselves.”

Subsuming religion under culture kept the concept under-theorized. It is notable that a canonical constructivist text, Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics ( 1999 ), does not include “religion” in the index (Snyder 2011 :2). An exception is Kubálková ( 2000 ), who brings religion into the study of IR through rule-oriented constructivism. However, the increasing interest in communal conflicts, such as ethno-national wars, and especially the September 11th attacks, have led to a resurgence of religion in the study of world politics (Fox 2001 :53; Philpott 2009 :184; Snyder 2011 :1).

Religion presents further definitional problems. The definition must encompass numerous but exclude from other phenomena such as ideologies or cults (Philpott 2003 ). Some of the early studies that deal with religion and international conflict, such as Ryan ( 1988 ), Azar ( 1990 ), Gurr ( 1994 ), and Gagnon ( 1994 ), consider religion to be part of a larger concept of ethnicity, or communality. Seul ( 1999 :553) tries to explain “the frequent appearance of religion as the primary cultural marker distinguishing groups in conflict,” and concludes that religion often exists “at the core of individual and group identity” (Seul 1999 :558). For Rothschild ( 1981 :86–7), however, religion is subsumed under the concept of ethnic identity. Correlation of War (COW) data uses both religion and ethnicity in measuring culture (see Henderson 1997 :661). Finally, Anthony Smith traces modern nationalism to religious origins (Smith 1999 ; see also Brubaker 2012 ).

Haynes ( 1998 ) provides a brief discussion about the definition dilemma and draws on Aquaviva while offering two sociological definitions. One sees religion as “a system of beliefs and practices related to an ultimate being, beings of the supernatural,” and the other considers religion to be what is “sacred in a society, that is, ultimate beliefs and practices which are inviolate” (Haynes 1998 : 4). The latter kind of definition is sometime referred to as ‘civil religion’ (Liebman and Don-Yiḥya 1983 ).

Toft ( 2007 :99) lists the common elements in most definitions: “a belief in a supernatural being (or beings); prayers and communication with that being; transcendent realities that might include some form of heaven, paradise, or hell; a distinction between the sacred and the profane and between ritual acts and sacred objects; a view that explains both the world as a whole and a person's proper role in it; a code of conduct in line with that world view; and a community bound by its adherence to these elements.”

On one hand, this discussion provides us some indicators to distinguish between religion and culture: the first belongs to the realm of the sacred and involves a relatively stable doctrine that connects the individual with the transcendental, while the latter belongs to the realm of the profane and involves a malleable combination of practices, customs, and expectations in relation to the society. On the other hand, religion and culture are intrinsically connected by myths, practices, and moral judgments that make religion a part of culture.

War and Peace in the Works of Religious Scholars and Political Theorists

Almost all religious texts have references to war and peace – the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, the Iliad and Odyssey, the Rig Veda, Mahabharata and Ramayana, Arthasastra, and so on. These references offer different treatments of war and peace. Some describe human nature as aggressive or as pursuing peace, some explain war and peace as a result of divine intervention and will, and some define the conditions in which war and peace can be achieved. Some references in sacred texts condition peace on the society's moral behavior. Other texts determine with whom, when, and how a war can be held and a peace treaty can be signed. Most of the sacred texts also have detailed historical narratives of war and peace, from which we can draw conclusions how the religion conceives war and peace. Religious figures and leaders are still creating new interpretations and commentary about peace and war, and this rich genre receives a lot of attention from scholars. In the Western world, books on Judaism and Christianity were written focusing on analyzing peace and war in the Hebrew Bible, in the New Testament, and in sermons, letters, and other external texts and exegeses (Arias 1533 ; Belli 1563 ; Benezet 1776 ; Heaton 1816 ; Dymond 1834 ). In the Muslim world, a similar attempt was made (Shaybani 1335 ; Ibn Khaldun 1377 ; Baladhuri 1866 ). This trend is still relevant in contemporary research today in Christianity (Faunce 1918 ; Barrett 1987 ; Swartley 2006 ), in Buddhism (Kraft 1992 ; Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010 ), in Islam (Khadduri 1940 ; Khadduri 1955 ; Kelsay and Johnson 1991 ; Abu-Nimer 2003 ; Mirbagheri 2012 ), in Judaism (Homolka and Friedlander 1994 ; Eisen 2011 ), in Hinduism (Banerjee 1988 ), and in some of them together (Jack 1968 ; Ferguson 1978 ; Smock 1992 ; Gort et al. 2002 ; Nelson-Pallmeyer 2003 ; Nan, Mampilly, and Bartoli 2012 ).

Political philosophy also includes religion in its scholarship. Religion, God, and faith exist in the writings of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Grotius, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and other early Western political thinkers. All of them considered religion to be an inherent part of life and society that had to be accounted for in political analysis. Some perceived religion as a moral and ethical guideline for individuals and society, and some debated whether religion is an obstacle for government and society or an integral part of it. The relationship between religion and political life remains a vibrant subject of debate to this day (Eisenach 1981 ; Beiner 1993 ; Martinich 2003 ; De Vries 2003 ). Despite the richness of the contributions of religious scholars and of philosophers, these works have not yet offered a scientific theory regarding the role that religion plays in war and peace.

Religion and Conflict: The Clash of Civilization Debate

The first major attempt in the IR field to understand war almost exclusively through the religious prism was that of Samuel Huntington in his well-known article and book Clash of Civilization ( 1993 , 1996 ). Huntington, rejecting Francis Fukuyama's notion of the “End of History,” divides the world into seven or eight major civilizations that are fundamentally different from each other “by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion” (Huntington 1993 :25). Instead of the traditional territorial nation-states, Huntington recognizes a world comprised of various identities that are not necessarily delineated by national boundaries. He argues that the end of the Cold War and the ideological battle between the West and the East will be replaced by a battle of civilizations, which is the broadest category of identification for individuals and is mainly determined by religious beliefs. More specifically, Huntington predicts that the main civilizational conflict will be between the Islamic civilization and the Judeo-Christian Western civilization, due to conflictual history from both sides, a large gap in values, the rise of Islamic extremists and fundamentalism, and a clash of identities as a result of Muslim immigration.

In sum, Huntington's view clarifies two main reasons why religion can cause war. First, religion can be considered as a primordial and immutable identity. The Manichean perception of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ that religion provides is a main source of conflict (Dark 2000 :4–5, 11). Second, globalization, which folds within it rapid economic development and an increase in interactions between individual groups, creates a clash between traditional customs and Western modernity (Fox 1997 :3; Thomas 2000 :5). The desire of other civilizations to maintain their core values and traditions, and to prevent the domination of Western culture lead Huntington to claim that civilizational differences will be the main source of future wars (Huntington 1993 :29–31, 40).

Huntington's thesis received a lot of interest in scholarly and political discourse, and his thesis was tested and criticized from many angles. Ajami ( 1993 ), Bartley ( 1993 ), and Weeks ( 1993 ), for example, argue that states are still the main actors in the international system and that the English-Western secular modern force is more powerful than Huntington thinks. Kirkpatrick ( 1993 ) claims that intra-civilizational conflicts are more common than inter-civilizational conflicts. Others, such as Tipson ( 1997 ), Pfaff ( 1997 ), and Said ( 2001 ), criticize Huntington's facts and methodology (for more comprehensive reviews of the clash of civilization debate see O'Hagan 1995 ; Fox and Sandler 2004 ; Fox 2005 ). Katzenstein ( 2010 ) rejects Huntington's conception of civilizations as homogeneous in favor of a pluralistic view recognizing internal diversity. Katzenstein ( 2010 ) further questions the Huntingtonian “clash” with the evident capacity for inter-and trans-civilizational encounters.

Scholars have also made quantitative attempts to test Huntington's theory. Russett, Oneal, and Cox ( 2000 ) examine inter-state wars between 1950 and 1992 and conclude that realist and liberal variables provide better explanations of these conflicts than civilizational factors. Henderson and Tucker ( 2001 ) examine international wars between 1816 and 1992 and find no connection between civilization membership and international wars. In addition, Henderson and Tucker find that conflicts within civilizations are more likely than conflicts between civilizations. More recent attempts also do not find support for the clash of civilization thesis (Chiozza 2002 ; Ben-Yehuda 2003 ; Bolks and Stoll 2003 ; Fox 2004 ; Henderson 2005 ). However, Henderson's ( 1997 :663) findings suggest that “the greater the religious dissimilarity between states, the greater the likelihood of war.” Similarly, Roeder ( 2003 ) examines ethnopolitical conflicts and finds support for Huntington's thesis. Fox, James, and Li ( 2009 ) bring a different angle to the clash of civilizations debate in examining international interventions on behalf of the same ethno-religious group in another state. Although they focus only on conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, their findings show that Muslim states are more likely to intervene on behalf of other Muslim minorities. Moreover, ethnic conflicts with a religious dimension seem more likely to attract intervention than other ethnic conflicts.

Another view of religion as a cause of war sees religion as a form of ideology rather than identity. In this kind of approach, the emphasis is not on how clashing religious identities create conflict, but rather how religious ideas shape worldviews that justify or are consistent with conflict (see also Desch 1998 ). According to Beker ( 2008 ), for example, the Jewish notion of the “chosen people” has fueled many ideological conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. He further demonstrates how the battle over “chosenness” is evident in modern anti-Semitic discourse. Khadduri ( 1955 ) makes an analogous point with the concepts of dar al-harb (territory of war) and dar al-Islam (territory of Islam) in Islamic laws of war. Similarly, in examining Chinese thought and culture and their influence on Ming strategy towards the Mongols, Johnston ( 1995 :xi) finds that the non-militant ideas usually associated with Confucianism may be “inaccurate, misleading, or plainly wrong.” Juergensmeyer ( 2003 ) focuses on ideas that affect “cultures of violence.” Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and others, Juergensmeyer claims, share a worldview of cosmic war between darkness and light (Juergensmeyer 2003 :13, 35). Because religious ideology is a defined non-negotiable set of rules, resolving a religious dispute peacefully is harder than with other disputes (Dark 2000 :1–2).

Religious Fundamentalism and Violence

The relationship between religious worldviews and war leads us to religious fundamentalism and violence. Of special note is the five-volume work by Marty and Appleby ( 1991 –5) that encompasses different approaches and case studies related to fundamentalism. Marty and Appleby ( 1992 :34) define fundamentalism as “a distinctive tendency – a habit of mind and a pattern of behavior – found within modern religious communities and embodied in certain representative individuals and movements … a religious way of being that manifests itself as a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity as a people or group.” They recount the ideological extremism in social, political, and structural conditions, such as social deprivation, repressive regimes, reaction to secularization, and economic crises. Marty and Appleby argue that religious ideas are not the goal for the fundamentalists, but rather they use religion as a means to achieve political ends. Fundamentalists use “old doctrines, subtly lift them from their original context … and employ them as ideological weapons against a hostile world” (Marty and Appleby 1991 :826). Fundamentalism, in this view, is a religious backlash against secular rule (see also Tibi 1999 ). Juergensmeyer ( 1993 ) shares this view but opposes labeling this religious fervor as fundamentalism due to the accusatory and ambiguous meanings of the term.

Eisenstadt ( 1999 ) agrees with Marty and Appleby that “contemporary” fundamentalist movements are thoroughly modern movements, but disagrees with the link they draw between religious force and fundamentalism. For Eisenstadt, contemporary fundamentalist movements rest on the same universal, utopian, totalistic, and secular claims of modernity that the Jacobins and the communist revolutions were based upon but “promulgate anti-modern or anti-Enlightenment ideologies” (Eisenstadt 1999 :1). The direction which a fundamentalist movement takes depends on its civilization, the political and social circumstances surrounding the movement, and the international setting (Eisenstadt 1999 ). Reviews of religious fundamentalism and violence include Gill ( 2001 ) and Ozzano ( 2009 ).

Religious Actors and International Conflict

Scholarship has gone beyond the clash of civilizations debate and the study of fundamentalism to explore further questions about how and under what conditions religion leads to war. One approach has been to consider individual values and mindsets in the lists of factors that affect decision making by leaders, including decisions about war. Brecher ( 1972 ), Jervis ( 1976 ), and Fisher ( 1997 ) focus on culture, while Fox ( 2001 ), Sandal and James ( 2010 ), and Warner and Walker ( 2011 ) focus specifically on religion. On the collective level, society's core values, conceptions, and assumptions about the world and the enemy can influence foreign policy outcomes (Booth 1979 ; Hudson and Vore 1995 ; Reeves 2004 ). Religious beliefs should not be dismissed as irrational or marginal, but should be included in the strategic calculations of leaders and states (Toft 2007 :129).

Religious affinities on the collective level are not confined to traditional territorial state boundaries. Transnational religious actors are another good example of the role of religion in conflict. Religious terrorist groups that have cells in different countries can initiate a conflict between states, and global riots can result from injury to religious sentiment, as in the Danish caricature case (Dark 2000 :5–10; Fox 2001 :67–9; Haynes 2001 ). These kinds of conflicts can be international, when religious diaspora is engaged in the conflict, or remain domestic (civil wars). Fox and Sandler show how local wars can capture the interest of members of transnational religious groups due to the possible involvement of holy sites (Fox and Sandler 2004 :63–82). Even without direct participation in violence, religious transnational movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participate in global conflict by lobbying or protesting in order to encourage a state to intervene in a distant war between ethno-religious minorities (Fox, James and Li 2009 ).

Religion may also have an indirect effect on war since it can be used as a tool to mobilize people and to enhance legitimacy (Fox 2001 :65–7; Haynes 2004 :456; Snyder 2011 :11). This does not necessarily mean that political leaders actually hold religious beliefs but that such beliefs serve them in accomplishing their political interests. This view holds that the recent global resurgence of religion in various societies occurs as a result of instrumental use of religion by political elites (Fox 1997 :4; Hasenclever and Rittberger 2000 :643–6).

The question of whether religion is the cause of a conflict, or just a tool or a dimension of it was addressed in several quantitative studies. Gurr ( 1993 ) uses the Minorities at Risk data to examine mobilization and collective action in “communal conflicts.” His findings indicate that an essential basis for mobilization is a sense of group identity. Gurr measures group identity by using six indicators including religion, ethnicity, and social customs. Fox ( 1997 , 2002 ) tries to isolate conflicts between groups from different religions. Using the same data as Gurr, Fox concludes that in such cases “religious issues play, at most, a marginal role” (Fox 1997 :16). Henderson, however, using Correlates of War data, concludes that “cultural difference, especially in the case of religion, is positively associated with war” (Henderson 1997 :666). Durward and Marsden ( 2009 ) offer a more nuanced and developed understanding of how religious beliefs, discourses, and practices are politicized and used to trigger conflicts, justify military interventions, and facilitate resolutions.

Religion and the Intensity of War

Another trend in the study of religion and war asks whether religious conflicts are more violent than other conflicts and if some religions are more prone to use more violence than others. Fox and Sandler ( 2004 ), using Minorities at Risk data, conclude that “religious conflicts … are consistently more violent than nonreligious conflicts.” A study by Pearce ( 2005 ) using a different data set supports this conclusion.

As for the relationship between a specific religion and violence, Pearce's ( 2005 :349) results show that Judaism and Hinduism are more violence prone, but this may be due to a small number of cases. Fox and Sandler's ( 2004 :132) results demonstrate “conflicts involving Islamic groups are more violent than conflicts not involving Islamic groups,” and conflicts within the Islamic civilization “are slightly more violent” than conflicts between civilizations. Due to the fact that there are many Muslim states, but only one Jewish state and one Hindu state that are each experiencing protracted conflict, it is still unclear whether specific religions are more violent than others, or whether it is a false image created by the uneven numbers of religious groups. The finding that Islamists were involved in 81 percent of the religious civil wars between 1940 and 2000 led Toft ( 2007 ) to eventually conclude that “overlapping historical, geographical, and, in particular, structural factors account for Islam's higher representation in religious civil wars.” More importantly, her theory suggests that religious aspects are an instrument by political elites for gaining more legitimacy in order to survive, or to achieve another objective (Toft 2007 :97–8, 128).

The degree of religious violence does not have to be related to a specific religion, but rather to the type of regime or degree of state power. Thomas ( 2000 :14–15) suggests that the appeal for religious ideas grows larger especially in weak states. Fox ( 1997 ) shows an increase in religious discrimination and grievance in autocratic states compared with democratic regimes. When a transition to democracy happens, the chances of such communal violence rise due to the diminishing power of the regime and an ease of autocratic repression (Gurr 1994 ).

Culture, Religion, and Diplomacy

Scholars have also been interested in the practical use of religion and culture to promote peace. Discussing culture specifically, Kevin Avruch ( 1998 ) suggests that culture is a significant variable in conflict resolution as each negotiator comes with his or her own subculture (class, region, ethnicity, and more). In contrast, Zartman ( 1993 :17) gives culture little substantive significance and argues that it is as relevant as the breakfast the negotiators ate. Fisher ( 1980 ) and Cohen ( 1997 ) occupy the middle ground suggesting that culture matters together with other variables. For a good introductory review regarding these approaches, see Ramsbotham, Miall, and Woodhouse ( 2011 ).

Cultural gaps may involve language barriers, create problems of interpretation, and disrupt the transfer of information (Gulliver 1979 ; Fisher 1980 ; Faure and Rubin 1993 ; Cohen 1997 ; Berton et al. 1999 ). The dichotomy, made by Hall ( 1976 ) between high-context cultures and low-context cultures, is useful in explaining these cultural obstacles in international negotiation. High-context cultures are generally associated with collective societies in which communication is less verbal and more indirect, emphasizing the context in which things are said and done. High-context cultures require communicators to pay attention to nuances and body language. Consequently, those from such cultures are more sensitive socially, they try to please their audience, and they see great importance in small talk and group consensus. Low-context cultures, on the other hand, are individualistic in character, and communication is direct and with a clear message. Accuracy in the written or spoken word is very important in low-context culture, and less attention is paid to context, body language, and facial expressions (Cohen 1997 ; Rubinstein 2003 ). When two societies from the two different types of culture meet around the negotiation table, potential pitfalls are evident. This line of research has specific practical implications. The US Institute of Peace published a series of works analyzing different negotiating styles and behaviors to equip negotiators with a better understanding of cultural differences. Examples include Wittes ( 2005 ), Solomon and Quinney ( 2010 ), and Schaffer and Schaffer ( 2011 ).

As for structure and the process of negotiation, culture can play an important role in the degree of trust between the sides, which can define negotiation strategy and whether there is a need for mediation. These factors can also influence the size of the delegations, the different roles within the delegation, the degree of unity within the delegation, negotiating procedures, seating arrangements, and public announcements (Berton et al. 1999 :3–5).

This vast literature regarding culture and diplomacy has little to say about religion. As former United States Secretary of State and international relations scholar Madeleine Albright confesses, diplomacy, conflict resolution, negotiation, and peace were all conceptualized in secular terms with no room for religion and faith prior to the terror attacks of September 11th (Albright 2006 :8–9). Indeed, most of the IR studies on culture and diplomatic practices to promote peace were written during the 1980s and 1990s. Only after September 11th did religion and faith become a primary topic.

Many scholars agree that the same power that religion has in inciting conflicts can also be used to promote peace (Gopin 1997 ; Appleby 2000 ; Broadhead and Keown 2007 ). Some works continue the trajectory of previous studies on cross-cultural negotiation and focus on a specific religion. In the case of Islam, Alon ( 2000 ), Alon and Brett ( 2007 ), and Pely ( 2010 ) focus on Muslim perceptions of conflict resolution, values of honor, and the institutional mechanism of sulha (reconciliation). Other studies consider how peace can be achieved with an emphasis on shared religious values, such as empathy, forgiveness, mercy, compassion and the Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Gopin 1997 ; Gopin 2001 ; Cilliers 2002 ; Carter and Smith 2004 ). Similarly, Albright ( 2006 :73) mentions the religious notion that “we are all created in the image of God” as a common ground. Shore ( 2009 :2) shows how “Christianity played a central role in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” and how values of forgiveness and justice were important in South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy. Similarly, Gopin ( 2002 ) argues that in the Israeli-Palestinian case, the marginalization of religious aspects was crucial in the failure of the Oslo agreement. He adds that by putting religion in the middle of the reconciliation process, and with dialogues between key religious figures from both sides, peace in the Middle East can be achieved.

While traditional realpolitik diplomacy has had difficulties coping with religion-inspired conflicts, non-state actors, such as religious leaders and members of religious NGOs, had more success in promoting peace in different forms – whether peacemaking, peacebuilding, peace enforcing, or peace keeping (Little 2006 :102). Cynthia Sampson ( 1997 ) overviews the various roles and methodologies used by religious-motivated institutional actors in the process of peacebuilding. She provides manifold examples of conflict intervention by religious institutional actors that advocate (such as during the Rhodesian war of independence), intermediate (such as in the 1972 Sudanese peace process), observe (such as during the 1991 Zambian elections), and educate (such as in Northern Ireland). Appleby ( 2000 ) offers a similar approach focusing on religious actors and their roles.

The vast examples of religious involvement in peacebuilding have led Johnston and Sampson ( 1997 ) and Johnston ( 2003 ) to conceptualize this type of diplomacy as “faith-based diplomacy,” which takes place through track II channels (the informal and unofficial negotiations). In general, the Catholic Church receives more scholarly attention than other religious institutions in mediating disputes. Examples include the 1968–89 internal dispute in Bolivia (Klaiber 1993 ) and the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile (Garrett 1985 ; Lindsley 1987 ; Laudy 2000 ). Bartoli's analyses of the reconciliation process in Mozambique specify how religion plays a role in conflict resolution. He demonstrates that religion does not replace or transform the political process of negotiation, but rather provides motivation, organizational capacities, legitimacy, and flexibility (Bartoli 2001 , 2005 ; see also Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011 ).

The volume edited by David Little ( 2007 ) offers a different perspective that focuses on individual religious figures, rather than institutions, as peacemakers. Examples from El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and Sudan highlight the grassroots efforts by religious individuals to promote peace. Using religious texts, rituals, and networks these individuals increase global attention, help find common ground, provide moral justification, and facilitate face-to-face communication between the warring sides (see also Smock 2008 ; for more on the topic of diplomacy and religion see “Diplomacy and Religion”).

Recently, there is a growing interest in challenging the secularist assumptions of United States foreign policy. Hurd ( 2008 ), for example, demonstrates that the perceived separation between religious and secular political authorities is a result of a political process and is socially constructed. By identifying two trajectories of secularism – a laicist one and a Judeo-Christian one – she shows how religion and secularism were never apart. Thus, instead of characterizing religion as a threat, diplomats and decision makers should realize that there are various political representations and interpretations of religion and should make more room for non-Western forms of politics (Hurd 2007 ). From a different perspective, Farr ( 2008 ) calls for rejecting the American narrow version of religious freedom that focuses on humanitarian violations in favor of a more tolerant and broader version that builds and encourages different versions of religious freedom in different regimes. Philpott ( 2013 :31) supports Farr's conclusions by highlighting how religious freedom is a “critical enabler of peace.”

Culture, Religion, and the Democratic Peace

Another research theme in IR tries to engage religion and culture in existing peace theories. The main example is democratic peace theory, by which liberal democracies tend not to fight each other. One of the explanations for democratic peace argues that shared cultures, values, and norms favoring compromise and peaceful solutions lead liberal democracies to solve disputes peacefully (Maoz and Russett 1993 ). But the traditional cultural explanation for democratic peace focuses on political culture and not on other elements such as ethnicity, language, and religion. Henderson ( 1998 ) tests the theory with those elements included and concludes that religious similarities within democratic dyads decrease the likelihood of war, while ethnic and lingual similarities increase this likelihood.

The connection between peaceful behavior and regime type led scholars to examine the connection between specific religions and democracy as a way to better understand the conditions for democracy and presumably for peace. After Huntington's theory and the events of September 11th, Western scholars tested Bernard Lewis’ hypothesis that Islamic religion conflicts with democracy (Midlarsky 1998 :486). This topic was researched from different angles. Some argue that Muslim resistance to modernity is an obstacle to democracy (Sivan 1990 ); some argue that lack of sufficient economic development holds back democracy; others claim that the possession of oil and the concept of the ‘rentier state’ hinder democracy (Ross 2001 ; Fish 2002 ); and some claim that the ideas grounded in Islamic thought and religion are incompatible with democracy (Huntington 1984 ; Lewis 1996 ). On the other hand, Esposito and Piscatori ( 1991 ) and Esposito and Voll ( 1996 ) argue that Islam is not necessarily hostile to democracy, and urge us to remember that Islam, like democracy, has a variety of interpretations, meanings, and political practices. Midlarsky ( 1998 ) tries to test the relationship between Islam and democracy using a political rights index (measuring procedural democracy) and an index of liberal democracy (measuring liberal freedoms). He finds that Islam, measured by the percentage of population that is Muslim, has a negative correlation with liberal freedoms but does not necessarily rule out democratic procedure. Recently, Hunter and Malik ( 2005 ) offer an antithesis to this view and demonstrate how military, colonial, international economic, and domestic economic factors prevented the creation of a civil society that is crucial for democracy. Sonn and McDaniel's chapter in the same book demonstrates how modern Islamic thought is quite similar to Western values, including rationality and tolerance.

Future Research

In the study of war and peace, religion long played a marginal role. Both sacred texts and Western canonical philosophical works contain religious references to war and peace, but none of the main theoretical works in IR address religion. Since the end of the Cold War and the growing attention to ethnic conflicts, new interests in culture and religion emerged. Scholars first explored the interplay of culture, war, and peace focusing on decision making, negotiation, national character, and the cultural construction of friends and foes. Then, as a result of the growing attention to ethnic conflict and terrorism, there was a resurgence of interest in religion in IR scholarship. Treated both as a central component of social identity and as an overarching ideology, religious international violence is understood by some scholars as a reaction to global population flows, modernization processes, and secularization.

Religion, as a social phenomenon, is also able to help us understand the growing power of actors outside the traditional boundaries of the state. Transnational actors that share religious beliefs with each other can pursue different, and sometimes contradictory, goals from those of the nation-state. Such actors can ignite conflicts, but can also help in mediating negotiations and promoting peace. Diplomats have learned to use key religious figures in their reconciliation attempts and they try to emphasize common values and diminish differences between religions.

The rediscovery of religion in IR scholarship has produced many studies that try to theorize the role of religion in conflict and peace. Thus far, these studies treat religion either as a political tool used by agents for their own interests or as an essentialist ideological scheme that informs actors’ behavior. Future research may focus on the relational and constantly changing aspects of religion and show what, when, and how various religious interpretations receive political prominence in promoting conflict or peace. Moreover, IR scholarship could use more theorization of how religion can be used as an independent variable across cases. How can one compare the religious passions animating the Crusades, with the religious passions during the Thirty Years War, or with modern fundamentalist terrorism? The definitional problems, mentioned earlier, provide difficulties in that regard.

A new way to look in more depth at religious and cultural elements of international politics is to use them as interpretive tools. Culture can be conceptualized as the “practices of meaning-making,” and thus open an opportunity to investigate the ways in which meanings are created within a society (Wedeen 2002 ). For example, examining political rhetoric can help us understand how meanings become inscribed within a society and how changes in rhetoric can lead to changes in foreign policy (Krebs and Jackson 2007 ; Krebs and Lobasz 2007 ). Another beneficial way to engage the elusive concepts of culture and religion is to trace the hidden set of assumptions that are embedded in the cultural and religion labels. What does “democracy” or “freedom” mean to different cultural or religious groups? What types of behavior are expected from a negotiator who is labeled Muslim or Buddhist and how does it affect the negotiation process? Moreover, how does popular representation of different religions shape these hidden assumptions?

IR literature will probably continue to engage culture and religion in its research, but in order to develop the field and avoid academic stagnation, it is important to enable scientific pluralism that will force us to reconsider how we treat religion and culture. A deeper understanding of different religions and cultures will open our understanding of the different “worlds” within “our world” and will identify the values that drive these worlds.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Renée Marlin-Bennett for her valuable guidance and comments, and Andrew Mark Bennett for his meticulous assistance.

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Links to Digital Materials

Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. At http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/ , accessed August 21, 2013 . The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, based at Georgetown University, is an educational and a research center for the study of religion in relation to various international phenomena, such as globalization, human rights, ethnics of war, negotiation, and more. The website also includes data regarding international religious freedom.

The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD). At http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/index.php?en , accessed August 21, 2013 . The ICD is an international NGO whose main goal is to enhance the intercultural relations between peoples and areas in the world. The ICD offers reports and publications researching various aspects of cultural diplomacy – definitions, efforts, implementation, and future directions. The institute combines academic development of the field with practical programs and educational resources.

Minorities at Risk (MAR). At http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/mar/ , accessed August 21, 2013 . The MAR project, located at University of Maryland, collects data regarding active conflict between communal groups. Among other variables, the MAR data measures religious characteristics of the conflicting groups.

Religions and Ethics in the Making of War and Peace Project. At http://relwar.org/ , accessed August 21, 2013 . The project on Religion and Ethnics in the Making of War and Peace, based at the University of Edinburgh, is an academic and practical forum to discuss the relationship between military and religious ethics. The publication section includes several articles on that topic.

Religions for Peace. At http://religionsforpeace.org/ , accessed August 21, 2013 . Religion for Peace was founded in 1970 as a coalition of representatives from the world's major religions dedicated to promote peace. The website offers guides and resources aimed to help religious leaders decrease violence and encourage development and peace.

United States Institute of Peace. At http://www.usip.org/ , accessed August 21, 2013 . Beside various books dealing with negotiation styles of different cultures, the United States Institute of Peace offers panels, initiatives, reports, and other publications dealing both with culture and religion in diplomacy and in war.

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Religion and Culture

This is an excerpt from International Relations –  an E-IR Foundations beginner’s textbook. Download your free copy here .

Religion and culture seem like complex ideas to study from the perspective of International Relations. After all, scholars and philosophers have long debated the meaning of these terms and the impact they have had on our comprehension of the social world around us. So is it an impossibly complicated task to study religion and culture at the global level? Fortunately, the answer is ‘no’, for we can recognise and respect complexity without being confused about what we mean by each term. In this chapter, which completes the first section of the book, we will explore why thinking about religious and cultural factors in global affairs is as integral as the other issues we have covered thus far.

What do we mean by the terms ‘religion’ and ‘culture’? Where can we see examples of religion and culture at work in the domains of world politics? How do religious and cultural factors impact on our ability to live together? Our investigation will begin to address these questions. As we do so, we shall keep in mind the encouragement of rabbi and political philosopher Jonathan Sacks, who wrote that ‘sometimes it is helpful to simplify, to draw a diagram rather than a map in order to understand what may be at stake in a social transition’ (1997, 55). There has indeed been a transition in IR thinking about the value of religion and culture.

How can we define religion and culture in a way that is useful to the study of world politics? It is important to sketch each term separately before bringing them back together to form a composite picture. We begin with religion, a category that scholars and policymakers once considered irrelevant to the study of IR because it was not believed to be important for the economic and security interests of modern states and their citizens. Yet, many scholars now hold that religion cannot be ignored. While the idea of culture has equally been underplayed in IR, its inclusion in analyses of world affairs predates that of religion and is considered less controversial. We shall consider four elements of each category and then make important linkages between them so that religion and culture make sense as whole, rather than fragmented, ideas.

Elements of religion

Following the Al Qaeda attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 (often called 9/11), studies of religion in world politics increased sixfold. In the words of Robert Keohane, the events of 9/11 provoked the realisation that ‘world-shaking political movements have so often been fuelled by religious fervour’ (2002, 29). Indeed, whether it is the disruptions of religion-led revolution, the work of religious development agencies responding to natural disasters, peace-making efforts of religious diplomats or a myriad of other examples, even a glance at global affairs over recent decades seems to support the comment of sociologist Peter Berger that ‘the world today … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever’ (1999, 2).

Such a view also seems supported by the numbers as ‘worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group’ (Pew 2012, 9). Are you numbered among the 20 or 80 per cent? Do you think religious influence on global affairs is a welcome inclusion or a significant problem? Regardless of where we stand, it appears a closer look at the ‘religion question’ is in order if we are to establish a fuller picture of IR. The following four elements of religion may provide a useful introduction.

1. God(s) and forces in the public square

The first element of religion is the belief that divine beings and/or forces hold relevance to the meaning and practice of politics today and throughout history. These beings are sometimes understood as a knowable God or gods, sometimes as mythical and symbolic figures from our ancient past and sometimes as impersonal forces beyond the physical realm.

Different religious traditions understand the influence of religion upon politics in different ways. Traditions that we might call ‘fundamental’ propose that politics is a matter of organising society according to divine commands. In Iran, for example, the highest court in the land is a religious one, drawing its principles from the Shia branch of Islam – the second largest Islamic tradition worldwide after the majority Sunni tradition. This court has the power to veto laws of parliament and decide who can hold power. Likewise, in Myanmar (formerly Burma) an influential group of religious monks has started a movement intent on imposing Buddhist principles on the whole country, including non-Buddhist minorities. Thus, some religious politics is based on ‘fundamentals’ that, in the view of adherents, cannot be changed without the standards of society also being compromised.

By contrast, traditions that adopt a ‘contextual’ approach hold that politics is a matter of influencing society according to divine principles but as part of a wider tapestry of influences. For example, religious development organisations such as the Aga Khan Development Network (also from the Shia branch of Islam) work in areas of health care and education in countries of Africa and Asia without seeking to control entire political systems. Likewise, in Myanmar, the so-called Saffron Revolution of 2007 saw Buddhist monks stand with the poor against the ruling military dictatorship and support the beginnings of multi-party democracy. In these examples, religious politics is adapted to changing circumstances and takes into account diverse interests and beliefs across society.

What is common to both fundamental and contextual religious traditions is an understanding that politics is in some sort of interactive relationship with the intentions of, or traditions shaped by, gods (or God) and spiritual forces. This contrasts strongly with secular approaches that demote, and sometimes deny altogether, a role for religion in political affairs.

Do you believe that religion has a role to play in public debates or should it be confined to private spirituality only? From an individual point of view, we could address this question by asking what it would be like to live in societies that are either entirely controlled by religion, or entirely without religion. What would the benefits and losses be in each situation? It can be strongly argued that neither scenario exists in pure form. When religion has been used to dominate the public square, a diversity of groups (non-religious and religious) have risen in opposition. Likewise, when religion has been expelled from the public domain, religious actors and interests go underground waiting for a chance to re-emerge.

2. Sacred symbols (re)defining what is real

The second element of religion are rituals that re-order the world according to religious principle. Although the word ‘faith’ can be associated with belief in unseen realities, humans throughout time have needed to see, touch and smell the sacred. Our senses are portals to the spirit. Therefore, rituals function as tangible symbols of the intangible realm. For examples of different studies that consider the public rituals of Judaism, Islam and Hinduism respectively see Beck (2012), Bronner (2011) and Haider (2011). While some religious rituals are private or hidden, many are performed in public spaces or in ways that are openly accessible to wider society. As such, they are a part of public life – which is one of the original definitions of the word politics.

For religious adherents, rituals symbolise spiritual truths but they can also redefine how power can be understood in the material world. Thomas Merton once described his experience of watching Trappist monks perform the rituals of the Catholic Mass in very political terms. He wrote:

The eloquence of this liturgy [communicated] one, simple, cogent, tremendous truth: this church, the court of the Queen of Heaven, is the real capital of the country in which we are living. These men, hidden in the anonymity of their choir and their white cowls, are doing for their land what no army, no congress, no president could ever do as such: they are winning for it the grace and the protection and the friendship of God. (Merton 1948, 325)

Merton’s experience of redefining power and influence through sacred symbols is true for millions of people practising thousands of different religious rituals each day. Beyond the experience of individuals, states also seek divine blessing. For example, over one-fifth of states today have a monarch (such as a king, queen or emperor). Although monarchs differ in the extent of their powers – from figureheads controlled by parliaments to absolute rulers to variations of these – they all draw their power from some form of religious or spiritual authority. The elaborate rituals of monarchies worldwide are understood by their subjects to symbolise divine blessing for the realm and its citizens, redefining where the real power lies.

3. Sacred stories connecting past, present and future

The third element of religion is teaching traditions based on stories of significant figures, events and ideas from the past and beliefs about the future of time itself – like a spoiler alert about the end of the world. For some religions, however, time itself is an illusion and the main focus is living in the now according to sacred ideas rather than the connection of past–present–future. These elements – interpreting the past, projecting the future, living now – are basic to the development of political ideologies also. Therefore, sometimes religious and political groups can appeal to the same stories or ideas even though the interpretation or intent may differ significantly.

For example, both Jews and Christians uphold the idea of ‘Jubilee’ as central to understanding the story and/or future promise of a Messiah who would usher in a new era of justice with peace (or ‘shalom’). In the 1990s members of both communities appealed to one aspect of Jubilee – a tradition of debt cancellation found in the Hebrew Bible – as the basis for addressing the debt crisis facing developing nations. Only a few years later, this sacred story was used for very different purposes by US president George W. Bush, who celebrated the 2003 invasion of Iraq by quoting a Jubilee text from the Book of Isaiah: ‘To the captives come out, and to those in darkness be free’ (Monbiot 2003). Sacred stories, ideas and teachings from the past have a richness and power that can influence political affairs today and the aspirations we hold for tomorrow. It is no wonder that the anthropologist Talal Asad once observed that what we today call religion has ‘always been involved in the world of power’ (2003, 200).

4. A community worshiping and acting together

The fourth element common to most religions is the need for believers to belong to a faith community in order to practice sacred rituals and reinforce the truth of sacred stories. Some religious traditions could be described as high demand, requiring strict adherence to rules and standards in order to maintain membership of the faith community. Other traditions are low demand, adopting a more flexible approach to the requirements for belonging faithfully to the community. Both forms of faith commitment are expressions of religion as ‘identity politics’ connected to who we are (that is, who we understand ourselves to be) and how we live.

The connection between religion and identity politics can have individual and international significance. For instance, empowered by belonging to a faith community, individuals can act in ways that they might not otherwise have done in isolation. Rosa Parks, an African American woman who famously refused to obey American racial segregation laws and sparked a nation-wide civil rights movement in the 1960s, is often lauded as a heroic individual. This may be true, but as a member of a religious community that affirmed human dignity and the divine principles of racial equality, Rosa Parks was never acting in isolation (Thomas 2005, 230–240). This can be understood internationally also, as many (if not most) faith communities have a transnational membership, and some of these exert significant influence on political issues varying from religion-inspired terrorist action against ‘Western’ values (after all, not all religious politics is peace-orientated) to faith coalitions for environmental sustainability.

The four elements of religion described above – the significance of gods and spirits, the power of holy rituals, the telling of sacred stories and belonging to faith communities – seem in their own ways to be a core aspect of the human condition in the twenty-first century. Although many dimensions of the religious experience can be ‘politics-free’, both history and contemporary events remind us that these combined elements of religion can have a political impact on individuals, nations and international society.

Elements of culture

We can approach the term culture in the same way we have considered religion. There are many proposed meanings of culture, and these vary from the simple to the complex. While each approach has real value for understanding the social world around us, we will opt for a simple version that still gives us plenty to work with. As such, we begin with an understanding of culture as the combined effect of humanly constructed social elements that help people live together. We will explore four elements of culture, illustrating each element through individual and international political experience.

1. Common life practised in society

The first element of culture has to do with common or shared life. While media reporting seems to constantly prioritise stories of war, conflict and controversy, it is equally the case that local, national and international society requires a remarkable degree of cooperation. How do we live together? Common bonds can sometimes be forged through family ties (as the saying goes, ‘you can choose your friends but you are stuck with your relatives’), economic interests (‘what matters most is the colour of your money’) or security concerns (‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’). Yet, there are other bonds that are forged at the social level as peoples of difference find ways to live together in the same space by forging common beliefs, habits and values. It is from this practice of common life that culture often emerges.

Sport provides good examples of culture as common life. Let us think about football (also known as soccer). Local football clubs can be founded on distinct community identity. For example, local Australian players from a Greek background can play for a team sponsored by the Hellenic Association. Clubs can equally represent a locality rather than a particular group. For example, the Smithfield Stallions of Sydney might have individual players from Greek, Ethiopian, British and Turkish background. Regardless of background, at the international level all players in these clubs have a loyalty to the Australian football team. Football is the common bond – a sporting pastime but also cultural practice. Think about the way entire nations can be said to embody the activities of its national sporting heroes. Supporters from different countries will identify their team as playing in a certain style, even if these are stereotypes and not entirely accurate: do all Eastern European teams play with structure and discipline? Do all South American sides use flamboyance and spontaneity? The larger point, for both individuals and nations, is the tangible power of a sporting pastime to generate common bonds from the local to the international (Rees 2016, 179–182). That bond is an expression of culture.

2. Symbols of group identity

The second element of culture are symbols of identity. Constructing and interpreting ‘signs’ is a basic activity in any society. The kinds of sign I am referring to are tangible reminders in modern societies of who we are as a people. They include styles of architecture (such as bridges or religious buildings), land or waterscapes that influence the activity of life (such as in harbour cities), monuments, flags and other identity banners, styles of clothing and habits of dress, distinctive food and drink – and so on. These signs are more than a tourist attraction, they are symbols that inform members about who they are as a group and that help the group live together cohesively.

Consider, for example, the individual and international significance of national flags as cultural symbols. For individuals, a flag can be so powerful that citizens are prepared to die on the fields of battle fighting for its honour, representing as it does the ‘way of life’ of the nation. The Star-Spangled Banner as the anthem of the United States of America describes the power of a national flag to inspire individual and national devotion. Written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 after he spotted the symbol of America still flying following a night of fierce British bombardment, Scott’s moving ode to freedom includes the famous words, ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave; O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’. The answer for Key was yes, the flag symbolising defiance and the promise of victory.

Equally, persecuted communities within a country might see a national or regional flag as a symbol of oppression rather than freedom, symbolising a dominant way of life that excludes them. In all regions of the world nationalist groups fight for autonomy or independence from a country or countries that surround them, and do so under alternative flags that represent their own cultural identity. The flag of the Canadian province of Quebec, for example, employs religious and cultural symbols reflecting its origins as a French colony in the new world. Quebec nationalists campaigning for independence from Canada have employed the flag in the promotion of French language, cultural preservation and Quebecois identity. National separatist groups worldwide are similarly inspired by symbols of culture they are trying to preserve.

3. Stories of our place in the world

The third element of culture is the power of story. Like the cultural use of symbols, societies need to tell stories. These may be about individuals and groups, of events in the distant and recent past, of tales of victory and defeat involving enemies and friends – and so on. Such stories are told to reaffirm, or even recreate, ideas of where that society belongs in relation to the wider world. As such, stories are performances designed to influence what we understand to be real (Walter 2016, 72–73). Sometimes cultural difference can be most starkly understood by the different stories societies tell about themselves. It is no surprise, therefore, that ‘culture change’ often involves a society accepting a different story about itself (or struggling to do so) in order to embrace a new social reality or accept a new view about its own history. Likewise, what is sometimes referred to as a ‘culture war’ occurs when different stories clash and compete for public acceptance (Chapman and Ciment 2013).

For example, indigenous (or ‘First Nations’) peoples readily, and with significant justification, contest the stories of settlement in countries like the United States, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. In such places, national holidays can be mourned as commemorating invasion and dispossession. New Zealand offers somewhat of a contrast, with the story of the nation including the drawing up of the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between the British colonisers and the indigenous Maori tribes. Although the terms of the treaty are still debated, particularly in relation to ‘the lack of Maori contribution’ to those terms (Toki 2010, 400), they did grant Maori peoples rights of ownership of their lands, forests, fisheries and other possessions. Such ownership, as an attempt to uphold the sovereignty of the Maori nation(s), was central to the preservation of their cultural story. Sadly, this is not the history recounted by Australian indigenous nations or most Native American tribes in the United States and Canada. Taken together, these depictions of preservation and loss illustrate the importance of language, ritual, place and tradition in the cultural story at the individual and international level.

4. Agreement on what is ‘good’

The fourth element of culture is the way a society decides what it means to have ‘a good life’. Like living organs, societies experience growth and decline, health and decay, fitness and injury. Extending the analogy, we could say that culture is a way to measure the psychological and emotional health of society. The United Nations Development Programme regards ‘wellbeing’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as fundamental to the sustainable health of a society. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization regards ‘building intercultural understanding’ via the ‘protection of heritage and support for cultural diversity’ to be a priority for international peace and stability. These descriptors reflect what individuals and international societies believe is a healthy culture. As such, culture involves agreement on the kind of things that are good for society and can make it flourish. ‘Culture clash’ occurs when different societies prioritise different understandings of what those ‘good’ things are.

One of the leading frontiers of culture clash worldwide involves the campaign for gender equality in areas such as education, employment, reproductive and marital rights. The story of Malala Yousafzai from northwest Pakistan reminds us of the power of one individual to inspire an international response on the vital issue of education for girls. When Malala was 12, and inspired by her teacher father, she began to speak out for the right to education, something that was becoming increasingly restricted due to the influence of the Taliban in Pakistan. In 2012, although critically wounded, Malala survived an assassination attempt at the hands of the Taliban and, on her recovery, became a brave advocate for the many millions who were being denied education due to certain cultural perceptions about girls and their place in society. In 2014 she was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated her prize money to the building of a secondary school for girls in Pakistan. Malala’s story reminds us that culture is about the way individuals and societies define what the ideal ‘good’ is and the extent to which individual citizens like Malala, the global networks inspired by her story, and even those like the Taliban who oppose this vision are willing to campaign for what they consider to be cultural rights.

Religion and culture: difference and similarity

We have explored elements of religion and culture and offered various brief examples from an individual, national and international perspective. While it has been important to consider each concept separately, highlighting the particular ways that religion and culture influence international relations, there are clear interlinkages between them. Theorists have long drawn such links and these are useful for our consideration here. For example, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described religion as a ‘cultural system’ composed of myths, rituals, symbols and beliefs created by humans as a way of giving our individual and collective lives a sense of meaning (Woodhead 2011, 124). Consider the similarities between the elements of religion and culture described in this chapter such as the role of symbols and stories in both accounts, and the pursuit of life according to what either faith or culture determine to be the higher standards of living.

An important question to ask is whether ‘culture’ should be necessarily understood as the larger more significant category in international relations, always casting ‘religion’ as a subset within it. Such a view makes sense because no one religion encompasses an entire society in the world today, and no society lives entirely according to one set of sacred rules and practices. On the other hand, in some contexts religious authority and identity can be more significant than any other cultural element. For example, when American soldiers moved into the Iraqi city of Najaf in 2003 to negotiate security arrangements, it was not the town mayor or the police chief that had most influence. Rather, it was the reclusive religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose authority influenced not only the city but much of the fracturing nation itself. Taking another example, when Communist authorities confronted striking dock workers in Poland in the 1980s, it was not only unions that opposed them but also the Catholic Church, whose priests performed sacred rituals and stood in solidarity with strikers in open defiance of the government. In both these examples, the elements of religion are equally – if not more – prominent than the elements of culture. Perhaps the most useful approach, therefore, is to see the elements of religion and the elements of culture in constant interaction with one another.

We have explored just four elements for each category. What might some other elements be and what are the impacts of these elements on individual and international life? There are some excellent resources to assist us in exploring such questions. These include an introduction to religion in IR by Toft, Philpott and Shah (2011), an examination of religion in a globalised world by Haynes (2012), a large compendium of essential readings on religion and foreign affairs edited by Hoover and Johnston (2012), and E-International Relations’ edited collection Nations Under God (Herrington, McKay and Haynes 2015). However, the simple outline we have provided so far will enable us to begin answering the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions about religion and culture in global affairs and draw some connections between them.

Can we all live together?

One of the most pressing questions related to our study is whether religious and cultural actors and agendas have more of a positive or negative effect on global affairs. As we have seen above, these elements relate to some of the deepest levels of human experience, both individually and internationally. Should policymakers try to release the powerful energy of religio-cultural identity for the sake of a better world, or should they try to ‘keep a lid on it’ for fear of unleashing forces that might damage our capacity to get along with others?

The value of a ‘both/and’ approach

The study of international relations shows that the answer may be to draw on both strategies, since religio-cultural identity inhabits a space somewhere between the problems of conflict and the possibilities of cooperation. This approach can be seen as an adaptation of Appleby’s influential idea of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ (2000) in which the elements of religio-cultural politics we have explored above carry simultaneously the potential for both violence and peace. The usefulness of this approach is that it helps us to break free from the restrictions of an ‘either/or’ logic about religion and culture (i.e. either conflict or cooperation). Instead, we can focus on a ‘both/and’ analysis which allows individual and international examples of each (i.e. both conflict and cooperation) to inform us about the politics of religion and culture at the global level. The influential scholar Martin E. Marty (2003) would add that such an approach helps us to deepen our understanding of world politics as it really is.

Therefore, with a ‘both/and’ logic in mind, we consider comparative examples of religio-cultural identity in world politics that emphasise conflict and cooperation respectively. The number of alternative examples in IR is potentially unlimited – so as you read on, keep in mind other instances where the elements of religion and culture contribute to violence and peacemaking.

Religion and culture create a ‘clash of civilisations’

When Soviet Communism finally collapsed in 1991, US president George H. W. Bush heralded the beginning of a ‘new world order’. In many ways this was an accurate description because the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West had shaped the dynamics of global affairs for half a century. But, what would this new order look like? One answer was offered by Samuel P. Huntington (1993), who suggested that world politics would no longer be shaped by a clash of ideologies (e.g. capitalism and communism) but rather by a ‘clash of civilizations’. With this hypothesis, Huntington still assumed that global politics would be shaped by conflict as much as the Cold War before it had been. The significant shift in thinking was the prominence that religious and cultural identity would play in shaping the conflict. For Huntington, a civilisation was understood as ‘a cultural entity … defined both by common objective elements such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people’ (1993, 23–24). Significantly, the descriptors Huntington gives to the major civilisations have a cultural or religious link: ‘Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African’ (1993, 25).

Thus, the central tenet to Huntington’s controversial idea is that those elements of culture and religion that we have studied in this chapter contribute to fundamental differences across the globe. This creates fault lines between individuals and peoples who will inevitably fall into serious conflict over these deep and abiding differences. Not surprisingly, Huntington’s ideas have been both criticised and embraced. The phrase ‘clash of civilisations’ came to popular prominence in 2001 as a way to interpret the 9/11 attacks as a conflict between Islam and the West. Although it is worth noting that the administration of George W. Bush did not apply the notion in the way Huntington proposed, scholars were using the phrase well prior to 9/11 and today its applications vary considerably, from commentary on Turkish politics to describing the tension of multicultural policy in Western regional cities. Whatever the merits of these examples (and hundreds like them) they illustrate how Huntington’s thesis has become a way for politicians, commentators and academics to frame conflicts in a changing global landscape. Religion and culture are central to this framing.

Religion and culture create a dialogue of civilisations

At the end of the Cold War, rather than assuming the continuation of a conflict-driven world as Huntington did, some saw the new world order as an opportunity to redesign the way international affairs was conducted. What would such a politics look like? Some policymakers imagined a world where multiple actors – not just powerful states – could contribute to a collective process of stability and accountability. Religio-cultural voices were increasingly considered an important part of this conversation.

Accordingly, an alternative approach to that of Huntington came from a United Nations consultative group known as the World Public Forum, which began an initiative in 2002 called the Dialogue of Civilizations. Influenced by a 1997 proposal from Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, the objective of the Dialogue is to ‘combine the efforts of the international community in protecting humanity’s spiritual and cultural values … bringing the spirit of cooperation and understanding into the daily lives of people from different cultures’. Thus, in stark contrast to the clash of civilisations assumption that religion and culture are causes of conflict, the Dialogue of Civilizations deploys the same broad elements as resources for building bridges between individuals and peoples in the development of sustainable peace and cooperation.

What is the value of such a change? The ‘clash’ emphasises religion and culture as an extension of politics based on power, and one of the abiding problems of world politics is that some states are (much) more powerful than others. The Dialogue of Civilizations potentially offers a more equalising approach, whereby religion and culture become an extension of politics based on shared interests. Noting that religio-cultural communities are often transnational rather than state-based, the Dialogue’s emphasis on ‘spiritual and cultural values’ helps to create an open-ended space for international cooperation beyond the defensive power interests of states.

The importance of precise thinking

Which framework makes more sense to you? Does the rise of religion and culture in international affairs encourage clash or a dialogue? Do religious and cultural elements of politics enable us to live together in cooperation or do they disconnect us in ways that lead to conflict? Applying the logic that we introduced at the start of this section, one answer is that elements of religion and culture contribute to both clash and dialogue, to both conflict and cooperation.

The benefit of this approach is twofold. First, it encourages us to look closely at specific elements of religion and culture – as we have done in this chapter – instead of forcing such complex phenomena into a singular assumption about conflict or cooperation. As Reza Aslan once commented, ‘Islam is not a religion of peace and it is not a religion of war. It is just a religion’ (PBS, 2009). This kind of ambivalent outlook allows us to consider how the precise elements of religion and culture are used in violent and peaceful ways.

Second, applying a ‘both/and’ logic requires us to consider specific examples of international relations – as we have attempted throughout the chapter – without stereotyping religious and cultural traditions by pinning them to singular events. When the shortcomings of religion were once brought to the attention of the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, he remarked that ‘Religion is like a cow. It kicks, but it also gives milk’ (Tyndale 2006, xiv). For every cultural symbol of hate, we see as many cultural symbols of healing and peace. For every religious movement of violence, we see as many religious movements for reconciliation.

This ‘both/and’ understanding of religion and culture has become influential among policymakers working with individuals, local communities, and national, regional and international organisations, marking a significant shift in our understanding of world politics as a whole. Beyond the issue of peace versus violence, it has also helped us understand the need for particular consideration about the extent of religious and cultural influence on politics throughout the world. For example, on religion, Jonathan Fox (2008, 7) writes:

A fuller picture of the world’s religious economy would show secularisation – the reduction of religion’s influence in society – occurring in some parts of the religious economy, and sacralisation – the increase of religion’s influence in society – occurring in other parts.

Cultural factors are similarly dynamic, both in influence and in the forms they take. As James Clifford wrote, ‘“cultures” do not hold still for their portraits’ (1986, 10), and as such the influence of culture on individual and global politics requires precise thinking.

In this chapter we set out to draw a diagram of religion and culture in world affairs. The aim was to show that religious and cultural factors matter if we want to deepen our understanding of international relations. The method has been to define elements of each concept and consider the impact of these elements on aspects of our individual, national and international experience. Hopefully, you are convinced that understanding religious and cultural issues is necessary if you want to join some of the most important discussions about world politics today. There is little that concerns IR today that does not involve elements of religion or culture, or both. Equally, it is important to recognise as a final thought that we have only just begun to explore these issues and we need to go deeper in our consideration of the importance of religious and cultural actors and interests. Understanding them will help us better understand an ever more complex and divided world.

*Please consult the PDF linked above for any citation or reference details.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Secularism: A Religion of the 21st Century
• Opinion – Navigating Epistemic Injustices Between Secularism and Religion
• Megachurches and the Living Dead: Intersections of Religion & Politics in Korea
• Religion in International Relations and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
• From (Communally-Based) Religion to Secularism in Indian Politics
• United Moderate Religion vs. Secular and Religious Extremes?

John A. Rees is Professor of Politics and International Relations at The University of Notre Dame Australia. His research interests are related to themes of religion and international development, religion and foreign policy and the IR discourse on post-secularism.

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Pluralism Project Archive

Native american religious and cultural freedom: an introductory essay (2005).

I. No Word for Religion: The Distinctive Contours of Native American Religions

A. Fundamental Diversity We often refer to Native American religion or spirituality in the singular, but there is a fundamental diversity concerning Native American religious traditions. In the United States, there are more than five hundred recognized different tribes , speaking more than two hundred different indigenous languages, party to nearly four hundred different treaties , and courted by missionaries of each branch of Christianity. With traditional ways of life lived on a variety of landscapes, riverscapes, and seascapes, stereotypical images of buffalo-chasing nomads of the Plains cannot suffice to represent the people of Acoma, still raising corn and still occupying their mesa-top pueblo in what only relatively recently has come to be called New Mexico, for more than a thousand years; or the Tlingit people of what is now Southeast Alaska whose world was transformed by Raven, and whose lives revolve around the sea and the salmon. Perhaps it is ironic that it is their shared history of dispossession, colonization, and Christian missions that is most obviously common among different Native peoples. If “Indian” was a misnomer owing to European explorers’ geographical wishful thinking, so too in a sense is “Native American,”a term that elides the differences among peoples of “North America” into an identity apparently shared by none at the time the continents they shared were named for a European explorer. But the labels deployed by explorers and colonizers became an organizing tool for the resistance of the colonized. As distinctive Native people came to see their stock rise and fall together under “Indian Policy,” they resourcefully added that Native or Indian identity, including many of its symbolic and religious emblems, to their own tribal identities. A number of prophets arose with compelling visions through which the sacred called peoples practicing different religions and speaking different languages into new identities at once religious and civil. Prophetic new religious movements, adoption and adaptation of Christian affiliation, and revitalized commitments to tribal specific ceremonial complexes and belief systems alike marked religious responses to colonialism and Christian missions. And religion was at the heart of negotiating these changes. “More than colonialism pushed,” Joel Martin has memorably written, “the sacred pulled Native people into new religious worlds.”(Martin) Despite centuries of hostile and assimilative policies often designed to dismantle the structures of indigenous communities, language, and belief systems, the late twentieth century marked a period of remarkable revitalization and renewal of Native traditions. Built on centuries of resistance as well as strategic accommodations, Native communities from the 1960s on have vigorously pressed their claims to religious self-determination.

B. "Way of Life, not Religion" In all their diversity, people from different Native nations hasten to point out that their respective languages include no word for “religion”, and maintain an emphatic distinction between ways of life in which economy, politics, medicine, art, agriculture, etc., are ideally integrated into a spiritually-informed whole. As Native communities try to continue their traditions in the context of a modern American society that conceives of these as discrete segments of human thought and activity, it has not been easy for Native communities to accomplish this kind of integration. Nor has it been easy to to persuade others of, for example, the spiritual importance of what could be construed as an economic activity, such as fishing or whaling.

C. Oral Tradition and Indigenous Languages Traversing the diversity of Native North American peoples, too, is the primacy of oral tradition. Although a range of writing systems obtained existed prior to contact with Europeans, and although a variety of writing systems emerged from the crucible of that contact, notably the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah and, later, the phonetic transcription of indigenous languages by linguists, Native communities have maintained living traditions with remarkable care through orality. At first glance, from the point of view of a profoundly literate tradition, this might seem little to brag about, but the structure of orality enables a kind of fluidity of continuity and change that has clearly enabled Native traditions to sustain, and even enlarge, themselves in spite of European American efforts to eradicate their languages, cultures, and traditions. In this colonizing context, because oral traditions can function to ensure that knowledge is shared with those deemed worthy of it, orality has proved to be a particular resource to Native elders and their communities, especially with regard to maintaining proper protocols around sacred knowledge. So a commitment to orality can be said to have underwritten artful survival amid the pressures of colonization. It has also rendered Native traditions particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Although Native communities continue to privilege the kinds of knowledge kept in lineages of oral tradition, courts have only haltingly recognized the evidentiary value of oral traditions. Because the communal knowledge of oral traditions is not well served by the protections of intellectual property in western law, corporations and their shareholders have profited from indigenous knowledge, especially ethnobotanical and pharmacological knowledge with few encumbrances or legal contracts. Orality has also rendered Native traditions vulnerable to erosion. Today, in a trend that linguists point out is global, Native American languages in particular are to an alarming degree endangered languages. In danger of being lost are entire ways of perceiving the world, from which we can learn to live more sustainable, balanced, lives in an ecocidal age.

D. "Religious" Regard for the Land In this latter respect of being not only economically land-based but culturally land-oriented, Native religious traditions also demonstrate a consistency across their fundamental diversity. In God is Red ,Vine Deloria, Jr. famously argued that Native religious traditions are oriented fundamentally in space, and thus difficult to understand in religious terms belonging properly tothe time-oriented traditions of Christianity and Judaism. Such a worldview is ensconced in the idioms, if not structures, of many spoken Native languages, but living well on particular landscapes has not come naturally to Native peoples, as romanticized images of noble savages born to move silently through the woods would suggest. For Native peoples, living in balance with particular landscapes has been the fruit of hard work as well as a product of worldview, a matter of ethical living in worlds where non human life has moral standing and disciplined attention to ritual protocol. Still, even though certain places on landscapes have been sacred in the customary sense of being wholly distinct from the profane and its activity, many places sacred to Native peoples have been sources of material as well as spiritual sustenance. As with sacred places, so too with many sacred practices of living on landscapes. In the reckoning of Native peoples, pursuits like harvesting wild rice, spearing fish or hunting certain animals can be at once religious and economic in ways that have been difficult for Western courts to acknowledge. Places and practices have often had both sacred and instrumental value. Thus, certain cultural freedoms are to be seen in the same manner as religious freedoms. And thus, it has not been easy for Native peoples who have no word for “religion” to find comparable protections for religious freedom, and it is to that troubled history we now turn.

II. History of Native American Religious and Cultural Freedom

A. Overview That sacred Native lifeways have only partly corresponded to the modern Western language of “religion,” the free exercise of which is ostensibly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution , has not stopped Native communities from seeking protection of their freedom to exercise and benefit from those lifeways. In the days of treaty making, formally closed by Congress in 1871, and in subsequent years of negotiated agreements, Native communities often stipulated protections of certain places and practices, as did Lakota leaders in the Fort Laramie Treaty when they specifically exempted the Paha Sapa, subsequently called the Black Hills from land cessions, or by Ojibwe leaders in the 1837  treaty, when they expressly retained “usufruct” rights to hunt, fish, and gather on lands otherwise ceded to the U.S. in the treaty. But these and other treaty agreements have been honored neither by American citizens nor the United States government. Native communities have struggled to secure their rights and interests within the legal and political system of the United States despite working in an English language and in a legal language that does not easily give voice to Native regard for sacred places, practices, and lifeways. Although certain Native people have appealed to international courts and communities for recourse, much of the material considered in this website concerns Native communities’ efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first century to protect such interests and freedoms within the legal and political universe of the United States.

B. Timeline 1871 End of Treaty Making Congress legislates that no more treaties are to be made with tribes and claims “plenary power” over Indians as wards of U.S. government. 1887-1934 Formal U.S. Indian policy of assimilation dissolves communal property, promotes English only boarding school education, and includes informal and formalized regulation and prohibition of Native American ceremonies. At the same time, concern with “vanishing Indians” and their cultures drives a large scale effort to collect Native material culture for museum preservation and display. 1906 American Antiquities Act Ostensibly protects “national” treasures on public lands from pilfering, but construes Native American artifacts and human remains on federal land as “archeological resources,” federal property useful for science. 1921 Bureau of Indian Affairs Continuing an administrative trajectory begun in the 1880's, the Indian Bureau authorized its field agents to use force and imprisonment to halt religious practices deemed inimical to assimilation. 1923 Bureau of Indian Affairs The federal government tries to promote assimilation by instructing superintendents and Indian agents to supress Native dances, prohibiting some and limiting others to specified times. 1924 Pueblos make appeal for religious freedom protection The Council of All the New Mexico Pueblos appeals to the public for First Amendment protection from Indian policies suppressing ceremonial dances. 1924 Indian Citizenship Act Although uneven policies had recognized certain Indian individuals as citizens, all Native Americans are declared citizens by Congressional legislation. 1928 Meriam Report Declares federal assimilation policy a failure 1934 Indian Reorganization Act Officially reaffirms legality and importance of Native communities’ religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions. 1946 Indian Claims Commission Federal Commission created to put to rest the host of Native treaty land claims against the United States with monetary settlements. 1970 Return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo After a long struggle to win support by President Nixon and Congress, New Mexico’s Taos Pueblo secures the return of a sacred lake, and sets a precedent that threatened many federal lands with similar claims, though regulations are tightened. Taos Pueblo still struggles to safeguard airspace over the lake. 1972 Portions of Mount Adams returned to Yakama Nation Portions of Washington State’s Mount Adams, sacred to the Yakama people, was returned to that tribe by congressional legislation and executive decision. 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act Specifies Native American Church, and other native American religious practices as fitting within religious freedom. Government agencies to take into account adverse impacts on native religious freedom resulting from decisions made, but with no enforcement mechanism, tribes were left with little recourse. 1988 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Three Calif. Tribes try to block logging road in federal lands near sacred Mt. Shasta Supreme Court sides w/Lyng, against tribes. Court also finds that AIRFA contains no legal teeth for enforcement. 1990 Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith Oregon fires two native chemical dependency counselors for Peyote use. They are denied unemployment compensation. They sue. Supreme Court 6-3 sides w/Oregon in a major shift in approach to religious freedom. Scalia, for majority: Laws made that are neutral to religion, even if they result in a burden on religious exercise, are not unconstitutional. Dissent identifies this more precisely as a violation of specific congressional intent to clarify and protect Native American religious freedoms 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Mandates return of human remains, associated burial items, ceremonial objects, and "cultural patrimony” from museum collections receiving federal money to identifiable source tribes. Requires archeologists to secure approval from tribes before digging. 1990 “Traditional Cultural Properties” Designation created under Historic Preservation Act enables Native communities to seek protection of significant places and landscapes under the National Historic Preservation Act. 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act Concerning Free Exercise Claims, the burden should be upon the government to prove “compelling state interest” in laws 1994 Amendments to A.I.R.F.A Identifies Peyote use as sacramental and protected by U.S., despite state issues (all regs must be made in consultation with reps of traditional Indian religions. 1996 President Clinton's Executive Order (13006/7) on Native American Sacred Sites Clarifies Native American Sacred Sites to be taken seriously by government officials. 1997 City of Bourne v. Flores Supreme Court declares Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) Protects religious institutions' rights to make full use of their lands and properties "to fulfill their missions." Also designed to protect the rights of inmates to practice religious traditions. RLUIPA has notably been used in a number of hair-length and free-practice cases for Native inmates, a number of which are ongoing (see: Greybuffalo v. Frank).

III. Contemporary Attempts to Seek Protection Against the backdrop, Native concerns of religious and cultural freedoms can be distinguished in at least the following ways.

• Issues of access to, control over, and integrity of sacred lands
• Free exercise of religion in public correctional and educational institutions
• Free Exercise of “religious” and cultural practices prohibited by other realms of law: Controlled Substance Law, Endangered Species Law, Fish and Wildlife Law
• Repatriation of Human Remains held in museums and scientific institutions
• Repatriation of Sacred Objects/Cultural Patrimony in museums and scientific institutions
• Protection of Sacred and Other Cultural Knowledge from exploitation and unilateral appropriation (see Lakota Elder’s declaration).

In their attempts to press claims for religious and cultural self-determination and for the integrity of sacred lands and species, Native communities have identified a number of arenas for seeking protection in the courts, in legislatures, in administrative and regulatory decision-making, and through private market transactions and negotiated agreements. And, although appeals to international law and human rights protocols have had few results, Native communities bring their cases to the court of world opinion as well. It should be noted that Native communities frequently pursue their religious and cultural interests on a number of fronts simultaneously. Because Native traditions do not fit neatly into the category of “religion” as it has come to be demarcated in legal and political languages, their attempts have been various to promote those interests in those languages of power, and sometimes involve difficult strategic decisions that often involve as many costs as benefits. For example, seeking protection of a sacred site through historic preservation regulations does not mean to establish Native American rights over access to and control of sacred places, but it can be appealing in light of the courts’ recently narrowing interpretation of constitutional claims to the free exercise of religion. Even in the relative heyday of constitutional protection of the religious freedom of minority traditions, many Native elders and others were understandably hesitant to relinquish sacred knowledge to the public record in an effort to protect religious and cultural freedoms, much less reduce Native lifeways to the modern Western terms of religion. Vine Deloria, Jr. has argued that given the courts’ decisions in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the Lyng and Smith cases, efforts by Native people to protect religious and cultural interests under the First Amendment did as much harm as good to those interests by fixing them in written documents and subjecting them to public, often hostile, scrutiny.

A. First Amendment Since the 1790s, the First Amendment to the Constitution has held that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The former of the amendment’s two clauses, referred to as the “establishment clause” guards against government sponsorship of particular religious positions. The latter, known as the “free exercise” clause, protects the rights of religious minorites from government interference. But just what these clauses have been understood to mean, and how much they are to be weighed against other rights and protections, such as that of private property, has been the subject of considerable debate in constitutional law over the years. Ironically, apart from matters of church property disposition, it was not until the 1940s that the Supreme Court began to offer its clarification of these constitutional protections. As concerns free exercise jurisprudence, under Chief Justices Warren and Burger in the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court had expanded free exercise protection and its accommodations considerably, though in retrospect too few Native communities were sufficiently organized or capitalized, or perhaps even motivated, given their chastened experience of the narrow possibilities of protection under U.S. law, to press their claims before the courts. Those communities who did pursue such interests experienced first hand the difficulty of trying to squeeze communal Native traditions, construals of sacred land, and practices at once economic and sacred into the conceptual box of religion and an individual’s right to its free exercise. By the time more Native communities pursued their claims under the free exercise clause in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the political and judicial climate around such matters had changed considerably. One can argue it has been no coincidence that the two, arguably three, landmark Supreme Court cases restricting the scope of free exercise protection under the Rehnquist Court were cases involving Native American traditions. This may be because the Court agrees to hear only a fraction of the cases referred to it. In Bowen v. Roy 476 U.S. 693 (1986) , the High Court held against a Native person refusing on religious grounds to a social security number necessary for food stamp eligibility. With even greater consequence for subsequent protections of sacred lands under the constitution, in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association 485 U.S. 439 (1988) , the High Court reversed lower court rulings which had blocked the construction of a timber road through high country sacred to California’s Yurok, Karok and Tolowa communities. In a scathing dissent, Harry Blackmun argued that the majority had fundamentally misunderstood the idioms of Native religions and the centrality of sacred lands. Writing for the majority, though, Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion recognized the sincerity of Native religious claims to sacred lands while devaluing those claims vis a vis other competing goods, especially in this case, the state’s rights to administer “what is, after all, its land.” The decision also codified an interpretation of Congress’s legislative protections in the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act as only advisory in nature. As of course happens in the U.S. judical system, such decisions of the High Court set new precedents that not only shape the decisions of lower courts, but that have a chilling effect on the number of costly suits brought into the system by Native communities. What the Lyng decision began to do with respect to sacred land protection, was finished off with respect to restricting free exercise more broadly in the Rehnquist Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith 484 U.S. 872 (1990) . Despite nearly a century of specific protections of Peyotism, in an unemployment compensation case involving two Oregon substance abuse counselors who had been fired because they had been found to be Peyote ingesting members of the Native American Church , a religious organization founded to secure first amendment protection in the first place, the court found that the state’s right to enforce its controlled substance laws outweighed the free exercise rights of Peyotists. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia’s opinion reframed the entire structure of free exercise jurisprudence, holding as constitutional laws that do not intentionally and expressly deny free exercise rights even if they have the effect of the same. A host of minority religious communities, civil liberties organizations, and liberal Christian groups were alarmed at the precedent set in Smith. A subsequent legislative attempt to override the Supreme Court, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act , passed by Congress and signed into law in 1993 by President Clinton was found unconstitutional in City of Bourne v. Flores (1997) , as the High Court claimed its constitutional primacy as interpreter of the constitution.

i. Sacred Lands In light of the ruling in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association (1988) discussed immediately above, there have been few subsequent attempts to seek comparable protection of sacred lands, whether that be access to, control of, or integrity of sacred places. That said, three cases leading up to the 1988 Supreme Court decision were heard at the level of federal circuit courts of appeal, and are worthy of note for the judicial history of appeals to First Amendment protection for sacred lands. In Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority , 19800 620 F.2d 1159 (6th Cir. 1980) , the court remained unconvinced by claims that a proposed dam's flooding of non-reservation lands sacred to the Cherokee violate the free excersice clause. That same year, in Badoni v. Higginson , 638 F. 2d 172 (10th Cir. 1980) , a different Circuit Court held against Navajo claims about unconstitutional federal management of water levels at a am desecrating Rainbow Arch in Utah. Three years later, in Fools Crow v. Gullet , 760 F. 2d 856 (8th Cir. 1983), cert. Denied, 464 U.S.977 (1983) , the Eighth Circuit found unconvincing Lakota claims to constitutional protections to a vision quest site against measures involving a South Dakota state park on the site.

ii. Free Exercise Because few policies and laws that have the effect of infringing on Native American religious and cultural freedoms are expressly intended to undermine those freedoms, the High Court’s Smith decision discouraged the number of suits brought forward by Native communities under constitutional free exercise protection since 1990, but a number of noteworthy cases predated the 1990 Smith decision, and a number of subsequent free exercise claims have plied the terrain of free exercise in correctional institutions. Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith (1990)

• Prison:Sweatlodge Case Study
• Eagle Feathers: U.S. v. Dion
• Hunting for Ceremonial Purposes: Frank v. Alaska

iii. No Establishment As the history of First Amendment jurisprudence generaly shows (Flowers), free exercise protections bump up against establishment clause jurisprudence that protects the public from government endorsement of particular traditions. Still, it is perhaps ironic that modest protections of religious freedoms of tiny minorities of Native communities have undergone constitutional challenges as violating the establishment clause. At issue is the arguable line between what has been understood in jurisprudence as governmental accommodations enabling the free exercise of minority religions and government endorsement of those traditions. The issue has emerged in a number of challenges to federal administrative policies by the National Park Service and National Forest Service such as the voluntary ban on climbing during the ceremonially significant month of June on what the Lakota and others consider Bear Lodge at Devil’s Tower National Monument . It should be noted that the Mountain States Legal Foundation is funded in part by mining, timbering, and recreational industries with significant money interests in the disposition of federal lands in the west. In light of courts' findings on these Native claims to constitutional protection under the First Amendment, Native communities have taken steps in a number of other strategic directions to secure their religious and cultural freedoms.

B. Treaty Rights In addition to constitutional protections of religious free exercise, 370 distinct treaty agreements signed prior to 1871, and a number of subsequent “agreements” are in play as possible umbrellas of protection of Native American religious and cultural freedoms. In light of the narrowing of free exercise protections in Lyng and Smith , and in light of the Court’s general broadening of treaty right protections in the mid to late twentieth century, treaty rights have been identified as preferable, if not wholly reliable, protections of religious and cultural freedoms. Makah Whaling Mille Lacs Case

C. Intellectual Property Law Native communities have occasionally sought protection of and control over indigenous medicinal, botanical, ceremonial and other kinds of cultural knowledge under legal structures designed to protect intellectual property and trademark. Although some scholars as committed to guarding the public commons of ideas against privatizing corporate interests as they are to working against the exploitation of indigenous knowledge have warned about the consequences of litigation under Western intellectual property standards (Brown), the challenges of such exploitation are many and varied, from concerns about corporate patenting claims to medicinal and agricultural knowledge obtained from Native elders and teachers to protecting sacred species like wild rice from anticipated devastation by genetically modified related plants (see White Earth Land Recovery Project for an example of this protection of wild rice to logos ( Washington Redskins controversy ) and images involving the sacred Zia pueblo sun symbol and Southwest Airlines to challenges to corporate profit-making from derogatory representations of Indians ( Crazy Horse Liquor case ).

D. Other Statutory Law A variety of legislative efforts have had either the express purpose or general effect of providing protections of Native American religious and cultural freedoms. Some, like the Taos Pueblo Blue Lake legislation, initiated protection of sacred lands and practices of particular communities through very specific legislative recourse. Others, like the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act , enacted broad protections of Native American religious and cultural freedom [link to Troost case]. Culminating many years of activism, if not without controversy even in Native communities, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act , signed into law in 1978 and amended in 1993, in order to recognize the often difficult fit between Native traditions and constitutional protections of the freedom of “religion” and ostensibly to safeguard such interests from state interference. Though much heralded for its symbolic value, the act was determined by the courts (most notably in the Lyng decision upon review of the congressional record to be only advisory in nature, lacking a specific “cause for action” that would give it legal teeth. To answer the Supreme Court's narrowing of the scope of free exercise protections in Lyng and in the 1990 Smith decision, Congress passed in 2000 the  Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)  restoring to governments the substantial burden of showing a "compelling interest" in land use decisions or administrative policies that exacted a burden on the free exercise of religion and requiring them to show that they had exhausted other possibilities that would be less burdensome on the free exercise of religion. Two other notable legislative initiatives that have created statutory protections for a range of Native community religious and cultural interests are the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Language Act legislation beginning to recognize the significance and urgency of the protection and promotion of indigenous languages, if not supporting such initiatives with significant appropriations. AIRFA 1978 NAGPRA 1990 [see item h. below] Native American Language Act Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)  2000 National Historic Preservation Act  [see item g below]

E. Administrative and Regulatory Policy and Law As implied in a number of instances above, many governmental decisions affecting Native American religious and cultural freedom occur at the level of regulation and the administrative policy of local, state, and federal governments, and as a consequence are less visible to those not locally or immediately affected.

F. Federal Recognition The United States officially recognizes over 500 distinct Native communities, but there remain numerous Native communities who know clearly who they are but who remain formally unrecognized by the United States, even when they receive recognition by states or localities. In the 1930s, when Congress created the structure of tribal governments under the Indian Reorganization Act, many Native communities, including treaty signatories, chose not to enroll themselves in the recognition process, often because their experience with the United States was characterized more by unwanted intervention than by clear benefits. But the capacity and charge of officially recognized tribal governments grew with the Great Society programs in the 1960s and in particular with an official U.S. policy of Indian self-determination enacted through such laws as the 1975 Indian Self Determination and Education Act , which enabled tribal governments to act as contractors for government educational and social service programs. Decades later, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act formally recognized the authority of recognized tribal governments to engage in casino gaming in cooperation with the states. Currently, Native communities that remain unrecognized are not authorized to benefit from such programs and policies, and as a consequence numerous Native communities have stepped forward to apply for federal recognition in a lengthy, laborious, and highly-charged political process overseen by the  Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Federal Acknowledgment . Some communities, like Michigan’s Little Traverse Band of Odawa have pursued recognition directly through congressional legislation. As it relates to concerns of Native American religious and cultural freedom, more is at stake than the possibility to negotiate with states for the opening of casinos. Federal recognition gives Native communities a kind of legal standing to pursue other interests with more legal and political resources at their disposal. Communities lacking this standing, for example, are not formally included in the considerations of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (item H. below).

G. Historic Preservation Because protections under the National Historic Preservation Act have begun to serve as a remedy for protection of lands of religious and cultural significance to Native communities, in light of first amendment jurisprudence since Lyng , it bears further mention here. Native communities seeking protections through Historic Preservation determinations are not expressly protecting Native religious freedom, nor recognizing exclusive access to, or control of sacred places, since the legislation rests on the importance to the American public at large of sites of historic and cultural value, but in light of free exercise jurisprudence since Lyng , historic preservation has offered relatively generous, if not exclusive, protection. The National Historic Preservation Act as such offered protection on the National Register of Historic Places, for the scholarly, especially archeological, value of certain Native sites, but in 1990, a new designation of “traditional cultural properties” enabled Native communities and others to seek historic preservation protections for properties associated “wit cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that (a) are rooted in that community’s history, and (b) are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community.” The designation could include most communities, but were implicitly geared to enable communities outside the American mainstream, perhaps especially Native American communities, to seek protection of culturally important and sacred sites without expressly making overt appeals to religious freedom. (King 6) This enabled those seeking recognition on the National Register to skirt a previous regulatory “religious exclusion” that discouraged inclusion of “properties owned by religious institutions or used for religious purposes” by expressly recognizing that Native communities don’t distinguish rigidly between “religion and the rest of culture” (King 260). As a consequence, this venue of cultural resource management has served Native interests in sacred lands better than others, but it remains subject to review and change. Further it does not guarantee protection; it only creates a designation within the arduous process of making application to the National Register of Historic Places. Pilot Knob Nine Mile Canyon

H. Repatriation/Protection of Human Remains, Burial Items, and Sacred Objects Culminating centuries of struggle to protect the integrity of the dead and material items of religious and cultural significance, Native communities witnessed the creation of an important process for protection under the 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act . The act required museums and other institutions in the United States receiving federal monies to share with relevant Native tribes inventories of their collections of Native human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of “cultural patrimony” (that is objects that were acquired from individuals, but which had belonged not to individuals, but entire communities), and to return them on request to lineal descendants or federally recognized tribes (or Native Hawaiian organizations) in those cases where museums can determine cultural affiliation, or as often happens, in the absence of sufficiently detailed museum data, to a tribe that can prove its cultural affiliation. The law also specifies that affiliated tribes own these items if they are discovered in the future on federal or tribal lands. Finally, the law also prohibits almost every sort of trafficking in Native American human remains, burial objects, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony. Thus established, the process has given rise to a number of ambiguities. For example, the law’s definition of terms gives rise to some difficulties. For example, “sacred objects” pertain to objects “needed for traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents.” Even if they are needed for the renewal of old ceremonies, there must be present day adherents. (Trope and Echo Hawk, 143). What constitutes “Cultural affiliation” has also given rise to ambiguity and conflict, especially given conflicting worldviews. As has been seen in the case of Kennewick Man the “relationship of shared group identity” determined scientifically by an archeologist may or may not correspond to a Native community’s understanding of its relation to the dead on its land. Even what constitutes a “real” can be at issue, as was seen in the case of Zuni Pueblo’s concern for the return of “replicas” of sacred Ahayu:da figures made by boy scouts. To the Zuni, these contained sacred information that was itself proprietary (Ferguson, Anyon, and Lad, 253). Disputes have arisen, even between different Native communities claiming cultural affiliation, and they are adjudicated through a NAGPRA Review Committee , convened of three representatives from Native communities, three from museum and scientific organizations, and one person appointed from a list jointly submitted by the other six.

I. International Law and Human Rights Agreements At least since 1923, when Haudenosaunee Iroqois leader Deskaneh made an appeal to the League of Nations in Geneva, Native communities and organizations have registered claims and concerns about religious and cultural freedoms with the international community and institutions representing it in a variety of ways. Making reference to their status as sovereign nations whose treaties with the U.S. have not been honored, frustrated with previous efforts to seek remedies under U.S. law, concerned with the capacity for constitutional protection of what are typically “group” and not individual rights, and sometimes spurned by questions about the rightful jurisdiction of the U.S., Native organizations have sought consideration of their claims before the United Nations and engaged in its consultations on indigenous rights. After years of such appeals and efforts, a nearly unanimous  United Nations General Assembly passed the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples The 1996  Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes reference [article 12] to the “right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of ceremonial objects,; and the right to the repatriation of human remains.” Importantly, the Declaration does not exclude those communities whose traditions have been interrupted by colonization. Indigenous peoples are recognized as having “the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures as well as the right to the restitution of cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.” Also specified are their rights to their languages. An offshoot of the American Indian Movement, the International Indian Treaty Council is one such organization that has shifted its attention to the international arena for protections of indigenous rights, including those of religious and cultural freedom.]]

J. Negotiated Agreements and Private Transactions Many if not most Native claims and concerns related to religious and cultural freedoms have been and will continue to be raised and negotiated outside the formal legal and regulatory structures outlined above, and thus will seldom register in public view. In light of the career of Native religious and cultural freedoms in legislative and legal arenas, Vine Deloria, Jr., has suggested the possibilities of such agreements to reach Native goals without subjecting Native communities to the difficulties of governmental interference or public scrutiny of discreet traditions (Deloria 1992a). Still, the possibilities for Native communities to reach acceptable negotiated agreements often owe to the legal and political structures to which they have recourse if negotiations fail. The possibilities of such negotiated agreements also can be shaped by the pressures of public opinion on corporate or governmental interests. Kituwah Mound Valley of the Shields/Weatherman’s Draw

IV. Selected Past Native American Religious and Cultural Freedom Court Cases

A. Land Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority 620 F. 2d 1159 (6th Cir. 1980) . Dam’s Destruction of Sacred River/Land Badoni v. Higginson 638 F 2d 172 (10th Cir. 1980) . Desecration of Rainbow Arch, Navajo Sacred Spot in Utah Fools Crow v. Gullet 706 F. 2d. 856 (8th Cir. 1983), cert. Denied, 464 U.S. 977 (1983) . State Park on top of Vision Quest site in S. Dakota Wilson v. Block 708F. 2d 735 (D.C. Cir. 1983) ; Hopi Indian Tribe v. Block; Navajo Medicine Men Assn’ v. Block Expansion of Ski Area in San Francisco Peaks, sacred to Navaho and Hopi Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association 485 U.S. 439 (1988) Logging Road in lands sacred to Yurok, Karok, and Tolowa

B. Free Exercise Bowen v. Roy 476 U.S. 693 (1986) Native refusal of Social Security Number U.S. v. Dion 476 U.S. 734 Sacramental Eagle Hunt contra Endangered Species Act Frank v. State 604 P. 2d 1068 (Alaska 1979) Taking moose out of season for potlatch *Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council 272 F 2d 131 (10th Cir. 1959) Peyotists vs. Tribal Gov’t Prohibiting Peyotism People v. Woody 61 Cal.2d 716, 394 P.2d 813, 40 Cal. Rptr. 69 (1964) Groundbreaking recognition of Free Exercise exemption from State Ban. Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith 484 U.S. 872 (1990) Denial of Peyotist’s unemployment compensation held constitutional

C. Prison cases involving hair *Standing Deer v. Carlson 831 F. 2d 1525 (9th Cir. 1987). *Teterud v. Gilman 385 F. Supp. 153 (S. D. Iowa 1974) & New Rider v. Board of Education 480 F. 2d 693 (10th Cir. 1973) , cert. denied 414 U.S. 1097, reh. Denied 415 U.S. 939 *Indian Inmates of Nebraska Penitentiary v. Grammar 649 F. Supp. 1374 (D. Neb. 1986)

D. Human Remains/Repatriation *Wana the Bear v. Community Construction, Inc. 180 Cal Rptr. 423 (Ct. App. 1982). Historic Indian cemetery not a “cemetery.” *State v. Glass 273 N.E. 2d 893 (Ohio Ct. App. 1971). Ancient human remains not “human” for purposes of Ohio grave robbing statute

E. Treaty Rights Pertaining to Traditional/Sacred Practices *U.S. v. Washington 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974) aff’d 520 F.2d 676 (9th Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 1086 (1976). Boldt Decision on Salmon Fishing *Lac Court Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Voight, 700 F. 2d 341 (7th Cir.) Cert. denied, 464 U.S. 805 (1983) 653 F. Supp. 1420; Fishing/Ricing/Gathering on Ceded Lands Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians 124 F 3d 904 affirmed. (1999) Fishing/Ricing/Gathering on Ceded Lands

V. References & Resources

Brown, Michael, Who Owns Native Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). Burton, Lloyd Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in the Management of Public Lands and Resources (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

Deloria, Vine, Jr., “Secularism, Civil Religion, and the Religious Freedom of American Indians,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16:9-20 (1992).

[a] Deloria, Vine, Jr., “Trouble in High Places: Erosion of American Indian Rights to Religious Freedom in the United States,”in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance , ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

[b] Echo Hawk, Walter,  In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided ( Fulcrum Publications , 2010) . Fine-Dare, Kathleen, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Ferguson, T.J., Roger Anyon, and Edmund J. Ladd, “Repatriation at the Pueblo of Zuni: Diverse Solutions to Complex Problems,” in Repatriation Reader , ed. Devon Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) pp. 239-265.

Gordon-McCutchan, R.C., The Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Red Crane Books, 1991).

Gulliford, Andrew, Sacred Objets and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

Johnson, Greg, Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

King, Thomas F., Places that Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management (Walnut Creek, Calif: Altamira Press, 2003).

Long, Carolyn, Religious Freedom and Indian Rights: The Case of Oregon v. Smith (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001).

Maroukis, Thomas A., Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010)

Martin, Joel, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

McLeod, Christopher (Producer/Director), In Light of Reverence , Sacred Lands Film Project, (Earth Image Films, La Honda Calif. 2000).

McNally, Michael D., "Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment," in After Pluralism ed. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Mihesuah, Devon A., ed., Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

Nabokov, Peter, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Sullivan, Robert, A Whale Hunt (New York: Scribner, 2000).

Trope, Jack F., and Walter Echo-Hawk, “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Background and Legislative History,” in Repatriation Reader , ed. Devon Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 123-168.

Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion : The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

• Why Is Religion So Important In Culture?

• More than 1.2 billion people today do not consider themselves religious, associate themselves as atheists, agnostics, or secular.
• Religion can be a key factor in the cultural identity of many people, influencing their behavior and traditions.
• Rituals, sacrifices, prayer, art, are one of the many ways people show their allegiance to a particular religion.

There are more than 10,000 religions in the world, some of which you probably never heard of or knew they existed. The majority of the world population is associated with Christianity (the largest religion), Islam, and Hinduism. However, around 1.2 billion people are without religious affiliation, those that associate themselves as atheists, agnostic, or secular.

Religion and culture have both been subjects of much scholarly debate throughout history, and remain in the spotlight of many discussions. Their relationship is complicated at best, and not easy to explain, but they are both important in the lives of humans and how they construct and make sense of the world around us. Even the terms themselves, "religion" and "culture," ask for explanations that are out of the scope of this article. However, we will try to make this as simple as possible.

Why Is It Hard To Define Religion?

Ever since the 9/11 attacks on the United States of America, there has been a significant increase in the study of religion and its impact on society and culture. Because of the attacks, there has been a growth of interest in the religion of Islam, as well as the increase in the critique of Islam. However, it also reinforced fundamentalism in faith, which provides a way of dealing with the plethora of choices offered by our societies.

Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz considered religion to be a cultural system, containing symbols that establish powerful moods and motivations by constructing a realistic order of existence. No academic will tell you an identical definition of religion or agree over what exactly makes a religion. However, many will agree that religion is a system of different behaviors and practices and that every religion has its set of morals, ethics, and sacred sites dedicated to figures they respect (they can be people, supernatural beings, or any form of transcendence that provides guidance or afterlife).

Religion incorporates the relation of human beings to supernatural, spiritual aspects of existence. Religious practices are one of the most common ways people show their allegiance or respect towards a particular religion. Such practices can be, or not, limited to rituals, sacrifices, prayer, art, the commemoration of the dead , going to churches, and many more, extending into various facets of human culture that we witness and experience daily.

The Cultural Importance Of Religion

"God is Dead," said Nietzsche , alluding to the secularization in the West, and the decline of the idea that a divine entity governed our universe. Because of the scientific revolution, the post-enlightenment period of history no longer needed God, according to Nietzsche. Today, more than 1 billion people are those with no religious affiliation, but can we be responsible for creating our value systems and moral guidelines without the divine intervention?

Even if we think we are, can religion ever be fully removed from our daily life and our culture? Whatever the answer is, it might not be important in exploring the ways of how religion is linked with cultural beliefs . Religion influences cultures, but it is also influenced by culture. Religion can play a big part in the cultural identity of people, influencing how they dress, what and when they eat, and how they behave.

Many of the cultural traditions are closely associated with religion, and many religious practices and behaviors have become so rooted in the daily lives of people all over the world that it is hard to make a distinct difference between culture and religion.

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The Connection Between Religion And Culture

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