[RC] Why the West gets religion wrong?

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hat tip to Our Friend Andy.  Not sure if all this guy's facts are  
straight, but it's a lovely 'radical middle' analysis of the  
interplay between religion, politics, and philosophy,

-enp
  	

Why the West gets religion wrong
Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2005

LONDON It is hard to overstate the importance of religion in the  
contemporary world, yet its role remains underexplored and little  
understood. Western elites are perplexed by religion and the beliefs  
and practices that it can engender. But before Marx, almost all  
socialism was Christian. Equally, all those on the right were  
Christian monarchists who saw the defense of established religion as  
a key political task.
All of this changed far more recently than is supposed. It was in the  
1960s that the idea of a secular Europe really emerged. And it is the  
mutual incomprehension and hostility of politics since the '60s that  
continues to prevent a true grasp of the importance of religion.  
Secular liberals regard religion as repressive, irrational and  
fundamentalist. Religious conservatives view liberal secularity as  
immoral, self-serving and nihilistic. Both are right about each  
other, but wrong about religion.
Contemporary secular liberalism is bankrupt. Historically, liberalism  
drew its strength from a critique of divinely sanctioned absolute  
monarchs and authoritarian rule. As such, liberalism had republican  
values and communal aims. But in overcoming absolute sovereignty,  
liberalism internalized it, reproducing not mutual citizens but self- 
sufficient subjects. This process reached its zenith in the 1960s,  
when genuine political transformation was aborted in favor of the  
subjective desires of pleasure-seeking adults.
The left that emerged from this generation eschewed a genuine public  
morality in the name of personal choice and private gratification. At  
great political cost, it handed over to the right the language of  
formation, values and religion. Unable to craft for itself a new form  
of civic collectivity, secular liberalism remains mired in  
individualism and blind to cultures built around universal ideals and  
collective aspirations.
Contemporary religious conservatism is more mobilizing yet no less  
exclusive. Politically, conservatism originated from a critique of  
liberal relativism. In its stead, conservatism sought to provide a  
public morality. But in challenging secular permissiveness,  
conservatives promoted conformity with the dominant class. Rather  
than uniting the citizenry around a common project, this led to the  
elevation of one group at the expense of all others. In consequence,  
the right surrendered to the left the ideal of a communal solidarity  
involving all sectors of society.
Additionally, in a fanatical overreaction to the atomization of  
liberal society, American conservatives embraced a new Christian  
fundamentalism that promised its followers an eternal community -  
composed only of themselves.
Only this sort of self-righteousness can explain why, as Robert Kagan  
writes, "It was always so easy for so many Americans to believe, as  
so many still believe today, that by advancing their own interests  
they advance the interests of humanity." In this manner, the neocons  
repeat the very fundamentalist vision of their enemies in Al Qaeda  
who want to build a new Caliphate from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
What unites both liberals and conservatives is their mutual  
insistence on the exclusivity and absoluteness of their vision. In  
this both sides are composed of fundamentalists who mistake their  
subjective beliefs for the only objective truth.
But true religion is not and cannot be fundamentalist. No true  
follower of monotheism can claim to know the mind and will of God.  
Judaism is marked by the struggle to interpret the righteousness that  
is demanded by God. Similarly, Jesus was never fully understood by  
his disciples nor was he even recognized by them after his  
resurrection. And in Islam, a fatwa used to be a nonbinding wisdom  
judgment of elders limited by the greater wisdom and judgment of God.  
It only became a lethal injunction when Muslims started to copy  
Napoleonic models of authority and legitimization.
Equally, religion is not and cannot be relativist. No genuine belief  
in God is just a matter of personal taste or subjective opinion. True  
religion has always been public and political because it is about  
forming communities around shared values and the practices that  
embody them. In the West, privatizing religion initiated the  
abandoning of any collective public realm that expressed common  
substantive ideals. We should not then be surprised when Iran and  
other countries do not wish to follow us down this path.
(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin's  
College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at  
Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the  
Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)



   Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com






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