Religious Mobilizations
For those who see secularism as part of modernity, and modernity as fundamentally progress, the last few decades have been painful and bewildering. Powerful political mobilizations that appear to center on religion seem to betoken a return of what had already been safely relegated to the past. Religion seemed to be wreaking a terrible revenge for its previous marginalization, not only in the world at large but even in the most powerful Western liberal democracy, the United States. Liberals spoke darkly of a relapse into the medieval, into irrationality.
There is some truth in this picture. The notion of revenge here does point to the way in which these religious mobilizations are reactive, at times feeding on a previous process of secularization perceived as a threat. But in general, this common view suffers from a defective understanding of both modernity and secularization. There is not one thing, called “religion,” which previously receded and is now coming back, like some raging tsunami. What we call secularization is a process that deeply destabilized and marginalized earlier forms of religion; but, partly as a consequence of this, new forms have arisen. The forms that are now “returning” in strength are thoroughly modern, and we cannot understand either them or modernity if we ignore this.
Ironically, the most obvious site of novelty lies in what are called, in the rough and rather confused language of media commentary, “fundamentalisms.” These are usually so called because they see themselves as harking back to earlier, purer forms of religion, beyond the recent compromises of modernism. So Protestant fundamentalism sees itself as returning to the purity of the Reformation sola scriptura (by scripture alone), which in turn saw itself as a return to primitive Christianity. Influential Islamicist Sayyid Qutb proposes to return to the principles alive in the first polity established by the Prophet and his companions. The irony and pathos here lie in the fact that precisely these attempts to return to purer forms are the sites of the most startling innovations; what is more, they feed on those innovations that are usually seen as quintessentially modern.
Thus the notion of literal Biblical inerrancy, with its clear distinction from and hostility to the figurative, is plainly part of the culture that has developed around modern positivistic science. Evolutionary theory has to be opposed by “creation science.” Augustine, one of the great reference figures for Western Protestantism, would be bewildered by this discourse, recognizing as he did many levels of meaning in the Biblical text. Protestant fundamentalists deviate from age-old Christian orthodoxy precisely in their wholesale acceptance of this modern positivist literalism, all the while loudly proclaiming their fidelity to the original pure form of Christianity.
In this essay, I want to explore some of these contemporary forms of religion, which are modern partly in that they involve what we can call mobilization. What do I mean by mobilization here? One obvious facet of its meaning is that it designates a process whereby people are persuaded, pushed, dragooned, or bullied into new forms of social and religious association. This generally means that they are induced through the actions of governments, church hierarchies, or other elites not only to adopt new structures but also, to some extent, to alter their social imaginaries and sense of legitimacy, as well as their sense of what is crucially important in their lives or society. Described in this way, mobilization was already taking place during the English Reformation and the French Counter- Reformation of the seventeenth century. But these changes were taking place within a wider social context, that of the political kingdom and church, which were seen not as the products of mobilization but, on the contrary, as already there, the unchanging and unchangeable backdrop of all legitimacy.
But in an age of mobilization, this backdrop is no longer there. It becomes clearer and clearer that whatever political, social, and ecclesial structures we desire must be mobilized into existence. This eventually becomes evident even to “reactionaries,” whose paradigms are found in the ancien régime. They are often forced to act on this understanding before they can bring themselves to recognize it. But sooner or later, their discourse changes, and the features of the old order that they want to reinstate become forms to be established — eternally valid, perhaps, because willed by God or in conformity with Nature, but still an ideal yet to be realized and not already there. As this understanding dawns across the political and ecclesial spectrum, we enter the age of mobilization.
The ancien régime model interwove church and state, and it presented us as living in a hierarchical order that had divine endorsement. In societies, on this model, the presence of God was unavoidable; authority itself was bound up with the divine, and various invocations of God were inseparable from public life. But there was more than one form of this in our past. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, we moved from that original model, which was alive in the Middle Ages and in a number of non-Western cultures, to another, very different one. It is this second one that defines what I want to call the “mobilization type.”
The earlier, ancien régime form was connected to what one might call an “enchanted world.” This is obviously borrowing from Max Weber and introducing the antonym to his term disenchanted. In an enchanted world there is a strong contrast between the sacred and the profane. By the sacred, I mean certain places (such as churches), certain agents (such as priests), certain times (such as high feasts), and certain actions (such as saying the Mass) in which the divine or the holy is present. In comparison to these, other places, people, times, and actions may count as profane.
In an enchanted world, there is an obvious way in which God can be present in society: in the locus of the sacred. Political society can be closely connected to these sacred forms and can itself be thought to exist on a higher plane. Ernst Kantorowicz tells us that one of the first uses of the term mystical body in European history referred to the French kingdom.1 The king himself could be one of the links between the planes, represented respectively by the king’s mortal and undying bodies.
In other words, in these earlier societies, the kingdom existed not only in ordinary, secular time, in which a strong transitivity rule held, but also in higher times. There are, of course, different kinds of higher times — Platonist eternity, where there is a level in which we are beyond the flux altogether; God’s eternity as understood in the Christian tradition, as a kind of gathering of time together; and various times of origins, in Mircea Eliade’s sense.
Now, with advancing disenchantment (especially in Protestant societies), another model took shape, with relation to both the cosmos and the polity. In this, the notion of design was crucial. As this model manifested itself in regard to the cosmos, there was a shift from the enchanted world to a cosmos conceived in conformity with post-Newtonian science, in which there is absolutely no question of higher meanings being expressed in the universe around us. But there is still, with someone like Newton himself, for instance, a strong sense that the universe declares the glory of God. This is evident in its design, its beauty, its regularity, but also in its having evidently been shaped to conduce to the welfare of his creatures, particularly ourselves, the superior creatures who cap it all off. Now the presence of God no longer lies in the sacred, because this category fades in a disenchanted world. But he can be thought to be no less powerfully present through his design.
This presence of God in the cosmos is matched by another idea: his presence in the polity. Here an analogous change takes place. The divine isn’t present in a king who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society that plainly follows God’s design. This can be supplemented with an idea of moral order that is seen as established by God, in the way invoked, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence: men have been created equal and have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
The idea of moral order that is expressed in this declaration, and which has since become dominant in our world, is what I have been calling the modern moral order. It is quite different from the orders that preceded it, because it starts from individuals and doesn’t see them as set a priori within a hierarchical order outside of which they wouldn’t be fully human agents. Its members are not agents who are essentially embedded in a society that in turn reflects and connects with the cosmos but, rather, disembedded individuals who come to associate together. The design underlying the association is that each, in pursuing his or her own purposes in life, acts in mutual benefit with others. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others and which offers them mutual help of certain kinds. The most influential early articulator of this formula is John Locke, but the basic conception of such an order of mutual service has come down to us through a series of variants, including more radical ones such as those presented by Rousseau and Marx.2
But in the earlier days, when the plan was understood as providential and the order seen as natural law, which is the same as the law of God, building a society that fulfills these requirements was seen as fulfilling the design of God. To live in such a society was to live in one where God was present — not at all in the way that belonged to the enchanted world, through the sacred, but because that society was following his design. God is present as the designer of the way we live. We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as “one nation under God.”
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Notes
- Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- I have discussed this at greater length in Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). First, there is a phenomenon that I touched on only glancingly in the previous discussion, when I spoke of evangelical revivals. These are paradigmatic examples of movements that weave together the meeting of spiritual and devotional aspirations with personal and often collective empowerment. These are familiar in the Protestant world, but there are analogous forms elsewhere: for instance, the various movements of the Catholic Action network and Catholic prayer and devotion, as well as the Nation of Islam among African Americans. Other examples could be cited in other religious milieus. Let’s call these modes of empowering devotion.Then, there are the interweavings of religious or confessional belonging with political identities: the neo-Durkheimian phenomenon.