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Spiritualpolitique
Religion matters more than ever in global affairs. But don't count on
the experts--or the State Department--to know that.
by John J. DiIulio Jr.
05/14/2007, Volume 012, Issue 33
Speaking last December before journalists assembled by the Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life, Peter Berger had some explaining to do.
Berger, an emeritus professor at Boston University, is a rightly
esteemed sociologist of religion. "We live in an age of overwhelming
religious globalization," he began. But, as late as a quarter-century
ago, neither he nor most other academics saw it coming. Most analysts,
he explained, had the same stale orthodoxy about religion's inevitable
demise. "The idea was very simple: the more modernity, the less
religion. . . . I think it was wrong."
Except in Europe, where it has proven half-right, the idea was all
wrong. This year marks the European Union's 50th anniversary. Next
year is the 40th since Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Europeans mocked the pope's warnings about family planning cultures
that promote abortion and produce few children. As a result, a fitting
inscription for the European Union's gold watches would be "World's
largest unfunded pension liability land mass."
Europe still has more Christians (over 500 million) than any other
continent. In Rome and several other European cities, Catholicism, but
not its practice, still permeates local culture, while its
architectural pageantry promotes foreign tourism. But post-1968 survey
data on European beliefs, church attendance rates, and more show that
postindustrial modernity has indeed loosened if not broken
Christianity's grip on the continent's diverse peoples. Still, this
decades-in-the-making European vacation from Christianity is not a
permanent vacation from religion itself. From Scotland to France,
Christianity's slide has been accompanied by growth in other faith
traditions including Islam. And it is not entirely clear that Europe's
Catholics have fallen so far from the cradle that their children or
grandchildren (if they start having some) will never return.
Most countries once ruled, in whole or in part, by Europeans have
modernized to varying degrees, but without religion losing its hold.
Christianity, in particular, is growing in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. One cannot begin to understand post-colonial Africa, for
example, without knowing how profoundly religion matters--and which
religions matter where and to whom. Nigeria is one small case in
point. There are now about 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria, on the way
to 30 to 35 million over the next generation. In 1900, Nigeria was one-
third Muslim and had almost no Christians. By 1970, the country was
about 45 percent Muslim and 45 percent Christian.
Outside of Nigeria, Anglicanism is hardly the wave of the future, but
Pentecostalism and other charismatic varieties of Christianity might
be. Throughout the 20th century, various Pentecostal sects crept or
swept through Latin America and Africa. In each continent,
Pentecostals are now an estimated one-tenth to one-fifth of the
population. In Asia, Pentecostals now number well over 150 million,
with concentrations in places like South Korea.
No matter what the host country or culture, Pentecostals tend to start
fast but remain concentrated in one city or region for a generation or
two before spreading. Here in America, the century-old Pentecostal
Church of God in Christ, a predominantly African-American
denomination, now stretches from traditional storefront "Holy Ghost"
or "blessing station" ministries in the South (still its home base) to
a 26,000-member congregation in Los Angeles, the West Angeles Church
of God in Christ, where Hollywood celebrities crowd into cathedral
pews next to the inner-city poor.
In 2005 and 2006, the cathedral's presiding pastor, Bishop Charles E.
Blake, traveled extensively in Africa and met with top government
leaders in Zambia and other nations. Through a new nonprofit
organization called Save Africa's Children, he expanded the church's
HIV/AIDS ministries in sub-Saharan Africa. Via satellite broadcasts,
he and other U.S.-based Pentecostal pastors are heard by poor people
in Africa and other places. When Blake goes to these countries, he is
mobbed like a rock-of-ages star.
Most international relations experts, however, know little about
Pentecostals in America or abroad. Many journalists who cover global
affairs could not tell you who Bishop Blake is. A few might even have
trouble identifying another California preacher who has partnered with
Blake on several international initiatives, Rick Warren. In 2005, at
the same Pew-sponsored event that featured Berger in 2006, I was the
opening act for Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life: What On
Earth Am I Here For? I joked that the conference organizers wanted the
day's first two speakers to average 15 million in book sales (his 30
million and my next to none). Most laughed, but some were puzzled,
apparently unaware of Warren's massive success.
First published in 2002, and since reissued in many different
languages, Warren's prayer-and-meditation manual has sold globally in
volumes few nonfiction books have ever achieved. (Warren co-pastors a
megachurch in California called Saddleback, with more than 80,000
members.) The goateed, born-again baby-boomer boasts a Bible-believing
pro-life, pro-family theology. True to stereotype, a few journalists
at the gathering looked for Pat Robertson beneath Warren's Hawaiian-
print shirt but could not find him. In fact, Warren has long since
fallen out with many fellow white evangelical leaders. To them, his
sins include cavorting with Pentecostals and others they consider to
be theologically incorrect; tooting "creation care" (environmental
protection); and nonpartisan hobnobbing with pro-choice politicians,
including Democrats, who share his global antipoverty and public
health agendas.
At the Pew gathering, the purpose-filled pastor got relatively few
questions in the session and over meals about his international
ministries and other globe-trotting adventures. His various training
programs and "tool kits" have reached an estimated 400,000 ministers
in more than a hundred countries. His interfaith antipoverty and
public health (most recently antimalaria) programs have purportedly
reached millions. His biggest battles to date have been over how he
has used his global bully pulpit. For instance, last November he
saddled over to Syria and sounded off on human rights, but seemed
dangerously naive about the regime's terrorist ties. In February he
was scheduled to preach in North Korea but postponed the trip. (Good
call.)
Still by far the single biggest "megachurch" presence on the global
scene is the Catholic church. Roman Catholicism claims a billion
followers and growing. America's Catholics, roughly a quarter of the
U.S. population, are just 5 percent of the church's global flock. Pope
Benedict XVI is "too strict" for many Catholics in America, not to
mention Catholics in Europe. But he is generally viewed as a moderate
by the conservative Catholic leaders and throngs in Africa.
All in all, there are today two billion Christians worldwide, and
Christianity in various orthodox forms, from Pentecostalism to Vatican-
certified Catholicism, is the world's fastest-growing religion. Take
it from Penn State's superb global religions watcher, Philip Jenkins,
who has established beyond any reasonable empirical or historical
doubt that, for decades now, Catholicism and many other Christian
sects have been growing rapidly in the southern hemisphere. By or
before 2050, Africa will supplant Europe as home to the most
Christians. In 1900, Africa had an estimated 10 to 15 million
Christians. In 1959, the Catholic church had not yet appointed a
single black African cardinal. By 2000, however, Africa had some 350
million Christians, including well over 100 million Catholics.
Some demographers would bet that Latin America will outdistance
Africa, and that South America will be first to succeed Europe as the
continent with the most Christians. It has long had the heaviest
country-by-country Catholic concentrations. Even as Pentecostals and
other Christian sects have made converts, South America's Catholic
seminaries have grown (up more than 350 percent since 1972). The
Vatican counts some 60,000 priests, 100,000 lay missionaries, and
130,000 nuns on the continent.
So, from Brazil to Belize, from Beirut to Boston, religion in over a
hundred forms and in a thousand different ways has outlived
"modernity" and "postmodernity," too. And whenever religious
individuals, ideas, and institutions get newly mobilized into politics
and public affairs, at home or abroad, look out, because they have the
power to transform things, and fast.
For example, just consider how the late Pope John Paul II changed both
the Church and Latin America by throwing Catholicism's weight behind
democracy movements there (as he also did on other continents). In
1987, the pope confronted Chile's dictator, General Pinochet, with
these words: "I am not the evangelizer of democracy; I am the
evangelizer of the Gospel. To the Gospel message, of course, belong
all the problems of human rights; and, if democracy means human
rights, it also belongs to the message of the Church."
History teaches that democracy has not done well in countries
dominated by Catholicism, Islam, and Confucianism. But as I argued in
Rome before the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 1998,
Catholicism changed after World War II. I invoked the political
scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who, writing that same year, agreed
that the Church had changed "in ways that positively affected the
potential for democracy."
Similarly, writing in 1991, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington explored
the global fortunes of democracy during the period 1974 to 1990, which
he termed democracy's "third wave." Huntington identified 33 instances
of democratization (versus just three of "democratic reversal").
Religion, he argued, was critical to this wave: "In many countries,
Protestant and Catholic church leaders have been central in the
struggles against repressive [governments]. . . . Catholicism was
second only to economic development as a pervasive force making for
democratization in the 1970s and 1980s."
Correct, but after The Third Wave, Huntington half-forgot how best to
think about religion. In a controversial 1993 article and 1996 book,
he speculated about the conditions under which the world might witness
(or avert) a "clash of civilizations." He argued that ideology,
economics, and nation-states would be far less central to future
international conflicts than they had been in the past. The "principal
conflicts of global politics," he predicted, "will occur between
nations and groups of different civilizations." He stressed that
Western democracies did not have all the answers, and scolded those
who graded other "civilizations" by how kindred they were to American
political norms.
But Huntington's conceptual framework was a sweeping, multivariable
mess that loosely related religion to ethnic, racial, regional, and
other history-moving forces. His provocative prediction was not
warranted by such empirical data as he mustered. When it came time to
delineate "civilizations," he created his own categories: "Islamic"
covered places from Albania to Azerbaijan; "Sinic" included China and
Vietnam; "Japan" was its own "civilization." And so on. Ostensibly
well-informed people describe the situation in Iraq in relation to
Huntington's "clash" thesis. But it should be obvious that the contest
between Sunnis and Shiites is an intra-religious conflict with deep
roots in Islamic history. It is not unlike the conflict (receded but
not forgotten) in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants,
an intra-religious conflict with centuries-old roots in Christian
history.
You know that you are skirting rather than seeing important realities
when you are using identity concepts that are nobody's actual
identity. You do not need to go globe-trotting to understand why. For
example, New Orleans is home to Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. Its
Catholic members are not Creoles or Cajuns. The church's "Post-Katrina
Recovery News" website is in Vietnamese. Since the biblical-sized
floods receded, its leaders have deepened ties to many English-
speaking churches and community groups, Catholic and non-Catholic. To
understand these leaders, their people, and their institution, to map
their community relations, or to gauge their present or potential
civic role, it would not help to categorize them as either "Sinic"
expatriates or "Westerners" on the make.
Huntington's big-think Harvard colleague, Joseph S. Nye, has been less
controversial and more cogent conceptually. Nye is famous for his 2004
work on so-called soft power, meaning how nations get what they want
through attraction rather than coercion (multilateral ties, not
military tussles; economic incentives, not muscle-bound sanctions).
America, he claims, has squandered opportunities to amass and use soft
power. He does not deny that religion can pack a soft-power punch, but
religion gets only a few passing mentions in his magnum opus.
Nye opens with Machiavelli, who wrote that it is better for a ruler to
be feared than to be loved. Nye challenges that dictum by claiming
that soft power often succeeds where hard power fumbles or fails. Fair
enough, but as Nye also knows, the medieval Italian for all seasons
counseled that rulers need both hard-power swords and soft-power
plowshares (or swords that rulers can opt to beat into plowshares as
circumstances may dictate).
As Nye might have emphasized, history teaches that when religion is
used as hard power, it sooner or later destroys those who wield it.
Christianity's hard-power-wielding religions, including king-making
Catholicism, had their days (even centuries) but resulted in ruins
(and, in Catholicism's case, a junior role in North America).
Protestant-inspired church-state separation doctrine is a prudential
prohibition against using religion as hard power at home, and a
caution against using religion as hard power abroad. It is also an
invitation for the state to be faith-friendly, promote religious
pluralism, and avoid sectarian strife.
Thus, what I hereby baptize as spiritualpolitique is a soft-power
perspective on politics that emphasizes religion's domestic and
international significance, accounts for religion's present and
potential power to shape politics within and among nations, and
understands religion not as some abstract force measured by its
resiliency vis-a-vis "modernity" and not by its supporting role in
"civilizations" that cooperate or clash. Rather, a perspective steeped
in spiritualpolitique requires attention to the particularities that
render this or that actual religion as preached and practiced by
present-day peoples so fascinating to ethnographers (who can spend
lifetimes immersed in single sects) and so puzzling to most of the
social scientists who seek, often in vain, to characterize and
quantify religions, or to track religion-related social and political
trends.
Consider how this perspective might inform the ongoing debate on Iraq.
Some have advocated increasing the U.S. presence in Iraq and staying
there until violence is well under wraps. Others have devised or
advocated various draw-down or get-out plans. Although it took a few
years, almost all now acknowledge that the struggle behind most
homegrown bombings that have killed innocent civilians in Iraq has
specific religious roots. But some on both sides in the debate over
U.S. policy seem not yet to know that any conflict-ending compromise
or resolution, no matter its military, economic, or other features,
will not last unless it takes those particular religious differences
very seriously. It is not a "civil war." It is "sectarian violence,"
complicated by the region's wider religious rifts and their
intersections with state-supported terrorism networks.
Spiritualpolitique lesson one is that even in stable representative
democracies, intra-national religious cleavages, whether long-buried
or out in the open, always matter to who governs and to what ends. The
religious cleavages in Iraq existed long before the U.S. occupation.
And the sectarian sources of the violence there will persist even if
the country somehow, some day becomes a textbook, multi-party, stable
parliamentary democracy. (If you doubt it, just study the Israeli
Knesset in action.)
Spiritualpolitique lesson two is that constitutionalism, not
democratization, matters most where religious differences run deepest
or remain most intense. It was good to hold elections in Iraq.
Majority rule via free and fair plebiscites is often among the first
steps toward a more humane polity, whatever its official form and
legal formalities. But majority rule can also mean the proverbial two
wolves and a sheep deciding what is for supper. Constitutionalism,
democracy or not, means that a government's powers are limited and any
law-abiding civic minority's fundamental rights--starting with
religious rights--are legally sacred.
Nothing, however, complicates the march to constitutionalism like
religious differences, especially when, as is almost always the case,
those differences are fodder for what the Founding Fathers denounced
as "foreign intrigues." Consider what James Madison wrote in the
Federalist Papers, and reflect on America's own history. When Madison
discussed how political "factions" could tear a people apart, the very
first source he mentioned was "a zeal for different opinions
concerning religion."
The Constitution's ratification was threatened by Protestant true
believers who cursed the clause forbidding any religious tests for
federal office-holding. They rejected, but Americans now happily live,
Madison's vision--a "multiplicity of sects" (Methodists, Muslims,
Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and others) that each shape but do not
dominate life in this large, commercial republic "under God."
Madison and company cut a political deal known to us as the First
Amendment's two religion clauses: "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof...." This meant that, for the time being, each state
could have a tax-funded and ceremonially favored religion if it
wanted, but the national government would remain forever neutral on
religion. In the early 20th century, the Supreme Court erased the
deal's last legal traces by holding that religious liberty is so
"fundamental" that no religious establishments by the states are
constitutionally permissible.
Until midcentury, not much changed. But then, in the early 1960s,
tradition-minded Protestants, largely self-exiled politically since
the Scopes "monkey trials," became convinced that the Court was going
too far in ridding religion from the public square (the 1962 decision
banning state-sponsored school prayer was the watershed moment). They
entered the political fray. Thus began the evangelical mobilizations
that revolutionized our two-party politics and shaped several recent
presidential elections.
Interestingly enough, the single biggest program to result from born-
again President Bush's push for faith-based initiatives has been
international, not domestic: a $15 billion, five-year effort to
address the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. In May 2005, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice met with the aforementioned Bishop Charles Blake and
other church leaders with ties to religious nongovernmental
organizations abroad that could help to get the job done.
Targeted mainly at 15 countries, and zeroing in on Africa (where two-
thirds of the more than 3.5 million yearly deaths from the disease now
occur), the soft-power program was championed inside the West Wing by
Michael Gerson, the chief speechwriter who became the president's
"compassion agenda" czar. Gerson is now a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations. He and his council colleague Walter Russell Mead
are two foreign policy wonks who take religion seriously. And the
council's president, Richard N. Haass, has publicly opined that
religion matters in world affairs today more than it has for
centuries.
But Gerson, Mead, and Haass remain exceptions to the expert rule, and
not only at the council. In fact, to a remarkable degree, most foreign
policy elites remain not only ignorant but also reluctant when it
comes to discussing religion. In November 2006, the Pew Charitable
Trusts (parent to the Pew religion program cited above) published in
its magazine, Trust, a feature essay by a freelance writer named Sue
Rardin. Entitled "Eyes Wide Shut," Rardin's article quoted numerous
thought leaders and policy makers who expressed reservations about
focusing on religion. She summarized their core concern as follows:
"Addressing religious differences means entering discussions where
moral values--our own as well as those of others--may not be governed
by reason alone, but may be held more fiercely than if they were."
There is only one word for American foreign policy elites, Democratic
and Republican, left and right, who downplay or disregard religion to
their peril, ours--and the world's--in deference to the dogma that
being faith-free promotes objectivity: preposterous. Or, as Rardin
editorialized well: "It's as imprudent to ignore the role of religion
in foreign policy as it is to pretend that the elephant is in some
other room, rather than right here."
It is bad to doubt the overwhelming empirical evidence that religion
matters to domestic politics as well as the delivery of social
services. But it is far worse to treat religion as a back-burner
reality in global affairs when it is boiling over in so many places.
The State Department needs to wake up and smell the incense. There is
already an international legal framework for thinking out loud and
acting in concert with other nations on religion's role in global
affairs. Religious freedom is addressed in the 1948 United Nations
"Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Article 18, which encompasses
"teaching, practice, worship, and observance." Its terms are echoed by
several other U.N. Declarations, including a 1981 General Assembly-
backed document calling for ending all state-sponsored religious
discrimination.
This international legal framework is reinforced by several federal
statutes that were passed with bipartisan support. For instance, a
1998 federal law, signed by President Clinton, puts America firmly on
the hook to support religious freedom abroad (the International
Religious Freedom Act). Subject to that act, the State Department and
other federal agencies are required to report any relevant information
they have regarding "countries of particular concern." The 2006 list
included Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan, and Uzbekistan.
Not much, however, is actually done by Washington to act on these
concerns, end religious persecution, or support nations that abide by
both U.N. and U.S. standards governing respect for religious
pluralism. Just how little can be glimpsed by comparing the federal
government's faith-based funding at home and abroad.
At home, domestic sacred places serving civic purposes have been
discriminated against in myriad ways by grant-making federal agencies.
Things have gotten a bit better since the first relevant federal laws
protecting their rights went on the books in 1996. The Bush
administration boasts that more than $2 billion a year in federal
grants now goes to qualified, community-serving faith-based
organizations. Even if that figure is accepted at face value (many
experts dispute it), $2 billion is still a relative pittance: The
federal government gives out hundreds of billions of dollars in such
grants each year, and over a third of all organizations supplying
certain social services in big cities are faith-based.
It is, however, a bishop's ransom compared with the $591 million that
the United States Agency for International Development granted faith-
based organizations operating abroad in Fiscal Year 2005. Last
September, Terri Hasdorff, the agency's faith-based center director,
testified before the House Subcommittee on Africa. She noted that "the
vast majority of faith-based awards are made to a small number of
groups." Judged against both the more than $20 billion a year in
bilateral foreign aid and the government's professed goal of providing
better public health and other services around the globe, it is an
astonishingly low sum.
Totalitarians, secular or religious, who know what they are about have
always gone beyond merely banning this or that religion or
establishing a state religion (Mao's little red book and cult come
quickly to mind) to killing religious leaders, gulag-ticketing or
terrorizing religious followers, and destroying (physically in many
cases) religion's last traces (books, buildings). Religion, however,
almost always proves resilient, often reasserting itself in its very
pre-revolutionary or dictator-forbidden forms.
Thus, today's democracy-loving, constitutionalism-forging leaders in
America and other nations should acknowledge, respect, and, where
appropriate, boost religious good works both at home and abroad. When
it comes to spiritualpolitique, God will help those who help others.
John J. DiIulio Jr., a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is
author of Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-
Based Future, from which this essay is adapted, forthcoming this fall
from University of California Press.
Spiritualpolitique
Religion matters more than ever in global affairs. But don't count on
the experts--or the State Department--to know that.
by John J. DiIulio Jr.
05/14/2007, Volume 012, Issue 33
Speaking last December before journalists assembled by the Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life, Peter Berger had some explaining to do.
Berger, an emeritus professor at Boston University, is a rightly
esteemed sociologist of religion. "We live in an age of overwhelming
religious globalization," he began. But, as late as a quarter-century
ago, neither he nor most other academics saw it coming. Most analysts,
he explained, had the same stale orthodoxy about religion's inevitable
demise. "The idea was very simple: the more modernity, the less
religion. . . . I think it was wrong."
Except in Europe, where it has proven half-right, the idea was all
wrong. This year marks the European Union's 50th anniversary. Next
year is the 40th since Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Europeans mocked the pope's warnings about family planning cultures
that promote abortion and produce few children. As a result, a fitting
inscription for the European Union's gold watches would be "World's
largest unfunded pension liability land mass."
Europe still has more Christians (over 500 million) than any other
continent. In Rome and several other European cities, Catholicism, but
not its practice, still permeates local culture, while its
architectural pageantry promotes foreign tourism. But post-1968 survey
data on European beliefs, church attendance rates, and more show that
postindustrial modernity has indeed loosened if not broken
Christianity's grip on the continent's diverse peoples. Still, this
decades-in-the-making European vacation from Christianity is not a
permanent vacation from religion itself. From Scotland to France,
Christianity's slide has been accompanied by growth in other faith
traditions including Islam. And it is not entirely clear that Europe's
Catholics have fallen so far from the cradle that their children or
grandchildren (if they start having some) will never return.
Most countries once ruled, in whole or in part, by Europeans have
modernized to varying degrees, but without religion losing its hold.
Christianity, in particular, is growing in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. One cannot begin to understand post-colonial Africa, for
example, without knowing how profoundly religion matters--and which
religions matter where and to whom. Nigeria is one small case in
point. There are now about 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria, on the way
to 30 to 35 million over the next generation. In 1900, Nigeria was one-
third Muslim and had almost no Christians. By 1970, the country was
about 45 percent Muslim and 45 percent Christian.
Outside of Nigeria, Anglicanism is hardly the wave of the future, but
Pentecostalism and other charismatic varieties of Christianity might
be. Throughout the 20th century, various Pentecostal sects crept or
swept through Latin America and Africa. In each continent,
Pentecostals are now an estimated one-tenth to one-fifth of the
population. In Asia, Pentecostals now number well over 150 million,
with concentrations in places like South Korea.
No matter what the host country or culture, Pentecostals tend to start
fast but remain concentrated in one city or region for a generation or
two before spreading. Here in America, the century-old Pentecostal
Church of God in Christ, a predominantly African-American
denomination, now stretches from traditional storefront "Holy Ghost"
or "blessing station" ministries in the South (still its home base) to
a 26,000-member congregation in Los Angeles, the West Angeles Church
of God in Christ, where Hollywood celebrities crowd into cathedral
pews next to the inner-city poor.
In 2005 and 2006, the cathedral's presiding pastor, Bishop Charles E.
Blake, traveled extensively in Africa and met with top government
leaders in Zambia and other nations. Through a new nonprofit
organization called Save Africa's Children, he expanded the church's
HIV/AIDS ministries in sub-Saharan Africa. Via satellite broadcasts,
he and other U.S.-based Pentecostal pastors are heard by poor people
in Africa and other places. When Blake goes to these countries, he is
mobbed like a rock-of-ages star.
Most international relations experts, however, know little about
Pentecostals in America or abroad. Many journalists who cover global
affairs could not tell you who Bishop Blake is. A few might even have
trouble identifying another California preacher who has partnered with
Blake on several international initiatives, Rick Warren. In 2005, at
the same Pew-sponsored event that featured Berger in 2006, I was the
opening act for Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life: What On
Earth Am I Here For? I joked that the conference organizers wanted the
day's first two speakers to average 15 million in book sales (his 30
million and my next to none). Most laughed, but some were puzzled,
apparently unaware of Warren's massive success.
First published in 2002, and since reissued in many different
languages, Warren's prayer-and-meditation manual has sold globally in
volumes few nonfiction books have ever achieved. (Warren co-pastors a
megachurch in California called Saddleback, with more than 80,000
members.) The goateed, born-again baby-boomer boasts a Bible-believing
pro-life, pro-family theology. True to stereotype, a few journalists
at the gathering looked for Pat Robertson beneath Warren's Hawaiian-
print shirt but could not find him. In fact, Warren has long since
fallen out with many fellow white evangelical leaders. To them, his
sins include cavorting with Pentecostals and others they consider to
be theologically incorrect; tooting "creation care" (environmental
protection); and nonpartisan hobnobbing with pro-choice politicians,
including Democrats, who share his global antipoverty and public
health agendas.
At the Pew gathering, the purpose-filled pastor got relatively few
questions in the session and over meals about his international
ministries and other globe-trotting adventures. His various training
programs and "tool kits" have reached an estimated 400,000 ministers
in more than a hundred countries. His interfaith antipoverty and
public health (most recently antimalaria) programs have purportedly
reached millions. His biggest battles to date have been over how he
has used his global bully pulpit. For instance, last November he
saddled over to Syria and sounded off on human rights, but seemed
dangerously naive about the regime's terrorist ties. In February he
was scheduled to preach in North Korea but postponed the trip. (Good
call.)
Still by far the single biggest "megachurch" presence on the global
scene is the Catholic church. Roman Catholicism claims a billion
followers and growing. America's Catholics, roughly a quarter of the
U.S. population, are just 5 percent of the church's global flock. Pope
Benedict XVI is "too strict" for many Catholics in America, not to
mention Catholics in Europe. But he is generally viewed as a moderate
by the conservative Catholic leaders and throngs in Africa.
All in all, there are today two billion Christians worldwide, and
Christianity in various orthodox forms, from Pentecostalism to Vatican-
certified Catholicism, is the world's fastest-growing religion. Take
it from Penn State's superb global religions watcher, Philip Jenkins,
who has established beyond any reasonable empirical or historical
doubt that, for decades now, Catholicism and many other Christian
sects have been growing rapidly in the southern hemisphere. By or
before 2050, Africa will supplant Europe as home to the most
Christians. In 1900, Africa had an estimated 10 to 15 million
Christians. In 1959, the Catholic church had not yet appointed a
single black African cardinal. By 2000, however, Africa had some 350
million Christians, including well over 100 million Catholics.
Some demographers would bet that Latin America will outdistance
Africa, and that South America will be first to succeed Europe as the
continent with the most Christians. It has long had the heaviest
country-by-country Catholic concentrations. Even as Pentecostals and
other Christian sects have made converts, South America's Catholic
seminaries have grown (up more than 350 percent since 1972). The
Vatican counts some 60,000 priests, 100,000 lay missionaries, and
130,000 nuns on the continent.
So, from Brazil to Belize, from Beirut to Boston, religion in over a
hundred forms and in a thousand different ways has outlived
"modernity" and "postmodernity," too. And whenever religious
individuals, ideas, and institutions get newly mobilized into politics
and public affairs, at home or abroad, look out, because they have the
power to transform things, and fast.
For example, just consider how the late Pope John Paul II changed both
the Church and Latin America by throwing Catholicism's weight behind
democracy movements there (as he also did on other continents). In
1987, the pope confronted Chile's dictator, General Pinochet, with
these words: "I am not the evangelizer of democracy; I am the
evangelizer of the Gospel. To the Gospel message, of course, belong
all the problems of human rights; and, if democracy means human
rights, it also belongs to the message of the Church."
History teaches that democracy has not done well in countries
dominated by Catholicism, Islam, and Confucianism. But as I argued in
Rome before the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 1998,
Catholicism changed after World War II. I invoked the political
scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who, writing that same year, agreed
that the Church had changed "in ways that positively affected the
potential for democracy."
Similarly, writing in 1991, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington explored
the global fortunes of democracy during the period 1974 to 1990, which
he termed democracy's "third wave." Huntington identified 33 instances
of democratization (versus just three of "democratic reversal").
Religion, he argued, was critical to this wave: "In many countries,
Protestant and Catholic church leaders have been central in the
struggles against repressive [governments]. . . . Catholicism was
second only to economic development as a pervasive force making for
democratization in the 1970s and 1980s."
Correct, but after The Third Wave, Huntington half-forgot how best to
think about religion. In a controversial 1993 article and 1996 book,
he speculated about the conditions under which the world might witness
(or avert) a "clash of civilizations." He argued that ideology,
economics, and nation-states would be far less central to future
international conflicts than they had been in the past. The "principal
conflicts of global politics," he predicted, "will occur between
nations and groups of different civilizations." He stressed that
Western democracies did not have all the answers, and scolded those
who graded other "civilizations" by how kindred they were to American
political norms.
But Huntington's conceptual framework was a sweeping, multivariable
mess that loosely related religion to ethnic, racial, regional, and
other history-moving forces. His provocative prediction was not
warranted by such empirical data as he mustered. When it came time to
delineate "civilizations," he created his own categories: "Islamic"
covered places from Albania to Azerbaijan; "Sinic" included China and
Vietnam; "Japan" was its own "civilization." And so on. Ostensibly
well-informed people describe the situation in Iraq in relation to
Huntington's "clash" thesis. But it should be obvious that the contest
between Sunnis and Shiites is an intra-religious conflict with deep
roots in Islamic history. It is not unlike the conflict (receded but
not forgotten) in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants,
an intra-religious conflict with centuries-old roots in Christian
history.
You know that you are skirting rather than seeing important realities
when you are using identity concepts that are nobody's actual
identity. You do not need to go globe-trotting to understand why. For
example, New Orleans is home to Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. Its
Catholic members are not Creoles or Cajuns. The church's "Post-Katrina
Recovery News" website is in Vietnamese. Since the biblical-sized
floods receded, its leaders have deepened ties to many English-
speaking churches and community groups, Catholic and non-Catholic. To
understand these leaders, their people, and their institution, to map
their community relations, or to gauge their present or potential
civic role, it would not help to categorize them as either "Sinic"
expatriates or "Westerners" on the make.
Huntington's big-think Harvard colleague, Joseph S. Nye, has been less
controversial and more cogent conceptually. Nye is famous for his 2004
work on so-called soft power, meaning how nations get what they want
through attraction rather than coercion (multilateral ties, not
military tussles; economic incentives, not muscle-bound sanctions).
America, he claims, has squandered opportunities to amass and use soft
power. He does not deny that religion can pack a soft-power punch, but
religion gets only a few passing mentions in his magnum opus.
Nye opens with Machiavelli, who wrote that it is better for a ruler to
be feared than to be loved. Nye challenges that dictum by claiming
that soft power often succeeds where hard power fumbles or fails. Fair
enough, but as Nye also knows, the medieval Italian for all seasons
counseled that rulers need both hard-power swords and soft-power
plowshares (or swords that rulers can opt to beat into plowshares as
circumstances may dictate).
As Nye might have emphasized, history teaches that when religion is
used as hard power, it sooner or later destroys those who wield it.
Christianity's hard-power-wielding religions, including king-making
Catholicism, had their days (even centuries) but resulted in ruins
(and, in Catholicism's case, a junior role in North America).
Protestant-inspired church-state separation doctrine is a prudential
prohibition against using religion as hard power at home, and a
caution against using religion as hard power abroad. It is also an
invitation for the state to be faith-friendly, promote religious
pluralism, and avoid sectarian strife.
Thus, what I hereby baptize as spiritualpolitique is a soft-power
perspective on politics that emphasizes religion's domestic and
international significance, accounts for religion's present and
potential power to shape politics within and among nations, and
understands religion not as some abstract force measured by its
resiliency vis-a-vis "modernity" and not by its supporting role in
"civilizations" that cooperate or clash. Rather, a perspective steeped
in spiritualpolitique requires attention to the particularities that
render this or that actual religion as preached and practiced by
present-day peoples so fascinating to ethnographers (who can spend
lifetimes immersed in single sects) and so puzzling to most of the
social scientists who seek, often in vain, to characterize and
quantify religions, or to track religion-related social and political
trends.
Consider how this perspective might inform the ongoing debate on Iraq.
Some have advocated increasing the U.S. presence in Iraq and staying
there until violence is well under wraps. Others have devised or
advocated various draw-down or get-out plans. Although it took a few
years, almost all now acknowledge that the struggle behind most
homegrown bombings that have killed innocent civilians in Iraq has
specific religious roots. But some on both sides in the debate over
U.S. policy seem not yet to know that any conflict-ending compromise
or resolution, no matter its military, economic, or other features,
will not last unless it takes those particular religious differences
very seriously. It is not a "civil war." It is "sectarian violence,"
complicated by the region's wider religious rifts and their
intersections with state-supported terrorism networks.
Spiritualpolitique lesson one is that even in stable representative
democracies, intra-national religious cleavages, whether long-buried
or out in the open, always matter to who governs and to what ends. The
religious cleavages in Iraq existed long before the U.S. occupation.
And the sectarian sources of the violence there will persist even if
the country somehow, some day becomes a textbook, multi-party, stable
parliamentary democracy. (If you doubt it, just study the Israeli
Knesset in action.)
Spiritualpolitique lesson two is that constitutionalism, not
democratization, matters most where religious differences run deepest
or remain most intense. It was good to hold elections in Iraq.
Majority rule via free and fair plebiscites is often among the first
steps toward a more humane polity, whatever its official form and
legal formalities. But majority rule can also mean the proverbial two
wolves and a sheep deciding what is for supper. Constitutionalism,
democracy or not, means that a government's powers are limited and any
law-abiding civic minority's fundamental rights--starting with
religious rights--are legally sacred.
Nothing, however, complicates the march to constitutionalism like
religious differences, especially when, as is almost always the case,
those differences are fodder for what the Founding Fathers denounced
as "foreign intrigues." Consider what James Madison wrote in the
Federalist Papers, and reflect on America's own history. When Madison
discussed how political "factions" could tear a people apart, the very
first source he mentioned was "a zeal for different opinions
concerning religion."
The Constitution's ratification was threatened by Protestant true
believers who cursed the clause forbidding any religious tests for
federal office-holding. They rejected, but Americans now happily live,
Madison's vision--a "multiplicity of sects" (Methodists, Muslims,
Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and others) that each shape but do not
dominate life in this large, commercial republic "under God."
Madison and company cut a political deal known to us as the First
Amendment's two religion clauses: "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof...." This meant that, for the time being, each state
could have a tax-funded and ceremonially favored religion if it
wanted, but the national government would remain forever neutral on
religion. In the early 20th century, the Supreme Court erased the
deal's last legal traces by holding that religious liberty is so
"fundamental" that no religious establishments by the states are
constitutionally permissible.
Until midcentury, not much changed. But then, in the early 1960s,
tradition-minded Protestants, largely self-exiled politically since
the Scopes "monkey trials," became convinced that the Court was going
too far in ridding religion from the public square (the 1962 decision
banning state-sponsored school prayer was the watershed moment). They
entered the political fray. Thus began the evangelical mobilizations
that revolutionized our two-party politics and shaped several recent
presidential elections.
Interestingly enough, the single biggest program to result from born-
again President Bush's push for faith-based initiatives has been
international, not domestic: a $15 billion, five-year effort to
address the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. In May 2005, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice met with the aforementioned Bishop Charles Blake and
other church leaders with ties to religious nongovernmental
organizations abroad that could help to get the job done.
Targeted mainly at 15 countries, and zeroing in on Africa (where two-
thirds of the more than 3.5 million yearly deaths from the disease now
occur), the soft-power program was championed inside the West Wing by
Michael Gerson, the chief speechwriter who became the president's
"compassion agenda" czar. Gerson is now a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations. He and his council colleague Walter Russell Mead
are two foreign policy wonks who take religion seriously. And the
council's president, Richard N. Haass, has publicly opined that
religion matters in world affairs today more than it has for
centuries.
But Gerson, Mead, and Haass remain exceptions to the expert rule, and
not only at the council. In fact, to a remarkable degree, most foreign
policy elites remain not only ignorant but also reluctant when it
comes to discussing religion. In November 2006, the Pew Charitable
Trusts (parent to the Pew religion program cited above) published in
its magazine, Trust, a feature essay by a freelance writer named Sue
Rardin. Entitled "Eyes Wide Shut," Rardin's article quoted numerous
thought leaders and policy makers who expressed reservations about
focusing on religion. She summarized their core concern as follows:
"Addressing religious differences means entering discussions where
moral values--our own as well as those of others--may not be governed
by reason alone, but may be held more fiercely than if they were."
There is only one word for American foreign policy elites, Democratic
and Republican, left and right, who downplay or disregard religion to
their peril, ours--and the world's--in deference to the dogma that
being faith-free promotes objectivity: preposterous. Or, as Rardin
editorialized well: "It's as imprudent to ignore the role of religion
in foreign policy as it is to pretend that the elephant is in some
other room, rather than right here."
It is bad to doubt the overwhelming empirical evidence that religion
matters to domestic politics as well as the delivery of social
services. But it is far worse to treat religion as a back-burner
reality in global affairs when it is boiling over in so many places.
The State Department needs to wake up and smell the incense. There is
already an international legal framework for thinking out loud and
acting in concert with other nations on religion's role in global
affairs. Religious freedom is addressed in the 1948 United Nations
"Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Article 18, which encompasses
"teaching, practice, worship, and observance." Its terms are echoed by
several other U.N. Declarations, including a 1981 General Assembly-
backed document calling for ending all state-sponsored religious
discrimination.
This international legal framework is reinforced by several federal
statutes that were passed with bipartisan support. For instance, a
1998 federal law, signed by President Clinton, puts America firmly on
the hook to support religious freedom abroad (the International
Religious Freedom Act). Subject to that act, the State Department and
other federal agencies are required to report any relevant information
they have regarding "countries of particular concern." The 2006 list
included Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan, and Uzbekistan.
Not much, however, is actually done by Washington to act on these
concerns, end religious persecution, or support nations that abide by
both U.N. and U.S. standards governing respect for religious
pluralism. Just how little can be glimpsed by comparing the federal
government's faith-based funding at home and abroad.
At home, domestic sacred places serving civic purposes have been
discriminated against in myriad ways by grant-making federal agencies.
Things have gotten a bit better since the first relevant federal laws
protecting their rights went on the books in 1996. The Bush
administration boasts that more than $2 billion a year in federal
grants now goes to qualified, community-serving faith-based
organizations. Even if that figure is accepted at face value (many
experts dispute it), $2 billion is still a relative pittance: The
federal government gives out hundreds of billions of dollars in such
grants each year, and over a third of all organizations supplying
certain social services in big cities are faith-based.
It is, however, a bishop's ransom compared with the $591 million that
the United States Agency for International Development granted faith-
based organizations operating abroad in Fiscal Year 2005. Last
September, Terri Hasdorff, the agency's faith-based center director,
testified before the House Subcommittee on Africa. She noted that "the
vast majority of faith-based awards are made to a small number of
groups." Judged against both the more than $20 billion a year in
bilateral foreign aid and the government's professed goal of providing
better public health and other services around the globe, it is an
astonishingly low sum.
Totalitarians, secular or religious, who know what they are about have
always gone beyond merely banning this or that religion or
establishing a state religion (Mao's little red book and cult come
quickly to mind) to killing religious leaders, gulag-ticketing or
terrorizing religious followers, and destroying (physically in many
cases) religion's last traces (books, buildings). Religion, however,
almost always proves resilient, often reasserting itself in its very
pre-revolutionary or dictator-forbidden forms.
Thus, today's democracy-loving, constitutionalism-forging leaders in
America and other nations should acknowledge, respect, and, where
appropriate, boost religious good works both at home and abroad. When
it comes to spiritualpolitique, God will help those who help others.
John J. DiIulio Jr., a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is
author of Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-
Based Future, from which this essay is adapted, forthcoming this fall
from University of California Press.