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Religion, culture, and communication.

Stephen M. Croucher , Stephen M. Croucher School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University
Cheng Zeng , Cheng Zeng Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
Diyako Rahmani Diyako Rahmani Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
and Mélodine Sommier Mélodine Sommier School of History, Culture, and Communication, Eramus University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.166
Published online: 25 January 2017

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are.

It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

communication
intercultural communication

Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Compiling an entry on the relationships among religion, culture, and communication is not an easy task. There is not one accepted definition for any of these three terms, and research suggests that the connections among these concepts are complex, to say the least. Thus, this article attempts to synthesize the various approaches to these three terms and integrate them. In such an endeavor, it is impossible to discuss all philosophical and paradigmatic debates or include all disciplines.

It is difficult to define religion from one perspective and with one encompassing definition. “Religion” is often defined as the belief in or the worship of a god or gods. Geertz ( 1973 ) defined a religion as

(1) a system which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (p. 90)

It is essential to recognize that religion cannot be understood apart from the world in which it takes place (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). To better understand how religion relates to and affects culture and communication, we should first explore key definitions, philosophies, and perspectives that have informed how we currently look at religion. In particular, the influences of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are discussed to further understand the complexity of religion.

Karl Marx ( 1818–1883 ) saw religion as descriptive and evaluative. First, from a descriptive point of view, Marx believed that social and economic situations shape how we form and regard religions and what is religious. For Marx, the fact that people tend to turn to religion more when they are facing economic hardships or that the same religious denomination is practiced differently in different communities would seem perfectly logical. Second, Marx saw religion as a form of alienation (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). For Marx, the notion that the Catholic Church, for example, had the ability or right to excommunicate an individual, and thus essentially exclude them from the spiritual community, was a classic example of exploitation and domination. Such alienation and exploitation was later echoed in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844–1900 ), who viewed organized religion as society and culture controlling man (Nietzsche, 1996 ).

Building on Marxist thinking, Weber ( 1864–1920 ) stressed the multicausality of religion. Weber ( 1963 ) emphasized three arguments regarding religion and society: (1) how a religion relates to a society is contingent (it varies); (2) the relationship between religion and society can only be examined in its cultural and historical context; and (3) the relationship between society and religion is slowly eroding. Weber’s arguments can be applied to Catholicism in Europe. Until the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries, Catholicism was the dominant religious ideology on the European continent. However, since the Reformation, Europe has increasingly become more Protestant and less Catholic. To fully grasp why many Europeans gravitate toward Protestantism and not Catholicism, we must consider the historical and cultural reasons: the Reformation, economics, immigration, politics, etc., that have all led to the majority of Europeans identifying as Protestant (Davie, 2008 ). Finally, even though the majority of Europeans identify as Protestant, secularism (separation of church and state) is becoming more prominent in Europe. In nations like France, laws are in place that officially separate the church and state, while in Northern Europe, church attendance is low, and many Europeans who identify as Protestant have very low religiosity (strength of religious devotion), focusing instead on being secularly religious individuals. From a Weberian point of view, the links among religion, history, and culture in Europe explain the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and now the rise of secularism.

Emile Durkheim ( 1858–1917 ) focused more on how religion performs a necessary function; it brings people and society together. Durkheim ( 1976 ) thus defined a religion as

a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (p. 47)

From this perspective, religion and culture are inseparable, as beliefs and practices are uniquely cultural. For example, religious rituals (one type of practice) unite believers in a religion and separate nonbelievers. The act of communion, or the sharing of the Eucharist by partaking in consecrated bread and wine, is practiced by most Christian denominations. However, the frequency of communion differs extensively, and the ritual is practiced differently based on historical and theological differences among denominations.

Georg Simmel ( 1858–1918 ) focused more on the fluidity and permanence of religion and religious life. Simmel ( 1950 ) believed that religious and cultural beliefs develop from one another. Moreover, he asserted that religiosity is an essential element to understand when examining religious institutions and religion. While individuals may claim to be part of a religious group, Simmel asserted that it was important to consider just how religious the individuals were. In much of Europe, religiosity is low: Germany 34%, Sweden 19%, Denmark 42%, the United Kingdom 30%, the Czech Republic 23%, and The Netherlands 26%, while religiosity is relatively higher in the United States (56%), which is now considered the most religious industrialized nation in the world ( Telegraph Online , 2015 ). The decline of religiosity in parts of Europe and its rise in the U.S. is linked to various cultural, historical, and communicative developments that will be further discussed.

Combining Simmel’s ( 1950 ) notion of religion with Geertz’s ( 1973 ) concept of religion and a more basic definition (belief in or the worship of a god or gods through rituals), it is clear that the relationship between religion and culture is integral and symbiotic. As Clark and Hoover ( 1997 ) noted, “culture and religion are inseparable” and “religion is an important consideration in theories of culture and society” (p. 17).

Outside of the Western/Christian perception of religion, Buddhist scholars such as Nagarajuna present a relativist framework to understand concepts like time and causality. This framework is distinct from the more Western way of thinking, in that notions of present, past, and future are perceived to be chronologically distorted, and the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical (Wimal, 2007 ). Nagarajuna’s philosophy provides Buddhism with a relativist, non-solid dependent, and non-static understanding of reality (Kohl, 2007 ). Mulla Sadra’s philosophy explored the metaphysical relationship between the created universe and its singular creator. In his philosophy, existence takes precedence over essence, and any existing object reflects a part of the creator. Therefore, every devoted person is obliged to know themselves as the first step to knowing the creator, which is the ultimate reason for existence. This Eastern perception of religion is similar to that of Nagarajuna and Buddhism, as they both include the paradoxical elements that are not easily explained by the rationality of Western philosophy. For example, the god, as Mulla Sadra defines it, is beyond definition, description, and delamination, yet it is absolutely simple and unique (Burrell, 2013 ).

How researchers define and study culture varies extensively. For example, Hall ( 1989 ) defined culture as “a series of situational models for behavior and thought” (p. 13). Geertz ( 1973 ), building on the work of Kluckhohn ( 1949 ), defined culture in terms of 11 different aspects:

(1) the total way of life of a people; (2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; (3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; (4) an abstraction from behavior; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a storehouse of pooled learning; (7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; (8) learned behavior; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; (11) a precipitate of history. (Geertz, 1973 , p. 5)

Research on culture is divided between an essentialist camp and a constructivist camp. The essentialist view regards culture as a concrete and fixed system of symbols and meanings (Holiday, 1999 ). An essentialist approach is most prevalent in linguistic studies, in which national culture is closely linked to national language. Regarding culture as a fluid concept, constructionist views of culture focus on how it is performed and negotiated by individuals (Piller, 2011 ). In this sense, “culture” is a verb rather than a noun. In principle, a non-essentialist approach rejects predefined national cultures and uses culture as a tool to interpret social behavior in certain contexts.

Different approaches to culture influence significantly how it is incorporated into communication studies. Cultural communication views communication as a resource for individuals to produce and regulate culture (Philipsen, 2002 ). Constructivists tend to perceive culture as a part of the communication process (Applegate & Sypher, 1988 ). Cross-cultural communication typically uses culture as a national boundary. Hofstede ( 1991 ) is probably the most popular scholar in this line of research. Culture is thus treated as a theoretical construct to explain communication variations across cultures. This is also evident in intercultural communication studies, which focus on misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.

Religion, Community, and Culture

There is an interplay among religion, community, and culture. Community is essentially formed by a group of people who share common activities or beliefs based on their mutual affect, loyalty, and personal concerns. Participation in religious institutions is one of the most dominant community engagements worldwide. Religious institutions are widely known for creating a sense of community by offering various material and social supports for individual followers. In addition, the role that religious organizations play in communal conflicts is also crucial. As religion deals with the ultimate matters of life, the differences among different religious beliefs are virtually impossible to settle. Although a direct causal relationship between religion and violence is not well supported, religion is, nevertheless, commonly accepted as a potential escalating factor in conflicts. Currently, religious conflicts are on the rise, and they are typically more violent, long-lasting, and difficult to resolve. In such cases, local religious organizations, places facilitating collective actions in the community, are extremely vital, as they can either preach peace or stir up hatred and violence. The peace impact of local religious institutions has been largely witnessed in India and Indonesia where conflicts are solved at the local level before developing into communal violence (De Juan, Pierskalla, & Vüllers, 2015 ).

While religion affects cultures (Beckford & Demerath, 2007 ), it itself is also affected by culture, as religion is an essential layer of culture. For example, the growth of individualism in the latter half of the 20th century has been coincident with the decline in the authority of Judeo-Christian institutions and the emergence of “parachurches” and more personal forms of prayer (Hoover & Lundby, 1997 ). However, this decline in the authority of the religious institutions in modernized society has not reduced the important role of religion and spirituality as one of the main sources of calm when facing painful experiences such as death, suffering, and loss.

When cultural specifications, such as individualism and collectivism, have been attributed to religion, the proposed definitions and functions of religion overlap with definitions of culture. For example, researchers often combine religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.) with cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1991 ) like individualism/collectivism to understand and compare cultural differences. Such combinations for comparison and analytical purposes demonstrate how religion and religious identification in particular are often relegated to a micro-level variable, when in fact the true relationship between an individual’s religion and culture is inseparable.

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

Religion as a part of culture has been linked to numerous communication traits and behaviors. Specifically, religion has been linked with media use and preferences (e.g., Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ), health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), interpersonal communication (e.g., Croucher, Faulkner, Oommen, & Long, 2012b ), organizational behaviors (e.g., Garner & Wargo, 2009 ), and intercultural communication traits and behaviors (e.g., Croucher, Braziunaite, & Oommen, 2012a ). In media and religion scholarship, researchers have shown how religion as a cultural variable has powerful effects on media use, preferences, and gratifications. The research linking media and religion is vast (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ). This body of research has shown how “religious worldviews are created and sustained in ongoing social processes in which information is shared” (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 , pp. 7–8). For example, religious Christians are more likely to read newspapers, while religious individuals are less likely to have a favorable opinion of the internet (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), and religious individuals (who typically attend religious services and are thus integrated into a religious community) are more likely to read media produced by the religious community (Davie, 2008 ).

Research into health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues is also robust. Research shows how religion, specifically religiosity, promotes healthier living and better decision-making regarding health and wellbeing (Harris & Worley, 2012 ). For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our health.

Research specifically examining the links between religion and interpersonal communication is not as vast as the research into media, health, and religion. However, this slowly growing body of research has explored areas such as rituals, self-disclosure (Croucher et al., 2012b ), and family dynamics (Davie, 2008 ), to name a few.

The role of religion in organizations is well studied. Overall, researchers have shown how religious identification and religiosity influence an individual’s organizational behavior. For example, research has shown that an individual’s religious identification affects levels of organizational dissent (Croucher et al., 2012a ). Garner and Wargo ( 2009 ) further showed that organizational dissent functions differently in churches than in nonreligious organizations. Kennedy and Lawton ( 1998 ) explored the relationships between religious beliefs and perceptions about business/corporate ethics and found that individuals with stronger religious beliefs have stricter ethical beliefs.

Researchers are increasingly looking at the relationships between religion and intercultural communication. Researchers have explored how religion affects numerous communication traits and behaviors and have shown how religious communities perceive and enact religious beliefs. Antony ( 2010 ), for example, analyzed the bindi in India and how the interplay between religion and culture affects people’s acceptance of it. Karniel and Lavie-Dinur ( 2011 ) showed how religion and culture influence how Palestinian Arabs are represented on Israeli television. Collectively, the intercultural work examining religion demonstrates the increasing importance of the intersection between religion and culture in communication studies.

Collectively, communication studies discourse about religion has focused on how religion is an integral part of an individual’s culture. Croucher et al. ( 2016 ), in a content analysis of communication journal coverage of religion and spirituality from 2002 to 2012 , argued that the discourse largely focuses on religion as a cultural variable by identifying religious groups as variables for comparative analysis, exploring “religious” or “spiritual” as adjectives to describe entities (religious organizations), and analyzing the relationships between religious groups in different contexts. Croucher and Harris ( 2012 ) asserted that the discourse about religion, culture, and communication is still in its infancy, though it continues to grow at a steady pace.

Future Lines of Inquiry

Research into the links among religion, culture, and communication has shown the vast complexities of these terms. With this in mind, there are various directions for future research/exploration that researchers could take to expand and benefit our practical understanding of these concepts and how they relate to one another. Work should continue to define these terms with a particular emphasis on mediation, closely consider these terms in a global context, focus on how intergroup dynamics influence this relationship, and expand research into non-Christian religious cultures.

Additional definitional work still needs to be done to clarify exactly what is meant by “religion,” “culture,” and “communication.” Our understanding of these terms and relationships can be further enhanced by analyzing how forms of mass communication mediate each other. Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ) asserted that there should be a shift from media to mediations as multiple opposing forces meet in communication. He defined mediation as “the articulations between communication practices and social movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality of cultural matrices” (p. 187). Religions have relied on mediations through various media to communicate their messages (oral stories, print media, radio, television, internet, etc.). These media share religious messages, shape the messages and religious communities, and are constantly changing. What we find is that, as media sophistication develops, a culture’s understandings of mediated messages changes (Martin-Barbero, 1993 ). Thus, the very meanings of religion, culture, and communication are transitioning as societies morph into more digitally mediated societies. Research should continue to explore the effects of digital mediation on our conceptualizations of religion, culture, and communication.

Closely linked to mediation is the need to continue extending our focus on the influence of globalization on religion, culture, and communication. It is essential to study the relationships among culture, religion, and communication in the context of globalization. In addition to trading goods and services, people are increasingly sharing ideas, values, and beliefs in the modern world. Thus, globalization not only leads to technological and socioeconomic changes, but also shapes individuals’ ways of communicating and their perceptions and beliefs about religion and culture. While religion represents an old way of life, globalization challenges traditional meaning systems and is often perceived as a threat to religion. For instance, Marx and Weber both asserted that modernization was incompatible with tradition. But, in contrast, globalization could facilitate religious freedom by spreading the idea of freedom worldwide. Thus, future work needs to consider the influence of globalization to fully grasp the interrelationships among religion, culture, and communication in the world.

A review of the present definitions of religion in communication research reveals that communication scholars approach religion as a holistic, total, and unique institution or notion, studied from the viewpoint of different communication fields such as health, intercultural, interpersonal, organizational communication, and so on. However, this approach to communication undermines the function of a religion as a culture and also does not consider the possible differences between religious cultures. For example, religious cultures differ in their levels of individualism and collectivism. There are also differences in how religious cultures interact to compete for more followers and territory (Klock, Novoa, & Mogaddam, 2010 ). Thus, localization is one area of further research for religion communication studies. This line of study best fits in the domain of intergroup communication. Such an approach will provide researchers with the opportunity to think about the roles that interreligious communication can play in areas such as peacemaking processes (Klock et al., 2010 ).

Academic discourse about religion has focused largely on Christian denominations. In a content analysis of communication journal discourse on religion and spirituality, Croucher et al. ( 2016 ) found that the terms “Christian” or “Christianity” appeared in 9.56% of all articles, and combined with other Christian denominations (Catholicism, Evangelism, Baptist, Protestantism, and Mormonism, for example), appeared in 18.41% of all articles. Other religious cultures (denominations) made up a relatively small part of the overall academic discourse: Islam appeared in 6.8%, Judaism in 4.27%, and Hinduism in only 0.96%. Despite the presence of various faiths in the data, the dominance of Christianity and its various denominations is incontestable. Having religions unevenly represented in the academic discourse is problematic. This highly unbalanced representation presents a biased picture of religious practices. It also represents one faith as being the dominant faith and others as being minority religions in all contexts.

Ultimately, the present overview, with its focus on religion, culture, and communication points to the undeniable connections among these concepts. Religion and culture are essential elements of humanity, and it is through communication, that these elements of humanity are mediated. Whether exploring these terms in health, interpersonal, intercultural, intergroup, mass, or other communication contexts, it is evident that understanding the intersection(s) among religion, culture, and communication offers vast opportunities for researchers and practitioners.

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> Harvard Theological Review
> Volume 116 Issue 1
> The Religions of Human Rights

Article contents

A prayer for the persecuted, minoritarian human rights: a jewish story, majoritarian human rights: a christian story, the limits of pluralism, cosmopolitan human rights: a judeo-christian story, the limits of dialogue, the religions of human rights.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2022

The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts and conflicts between Judaism and Christianity, particularly in the context of the decolonizing Middle East. This article retraces this interreligious encounter through the writings of Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, diplomat and theologian Charles Malik, and rabbi and activist Maurice Perlzweig. Together they represent three different theopolitical responses to the problem of religious pluralism after global empire: minoritarian human rights, majoritarian human rights, and cosmopolitan human rights. Recovering these interrelated human rights conceptions exposes the frames of religious difference embedded in the modern Western human rights imagination.

On February 17, 1962, Peter Benenson, a recent Jewish convert to Catholicism, asked the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel to pray with him. His new organization, Amnesty International, planned a “World Day of Prayer for the Persecuted” to be held on April 8, Passion Sunday, the first day of the two-week period preceding Easter. Christian communities around the world were joining together on that day to recite a “Prayer for the Persecuted,” especially composed for the occasion by the archbishop of Westminster, the de facto head of the British Catholic Church. Benenson wrote to the Jewish spiritual leader to ask that Jews participate in the exercise. Would the rabbi lead world Jewry in praying with Christians for the common cause of human rights? Footnote 1

In his reply, the “Rishon Le-Zion,” Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, politely declined. He sympathized with the idea of prayer for the oppressed, his secretary explained, but the date in question fell within the Hebrew month of Nissan. During that time Jews customarily refrained from prayers “characterized by agony or sorrow,” because of their joy at the impending holiday of Passover. Undeterred, Benenson wrote back with an alternative proposal. Later that same year, on Monday, December 10, UN Human Rights Day, churches would once more join in coordinated prayer. Jewish prayers would be most welcome. They might even be performed on the proximate Sabbath, he helpfully added. His effort was again rebuffed. Footnote 2

Why was it so important for Benenson to secure Jewish participation in his international prayer campaign? Certainly, religion offered an attractive tool with which to forge Amnesty’s “Community of Conscience” stretching “over frontiers of belief and nationality.” Footnote 3 Benenson and his colleagues dispatched similar entreaties to Muslim, Bahai, and other religious groups. Prayer evidently beckoned as an innocuous means of ethical mobilization for human rights. Parallel liturgical texts might be tailored to accommodate religious differences. Prayer times could be loosely synchronized. Indeed, in his reply to the rabbi, the former Jew pointedly quoted the Hebrew date, albeit incorrectly, to display his sensitivity to Jewish liturgical time. Benenson’s overture also resonated with that year’s Second Vatican Council, in which the Roman Catholic Church repudiated its own historical anti-Semitism. Footnote 4

Yet below the placid surface of his pluralist entreaty lurked a more complex theological motive. Benenson confided to his friend and Amnesty cofounder Eric Baker that he regarded the human rights organization as “a part of the Christian witness.” Footnote 5 Amnesty’s goal was to offer every person a chance to become “like Christ reborn,” including those “member[s] of the race from which God chose the mother to His son.” Footnote 6 This ostensibly secular enterprise was shot through with barely concealed Christian beliefs. We might then reasonably ask: Did Benenson seek out a Jewish partner to widen the appeal of human rights? Or to realize his religious theology?

The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions. After a long nineteenth century in which religious humanitarianism largely took the form of Christian missionary work, imperial military intervention, and intrareligious relief campaigns, the leading mid-twentieth-century exponents of human rights embraced religion as a general philosophical foundation for cosmopolitan internationalism. Footnote 7 Across the 1940s and 1950s, the religious grounds of human rights featured prominently in diplomatic dialogues and international nongovernmental activism. The quest for a secularized natural law spurred a roster of new interfaith political alliances and comparative intellectual inquiries. Yet the religious dynamics of all this interreligious activity remained decidedly ambiguous. Benenson’s prayer drive suggested just how blurred the line was between Christianity as a secular, contingent tool for burnishing the preexisting authority of human rights and Christianity as a theological force animating the moral imagination. It was not always clear where faith stopped and politics began. Or where the boundary lay between secular and religious. Or, for that matter, where the borderlines and fault lines lay between religions.

The “between” is the crucial factor that concerns us here. Almost without exception, attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religion have taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. Rejecting confessional approaches that locate some essential human rights principles lurking in premodern texts, historians and religion scholars have traced the continuities and ruptures between classical Christian theology and mid-twentieth-century Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox conceptions of human rights. Footnote 8 They have likewise exposed the absence of Christian-style natural law or an individual rights tradition in classical Judaism. Footnote 9 This has led to a default emphasis on secularization as the defining process by which religious thinkers rummaged in the storehouses of their traditions in order to “rediscover” ideas such as the sacredness of the individual human that, mutatis mutandis, matched the intellectual and legal culture of the twentieth century. Footnote 10 This revisionist approach rightly corrects for historical anachronism. Footnote 11 The usable past conjured up by human rights proponents should not be mistaken for deep historical origins. Still, the polycentric study of religion and human rights remains trapped in a set of unifocal frames of inquiry: Christian human rights, Jewish human rights, Muslim human rights, and so on. Footnote 12 Indeed, on this model, world religions first met modern rights, and only afterwards did their adherents confront one another’s contrasting visions in the realm of international institutions and legal projects. The preoccupation with the emergence of religious human rights, in other words, still privileges individual genealogies over their points of historical interaction. What is lost as a result is any sense of how these spiritualized human rights visions are themselves products of a twentieth-century globalizing world of religious pluralism. Footnote 13 To historicize fully the relationship between religion and human rights, then, we need to recover the interreligious dynamics present in the moment of their creation.

The origins story of Peter Benenson (1921–2005) and the creation of Amnesty International affords us one glimpse of this kind of complicated interreligious encounter. Others present themselves through the careers of two other key mid-twentieth-century figures: Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig (1895–1985) and Greek Orthodox Christian theologian Charles Malik (1906–1987). Between them, these three men respectively encapsulate what might be conventionally identified as Jewish, Christian, and, in the case of Benenson, Judeo-Christian human rights traditions. Each of these individuals has received attention in recent scholarship on the postwar origins of international human rights. Footnote 14 But the question of how their interactions with other religions and their own theological views actively shaped their human rights visions has not been answered. Hence, in this essay, I reexamine the threads tying religion to human rights by way of the following thesis: modern human rights arose after the Second World War less as a progressive secularization of religious eschatology than as a novel set of solutions to the problem of religious pluralism after empire. In a world shifting from Christian and Muslim empires to ethnoreligious nation-states, older forms of religious internationalism no longer fit the emerging global order. Footnote 15 The new discourse of a single humanity divided into discrete sovereign nation-states fundamentally destabilized the civilizational, racial, and imperial frameworks that had sustained earlier religious universalisms, even if it did not fully dismantle them. Global religions no longer matched any of the basic units of global politics. Sectarianism and nationalism jostled in the confines of the territorial state. War, decolonization, and Cold War geopolitical division reapportioned religious communities into sovereign citizenries. As a result, these thinkers grasped for a moral language that could reconcile global religion with the nation-state. They found a solution in the emerging doctrine of human rights.

Despite common concerns, the ideas put forward by these individuals were by no means identical. Indeed, when we compare their thinking, what emerges is a tripartite set of approaches that we might call minoritarian human rights, majoritarian human rights, and cosmopolitan human rights. In his Jewish minoritarian approach, Perlzweig envisioned human rights as a pluralist survival strategy for a world of nationalized minority religions. By contrast, in his Christian majoritarian approach, Malik sought to neutralize religious pluralism and its ties to nationalism by imagining humanity as a single Christian community of individual believers. Finally, in his Judeo-Christian cosmopolitanism, Benenson rejected the very categories of religious majority and minority. Instead, he recast humanity as members of a postvernacular Christian faith. Footnote 16 This taxonomy of minoritarian, majoritarian, and cosmopolitan reflects both the underlying logic and the programmatic aspirations of these men.

None of these visions developed in isolation from one other. In fact, these religious human rights visions grew precisely out of interreligious frictions in the decades surrounding the Second World War. That historical process unfolded in different ways depending on time and place. American Protestant thinkers, for instance, used the human rights idiom to recalibrate their relations with Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam in the context of rising American global power. Footnote 17 European Catholics and Protestants found in human rights a moral language to restore Europe’s religious equilibrium and rally against the dangers of secular statism and totalitarian atheism. Footnote 18 Confucian and Hindu thinkers grappled with how to assimilate their traditions into Western categories in the context of decolonization and Communist revolution. Footnote 19 Benenson, Malik, and Perlzweig, by contrast, represented a group of thinkers transiting the uncertain pathways linking Holocaust-era Christian Europe to the decolonizing Middle East. Their universalist visions tracked closely against the region’s political conflicts and ideological debates stemming from the newly imposed boundaries of nationhood. Despite their divergent answers, they each responded to the same question of how to imagine global religious difference after the end of empire. Footnote 20

Maurice Perlzweig is easily the most prominent rabbi to be found in the history of twentieth-century international human rights. Over the course of a seven-decade career, he fought for minority rights at the interwar League of Nations, organized the rescue of Jews in Europe and the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s, and worked at the postwar United Nations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Genocide Convention, and the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Equally importantly, as long-time UN representative of the World Jewish Congress, he led the rise of the modern international nongovernmental organization, earning the sobriquet, “Mr. NGO” in diplomatic circles.

Religious Judaism played an undeniably central part in Perlzweig’s worldview and activism. As a cofounder of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, he blazed a path for Liberal Judaism across Europe and the world. As a long-time pulpit rabbi in England and Canada, he taught a generation of Anglo-Jewish elites (and their children, through his stint as Jewish chaplain at Eton) and the public at large about the moral visions of Judaism. Even so, six decades of Perlzweig’s speech-making, memo-writing, and media appearances yield a surprisingly small number of explicit discussions of Judaism’s relationship to human rights. Even those that do often feature heavy disclaimers to the effect that there is no such thing as a unitary Jewish theological doctrine of human rights. Footnote 21 Where, then, did he source his human rights vision?

The answer is politics. Before he became a Jewish human rights icon, Perlzweig was a Zionist internationalist. Footnote 22 While the exclusionary face of Zionist ideology commands much of our attention today in the context of post-1948 Israel/Palestine, Perlzweig represented an influential earlier European branch of the national movement that understood Jewish self-determination both with and beyond territorial settlement in Palestine as a claim to moral autonomy for a distinct, endangered national community. Footnote 23 Born in Habsburg Galicia and raised in London, Perlzweig grew up the son of a prominent Orthodox cantor who was also an early adherent of the Zionist movement and a good friend of its leader, Theodor Herzl. Perlzweig’s father was even long rumored to have composed “Hatikvah,” the Zionist national anthem. As a teenager, the younger Perlzweig embraced his father’s politics but rejected his Orthodoxy. In its place, he received ordination in England’s Liberal Judaism movement, also known as Progressive Judaism, a cousin of the more well-known American denomination of Reform Judaism. At the same time, thanks to his oratorical gifts, he became a precocious youth leader in the British Zionist movement at the fateful World War I–era moment in which the British government delivered an assortment of contradictory new promises regarding national self-determination in the post-Ottoman Middle East. Thereafter, the dialectical interplay between Perlzweig’s “religious liberalism” and his ethnic nationalism would become the defining force in his human rights thought. Footnote 24

Like their American and German Reform cousins, British Progressive Jews opposed Zionism on ideological grounds as an improper politicization of Jewish identity. These liberal leaders insisted that Zionism was fundamentally illiberal in its character. Postbiblical Judaism was a universal religious creed with no national or ethnic dimensions. Zionism’s collectivist vision of Jewish ethnonational identity violated that principle and exacerbated anti-Semitism by jeopardizing the process of liberal inclusion in modern Western democratic societies. Footnote 25 Perlzweig, by contrast, insisted that Liberal Judaism offered “spiritual self-emancipation” from antiquated Orthodoxy, while Zionism constituted the quintessence of political liberalism in the form of Jewish “national self-emancipation.” By re-territorializing their nationhood in Palestine, Jews could achieve collective security and political dignity, free from the sway of mighty powers or the allure of “assimilation.” Footnote 26

From his London pulpit and in the pages of his self-authored prayer book in the 1920s and 1930s, he preached a vision of modern Judaism as a naturalistic blend of liberal nationalism and religious universalism. Footnote 27 “I am convinced that Israel has a special place and function in the spiritual economy of mankind,” he wrote in 1928, “and I am prepared to believe that, given the will, he could mobilize all his scattered communities for the task of advancing the spiritual welfare of humanity.” Footnote 28 To do that, however, Jews would need to reenter “the life of humanity” as a self-governing nation anchored in its historic homeland. Like Muslim nationalists in India at the same time, Perlzweig saw late colonial modernity as a process that turned an ethnoreligious community into a national minority in need of protection from national majorities:

The underlying conception of the State is one that demands for it an absolute sovereignty over the individual, in the spiritual no less than in the political sphere. This conception, carried to its logical conclusion, leaves no room even for religious [or other] differences within the State…. Against that conception we have to oppose the view that, while all citizens of the State owe it uncompromising loyalty in matters which are properly the concern of the State, the human mind has other interests than those of political and tax-paying, and the life of the State, and of humanity as a whole, is enriched by the existence and the inter-play of groups with distinctive racial and spiritual inheritances and ideals. Footnote 29

As a result, he insisted on “the right of the Jews to exist as a separate group” as the building block of the modern global order. Footnote 30 This minoritarian vision animated Perlzweig’s support for Zionism and his investment in international minority rights, the key legal incarnation of human rights thinking between the nineteenth-century Rights of Man and later twentieth-century human rights. Like others in his day, he saw postwar Eastern Europe and the Middle East as a single postimperial world in which the combination of nation-states and international minority rights guaranteed by the League of Nations would provide opportunities for national self-determination and diasporic protection. He pursued this work chiefly through his leadership in the World Jewish Congress, a transnational nongovernmental organization committed to defending Jewish minority rights at the interwar League of Nations. A properly built international system would mediate between large and small religions, national majorities and national minorities, creating spaces for pluralism in a postimperial world. It would also provide a means to link the fate of the national minority with its kin-state, the national majority, in a harmonious vision of an ordered world.

At the heart of Perlzweig’s public theology lay a vision of collectivist universalism. The small size of Judaism in the global context of religions represented not a defect but a virtue. “Judaism is, undoubtedly, a universalistic religion, but its universalism springs from the quality of the Jewish faith, not the quantity of Jewish communities.” Footnote 31 The “peculiar quality and genius” lay in its unique “synthesis of Universalism and Particularism.” Footnote 32 His goal was not to Judaize the world through a universalization of Judaic values or legal principles but to embody difference as a defense against the coercive forces of statism and imperialism.

Looking back on his own interwar activism decades later, Perlzweig noted that it was thanks to the American Jewish social philosopher Horace Kallen that he entered this sphere of international human rights activism. Kallen’s concept of “cultural pluralism,” itself an extension of William James’s pluralism, provided the template for a progressive restructuring of modern society along naturalistic lines. Footnote 33 Each state would hold various religious and national communities together without compelling homogeneity at odds with the realities of global diversity after empire. This political theology, similar in respects to nineteenth-century Italian rabbi Elia Benamozegh and twentieth-century contemporary philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, suggested a vision of Jewish modernity that has been described as a model of “concrete, pluralistic universalism” in which “true unity would only be achieved through consciously channeled diversity.” Footnote 34

If there was a blind spot in Perlzweig’s field of vision, it lay in the direction of Palestinian self-determination. Convinced that Arab nationalism was a disingenuous exercise in antiliberal imperialism, Perlzweig clashed early on with Muslim and Christian Palestinian representatives who sought a separate Palestinian national right to existence. Many of these thinkers asserted an ecumenical vision of harmonious religious coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in late-Ottoman Palestine. Footnote 35 It was only with the advent of Zionism, a European colonial import, they argued, that the Arabized Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine and surrounding countries began to fracture into divisive national groupings. To Perlzweig these claims constituted a denial of Jewish collective identity. Submerging Jews into an Arab civilization, he argued, amounted to a neo-imperial project of Arab national majoritarianism that would imperil Jews and destroy Jewish life as surely as had happened in Eastern Europe. Accordingly, he blithely dismissed Arab demands for self-determination in Palestine as disingenuous ideological maneuvers behind which lay the hand of European fascism. His conception of Jews as a global minority par excellence left him unable to see the colonial dimensions of his own Jewish politics as applied to interwar Palestine.

The events of the 1940s further challenged Perzlweig’s minoritarian vision of human rights. The Holocaust decimated European Jewry, reducing its surviving remnant in Eastern Europe to a captive community languishing under Communist rule, whose imagined ties to a global Jewish nation proved a focal point for lethal discrimination. The growing imperilment of Jewish communities across the Middle East in connection with the violent partition of Palestine also showed how Jewish interconnectedness could exacerbate collective vulnerability. The war itself and subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict raised painful questions about Jewish ethics and the exercise of power by a minority turned majority. Equally dismaying was the fate of minority rights in the international arena. Having fled to the United States during the war, Perlzweig found there, to his dismay, that the new rhetoric of human rights favored by American clergy, lawyers, and policymakers positioned individual liberties in opposition to minority group rights. As these ideas took hold in the emerging United Nations project, Perlzweig struggled to adapt his minoritarian vision. Footnote 36 The result was a curious hybrid rhetoric of human and minority rights. In sermons across the years 1948 and 1949, for instance, he endorsed the UDHR but insisted that alongside the “fundamental rights of human personality,” the UDHR must continue to guarantee “equal human rights to any group in a national society.” Both the rights of the individual and the “rights of a particular group” required protection in international law, he insisted, in order to secure “the welfare of humanity.” Footnote 37

What Perlzweig most feared about the new individual human rights doctrine of the late 1940s was its implications for pluralism. In a libertarian world of atomized individuals, the majority might swallow up the minority, disrupting the natural diversity of humanity. Similarly, he decried the enthusiastic pronouncement of universal human rights without any accompanying legal structure to enforce them. When it came to human rights, “the new organization is authorized to preach against sin,” he quipped, “but is not given the legal right to restrain the sinner.” Footnote 38 Proclaiming humanity’s rights without legalizing them would surely backfire. In fact, his critique of the spiritualization of rights anticipated precisely the theological move made by his friend and rival, Charles Malik.

No other post–World War II public figure better articulated religion’s relevance to human rights than Charles Malik. Throughout several decades of prominent leadership at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, including as a key drafter of the UDHR, as well as in his scores of writings and public lectures, Malik consistently and passionately invoked the ties between religion and human rights. As a Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian who embraced the Catholic Personalist doctrine of Jacques Maritain and other Neo-Thomists, Malik has often been viewed as a prototypical ecumenicalist and paradigmatic religious human rights thinker. Footnote 39 Yet, not only did he arrive late to human rights, adopting the term only in 1947 once he began work on the UN Commission on Human Rights, but Malik tempered his human rights ecumenicalism with profound conversionary yearnings toward Jews and Muslims. Footnote 40 Hence we are left with a puzzling disjuncture between the well-worn image of a liberal religious cosmopolitan and the clear evidence of a committed Christian evangelist. Footnote 41

As in the case of Perlzweig, Malik’s views on human rights emerged from the intersection between religion and nationalism in the context of a postimperial Middle East. Born and raised in a rural village in late-Ottoman Lebanon, Malik passed through Christian Protestant missionary schools and the American University of Beirut before venturing abroad to work in Cairo. In the early 1930s, he embarked on a doctoral degree in philosophy at Harvard under Alfred North Whitehead, along with one year spent studying with Martin Heidegger in mid-1930s Germany. Returning to Lebanon, he began a career as a philosophy professor at the American University until his appointment as Lebanese ambassador to the United States and the UN in 1945.

That year, 1945, also marked the date that Malik assumed the role of spokesman for the Arab League, a new pan-Arab nationalist organization. However, he resisted Arab nationalism’s secularist pull and feared for the fate of Middle Eastern Christians under the impact of both Zionism and Islamism. As a result, Malik saw in human rights a solution to the dilemmas of minorityhood in a decolonizing Middle East. Footnote 42 His majoritarian human rights vision emerged out of his larger confrontation with what he perceived to be the political pathologies of modern collectivism. In a world that increasingly fetishized groups and imperiled minorities, the sole solution was to protect and reconsecrate the individual. During his year in Germany, Malik witnessed firsthand the rise of European fascism—and even suffered anti-Semitic harassment and violence because of being mistaken for a Jew. Footnote 43 Still, he focused not on the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism or anti-Christianity but instead on its idolatrous collectivism: “In 1935 A.D. you must belong to a Group, with a brilliant history, if you want to be at all . Being is Group-being and only Group-being. The individual is dead, wholly dead.” Footnote 44

Faced with the threats of “spiritless secularism,” Communism, and Fascism, Malik gravitated to neo-Thomist Catholic thought and from there to a religionized Rights of Man. Footnote 45 As he began to engage formally with human rights in the late 1940s, he stressed the common goal of re-enshrining the divine core of dignity within “the human person” as an inviolable sanctum impervious to temporal state power. Footnote 46 Across the late 1940s, Malik repeatedly returned to this theme, as evidenced by his famous quotation about the Universal Declaration: “We are trying in effect, knowingly or unknowingly, to go back to the Platonic-Christian tradition which affirms man’s original, integral dignity and immortality.” Footnote 47

Malik’s faith permeated his public comments about the Christian meaning of human rights. Time and again in the drafting work for the Universal Declaration, he stressed this barely submerged Christian undercurrent. Convinced that the “eye of faith can see in practically every international situation the hidden hand of Christ,” he insisted that “the whole modern movement for the rights of man is inspired directly or indirectly by the Christian conscience,” defined as an exclusively Christian affirmation of “the original dignity of man,” “the unity of man all over the world,” and “the universality of the moral law.” Footnote 48

Yet Christian human rights could never replace Christianity for Malik. The Church remained the best, and ultimately the only, solution to humanity’s needs. Footnote 49 That left human rights spiritually suspect. If humanity embraced its rights but failed to recognize their creator, they risked idolatry. Strikingly, already in 1948, as he worked to draft the UDHR, Malik lamented its desacralized character. As he wrote in the American Bar Association Journal in August of that year:

The real crisis in human rights … consists rather in the fact that people today do not believe they have natural, inherent, inalienable rights…. Having lost his hold on God, or more accurately, having blinded himself to God’s constant hold on him, [modern man] seeks for his rights elsewhere in vain. Footnote 50

Moreover, the gap between religious origins and secular appropriations troubled Malik deeply. If human rights offered a poor, temporary placeholder for salvation, the new doctrine also exposed genuine Christianity to a constant danger of contamination by secularism. Speaking to a Presbyterian mission audience in New York, again in 1948, he dismissed the possibility of a post-religious human rights:

I find no evidence that this enlightened secularization of our religion was even the remotest intention—let along the practice—of our Lord or his Apostles or saints, or of the Fathers of the Church. I pray that the missionary movement will never allow itself to be deflected into purely humanitarian and secular…. Its task is, through every suffering … to mediate Jesus Christ himself … who alone can and does mightily save me every day from the grip of sin and death. Footnote 51

Ultimately, Christianity would supersede human rights, unifying humanity and dissolving differences:

As in every crisis throughout the long record of human misery, the Church of Christ is the only real answer … I yearn and groan for nothing more than for the unity of the Body of our Lord. In that holy unity alone is man in all his possibilities completely revealed. What a pale and miserable phantom is all our activity for human rights by comparison with the humanity already achieved for all of us in Jesus Christ! Whatever we do with our human covenants, surely He is able to keep His covenant with us. Footnote 52

As a result, Malik viewed religious pluralism with skepticism and hostility. The problem of religious conflict ultimately could not be resolved other than by fusion inside Christianity. His dream of a mass conversion of the Middle East to Christianity bespoke a deep desire to replace the intermediate stage of human rights with a final human redemption. Human rights represented a fight on two fronts: against faithlessness and against other faiths. Footnote 53

Malik’s antipathy to religious pluralism reflected itself in his turbulent relationship to Judaism and Zionism. In his diplomatic remarks at the UN, he lavished praise on Judaism’s ethical content and noted the relevance of the Holocaust to the enterprise of human rights. But in other writings and speeches outside that forum, he rarely mentioned Judaism and conspicuously avoided the phrases “Judeo-Christian” or even “Judaeo-Christian-Islamic.” Footnote 54 Instead, he favored locutions such as the “Greco-Roman-European human tradition of thought and being.” Judaism represented a wayward tributary from Christianity rather than a distinct separate religion. Moreover, Malik’s positive public mentions of Jews and Judaism alternated with darkly anti-Semitic views of Jews and Zionists (sometimes used interchangeably), whom he accused of corrupting the Middle East and American Christianity alike with “messianic” Jewish tribalism and demonic manipulation. Footnote 55 Indeed, one could reasonably read Malik’s human rights spiritualism as a bid to repress the Jewish-Zionist origins of much of the international human rights law in his day. Footnote 56

Malik’s Christian supercessionism also led him to argue that only universal Christianity could do the work of religious conciliation. Footnote 57 In 1953, the English Protestant interfaith activist Reverend James Parkes wrote him to ask whether he might temper his anti-Zionist comments for the benefit of Middle Eastern peace. Footnote 58 Surely, all sides involved—“the British, the Arabs, the Jews and the Christian Churches”—shared responsibility for the crisis of Israel/Palestine. Footnote 59 Perhaps a more ecumenical spirit could help bring peace, he gently counseled. Malik rejected the idea out of hand:

Certainly Christianity and Islam are rooted in the Jewish religion, but you do not reconcile things by going back to their roots…. The road to reconciliation will be open only when the Jews acknowledge and serve Jesus Christ and the Moslems understand fully how they have departed from Him. He reconciles, and certainly not we nor any political movement. Footnote 60

Across the 1940s and early 1950s, both Perlzweig and Malik viewed human rights in terms of a religiously pluralizing world. Perlzweig tried to enshrine that pluralism in communitarian human rights legislation; Malik regarded it as a menace to be overcome through a spiritualized individualism. Perlzweig envisioned a postimperial world of nation-states with diasporic kin minority communities. Malik feared for a Christianity facing encroaching religious and religion-like rivals. Footnote 61 The intensification of anticolonial nationalism and the Cold War in the Middle East after 1948 brought increasing pressure to bear on each of these visions. For Malik, Soviet Communism, secular Pan-Arab nationalism, and Zionism together threatened to overwhelm Christian human rights. At home in Lebanon, the uneasy relations between Christians and Muslims raised the precise kinds of sectarian issues he had hoped to avoid. For Perlzweig, the realities of Zionist sovereignty compromised his Jewish vision of minoritarian human rights. Zionism’s reconfiguration of religion and ethnicity within a Jewish nation-state achieved the opposite of his earlier vision. Rather than normalizing Jewish global status, the politicized ties between Jewish majorityhood in Israel and Jewish minorityhood thrust a new vulnerability on both East European and Middle Eastern communities. Having converted their religious nationhood into a secular nation-state, Jews themselves now faced the temptation to view the state as a spiritual end in and of itself and Palestinian difference as a threat to Jewish self-determination. Footnote 62

Perlzweig responded to this development with an outright turn to apologetics. In a 1961 lecture, he spoke unabashedly of “the fundamental doctrine of the rights of human personality which the religious genius of ancient Israel gave to the world, [and] which reached its highest expression in Hebrew prophecy and which Rabbinic Judaism expounded and developed.” Footnote 63 Now Western monotheism, credited in the first instance to Judaism, provided the template for the moral universalism of human rights. At the same time, he urged Arab-Jewish rapprochement by insisting that anti-Semitism was a European Christian import into the Muslim Middle East. After the Six-Day War in 1967, as the image of Israel as a hulking military occupier began to predominate within international human rights contexts, Perlzweig slipped further into essentialist caprices. Retiring his earlier vision of a Jewish mission to perform ethical nationhood, he now reimagined the Jewish people as the physical incarnation of human rights, insisting that “today the Jew remains, even when he is not conscious of his Jewishness, the friend and the embodiment of human rights.” Footnote 64

Malik reacted with even greater alarm to decolonization’s challenge to Christianity. “The Christians all over the world,” he wrote in 1962, “are now more mingling and dealing with other religions and outlooks and points of view than ever before.” These new contacts risked overwhelming Christian faith. Worse still, the human rights movement had spawned its own kind of pseudo-religion, luring Christians into “some vague eclectic or pantheistic or humanitarian form of religion.” Footnote 65 “Human rights” now risked becoming just one of the “clichés,” “the silly slogans and stupid shibboleths” that “daily bombarded” Christians, along with “ ‘the free world,’ ‘Western civilization’ ‘nuclear parity,’ ‘nuclear holocaust’, ‘coexistence’, [and] ‘social justice.’ ” Footnote 66

These lines come from Malik’s 1962 book, Christ and Crisis . That this book was published in the same year as the opening of the Second Vatican Council is hardly a coincidence. As we have seen, Jewish-Christian reconciliation deeply offended Malik’s own beliefs. Yet Vatican II was hardly the greatest blow to Malik’s dogma at the time. The very “humanitarian” religion of human rights that he feared had received a formal consecration in the form of an organization founded the year before: Amnesty International.

The mythological origins-story of Amnesty International comprises a tale of secular epiphany. In that narrative, Peter Benenson was an average middle-aged British barrister riding the London Tube to work one day in 1961, when his eye fell upon a newspaper article about two students imprisoned in Portugal for toasting freedom. Shocked out of his everyman apathy, he exited the subway, entered the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to meditate, and reemerged with an idea for a worldwide movement to free political prisoners. Historians long ago exposed this conversion story as a later fabrication. Footnote 67 Yet they have ignored the fact that this invented road-to-Damascus tale conceals another quite real story of religious conversion. Benenson’s idea for Amnesty emerged in tandem with his own transformation from secular Jew into devout Catholic. The result was a curious hybrid ideology that has been termed a “secular religion” and a “religionless Christianity.” Footnote 68 In truth, however, it is better understood as a post-Jewish form of Christian universalism. Footnote 69

As in the cases of Malik and Perlzweig, Benenson’s life stretched between the decolonizing Middle East and the postimperial Atlantic world. Born in 1921 into a family that rested at the pinnacle of the Anglo-Jewish elite, Benenson spent his earliest years in Jerusalem, where his father Harold Solomon served as a commander in the British Jewish Legion and then an official in the administration of the British Mandate of Palestine. Footnote 70 His mother, Flora (née Benenson) Solomon, daughter of a Russian émigré millionaire, parlayed her wealth, charisma, and connections into a career involving Jewish philanthropy and British left-wing activism.

Benenson’s parents showed little interest in the Jewish religion but shared a passionate Zionist faith. Consequently, Benenson developed close family ties to Chaim and Vera Weizmann, future first president and first lady of Israel, to the point of vacationing with them in Europe before World War II. His most sustained exposure to Judaism, ironically, came with his enrollment as a teenager at Eton College. There, he found a mentor in none other than Perlzweig, then serving as the school’s Jewish chaplain. On Sunday mornings, Perlzweig offered religious instruction to Jewish boys, while the rest of the student body attended school chapel. Such was his influence on Benenson that two decades later the latter tracked him down to seek his blessing for the launch of Amnesty. Footnote 71

Most accounts of Benenson’s road to Amnesty stress his deep involvement in Labour Party politics and his legal activism on behalf of civil liberties at home and abroad in the 1950s. Yet what is forgotten is that up until the late 1950s, Benenson personally remained deeply enmeshed in the dramas of Middle Eastern decolonization. Beyond visiting the region regularly, particularly Cyprus, where he intervened as a lawyer in the violent conflict between Greek Orthodox, Turkish Muslims, and British colonial forces, he maintained extremely close ties to the Israeli political leadership. Footnote 72 During the 1956 Suez War, while working officially as a correspondent for The Spectator , Benenson even served as a secret intermediary between the Israeli Labour government and the British Labour Party. Footnote 73 He continued to offer his services to the Israeli government as he traveled around the region reporting from countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Footnote 74 Yet, in 1957, he broke with Judaism, converting to Catholicism. That decision formed the backdrop to the launching of Amnesty in 1961.

While parsing the motives for religious conversion is always difficult, in Benenson’s case the outlines are quite clear. Years of travel in the Middle East combined with successive failed parliamentary campaigns back home soured him on the redemptive potential of secular politics. He outright despaired of the prospects for decolonization without massive violence and postcolonial injustice. Footnote 75 A passion for Zionism yielded to a darker view of all forms of postcolonial nationalism as dangerously fallible ideologies of difference. In Catholicism he found a means to overcome nationalism’s limits, as well as the other global political fissures of the Cold War. Healing all these divisions required a new kind of spiritualized antipolitics. Footnote 76

Amnesty International began as a public campaign to mobilize grassroots activists to petition directly for the release of prisoners penalized solely for their political or religious beliefs. From the start, Benenson imagined this movement as “a spiritual union transcending national barriers.” Footnote 77 That union would be Christian in form but open to all. It would be focused on man’s “higher goal: to be Christ reborn” and yet also directed at a global audience so as “to give him who feels cut off from God, a sense of belonging to something much greater than himself, of being a small part of the entire human race.” Footnote 78

What, then, was the precise relationship of Christianity to human rights in this endeavor? Benenson clearly conceptualized the endeavor as a religious mission for a fallen world. His early writings to his cofounder Eric Baker evince a deep longing for world unity and transcendence, and a desire to escape the political and national cleavages in the world and within himself. In the age of decolonization and Cold War, neither socialism nor nationalism any longer constituted liberating forces for humanity. Nationalism for the Jews had brought collective emancipation, but only at a steep moral price. Socialism had revealed its darker face in Eastern Europe. The postcolonial politics of Africa and the Afro-Caribbean looked no better. Colonizer, colonized, and decolonized had all succumbed to a vicious cycle of violence. Back home in Europe, the media had turned politics into an ongoing popularity contest. Even law itself had become an obstacle to progress, “The law which was once designed as protection for individuals is now primarily used as an instrument to ensure the smooth functioning of State machinery.” Footnote 79

The solution was not a return to God’s law à la Malik but a new kind of Christian universalism. Strikingly, the new Catholic convert quickly adopted an iconoclastic liberal theology. Addressing a conference of Catholic lawyers in the summer of 1963, Benenson explained his understanding of the historic moment at hand:

It is frequently said that we are now living in the post-Christian era. This title may make a good chapter heading in a history book, but it contains little of the truth. It may be that we have come to the end of the age of superstitious Christianity. What is developing today, and is evidenced by gatherings of this character, is the beginning of reasoned Christianity. Footnote 80

His was a most heterodox conception of natural law as not a divine moral order but a human reordering of the world:

The true concept of natural law is that in inherent compliance with his predestined function to create order out of chaos man seeks to create ever-widening communities. From this it follows that anything which is conducive to the stability and ultimate growth of a community until it encompasses the whole earth is in accordance with natural law. Footnote 81

Still, this Catholic universalism remained couched in theological terms as “the release of the enchained spirit of Man”:

Man’s striving toward harmony on earth is thus an expression of God’s will. Man’s method of promoting harmony is by the creation of ever greater communities. Thus, man’s desire to become part of a community is similarly an expression of God’s will…. This search for a wider harmony involves the merging of the functions of one community into another greater community … [and eventually] a single world community. Footnote 82

It is tempting to read this vision as a secularized expression of liberal Catholicism or an ecumenical pluralism. Footnote 83 Unlike Malik, who dreamed of a theological restoration through the re-Christianization of the world, or Perlzweig, who imagined a Jewish-inflected pluralization of humanity, Benenson envisioned a diverse humanity united beyond religious difference in a single “world ideology.” Footnote 84 That cosmopolitan impulse led him to imagine all faiths united in a universal creed without any doctrinal preconditions, let alone expectations of conversion. Yet he still insisted that human rights could not be a “post-Christian” movement. Like other universalisms, Benenson’s religion of human rights also struggled against its own vexed relationship with religious pluralism. Footnote 85 The drive to multifaith unity required a single Christian grammar. Pluralism could only ever serve as a practical tool, not as a theological end in and of itself. Other religions could join this quest but with, at best, honorary status.

One expression of that ambivalence came in Benenson’s crudely instrumental treatment of non-Christian religions in early Amnesty work. In January 1961, during the planning stages, he spoke in mercenary terms about interfaith outreach as an exercise in political optics. It wouldn’t do to have only Christians involved, he explained to colleagues in internal correspondence. A few Jews, Muslims, and others were required for balance. Footnote 86 This casual approach to non-Christian religions contrasted with the careful curation of Christian elements within Amnesty events. Benenson himself typically designed the actual Amnesty prayer services held annually on Human Rights Day, in which the Christian symbolism of the organization yielded to explicitly Christological liturgies. Footnote 87

A pseudo-pluralistic approach to Judaism also surfaced in Benenson’s own treatment of Judaism. As a public convert with well-known ties to Israel and Jewish affairs, Benenson was well equipped to argue for the braided Jewish and Christian religious patrimony of human rights. In his post-conversion writings, he continued to engage respectfully, if selectively, with Jewish thought, positioning himself as a friendly mediator between the two religions. Footnote 88 This Judeo-Christian image readily served as proof of Amnesty’s inclusive cosmopolitanism. A nice Jewish boy turned Christian humanist who openly acknowledged his own “racial” origins, Benenson proposed himself as the physical embodiment of pluralism. Footnote 89

Furthermore, Benenson did not share Malik’s conversionary impulse. Amnesty was not to be “a means of converting others to Catholicism,” he wrote in a letter, explaining that “there are many paths which lead to the same summit.” Yet, “for those of us brought up in the tradition of Western civilization … and especially” to those of Jewish origin like himself, Christianity represented the only “discernible and practicable” path to the divine. Footnote 90 In drawing a hard line between his Jewish past and his Christian present, Benenson embraced a supercessionist theology. His view of Christianity’s superiority to Judaism left a deep impression on many of his closest friends and colleagues, who professed bafflement at his “Pauline” insistence that “the salvation of the world is entirely Christianity’s role.” Footnote 91 Benenson’s Judeo-Christian vision of human rights, then, resisted Jewish difference and questioned Jewish spiritual legitimacy.

This Christianist exceptionalism intensified after the Six-Day War. Footnote 92 As Benenson began to denounce Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights in increasingly sharp terms, he doubled down on his call for an “intellectual Christianity” as the sole key to human salvation. Footnote 93 This tonal shift was on full display in his 1979 book, The Other Face , his first human rights manifesto since the “Appeal for Amnesty” issued in 1961. Footnote 94 There, he wrote, the true meaning of Christianity lay not in any faith in the divinity of Jesus or his resurrection. Rejecting heaven and hell, or a “purposeful God,” he even dismissed rights as a remedy for human suffering, writing that “those who nobly work to secure freedom for people whose governments unnecessarily regiment them will one day realize that, as with life, not everyone wants an indefinite amount of liberty. Too much freedom of choice can be as debilitating to the intellect as too long a life is to the body.” Footnote 95

What really mattered for human happiness was the unceasing “search for acceptance,” a lifelong individual drama that began when a baby was separated from its mother. “Acceptance is more important than life,” he wrote, “more important than liberty,” for it emerged out of the deepest human need for unity. So great was this psychospiritual need that it had sparked the invention of God:

Man begins to be cut off from the rest of the human race at the moment of conception and is completely separated by birth. He is not reunited until he dies…. As he cannot possibly see the rest of humanity or properly imagine it, what he tends to do is to personalize, to idealize, it. That idealized person he has traditionally called God. Footnote 96

Citing the French Carmelite prodigy St. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus as an inspiration, he outlined his theology of unity:

In the end, there is only one source of appeal which answers the human condition, that is acceptance by the entire race, from which man’s body separates him. He needs to be one of the whole, and he cannot be so long as he occupies his mortal frame. The nearest he can get to acceptance by the entire race is to be warmed by “the light of God’s countenance” with light and countenance idealized as the conscience of the race. That is why God as concept must be “human,” not some metaphysical, faceless force away in outer space; God is the epitome of man’s conscience. Footnote 97

In the “search for a common conscience to unite mankind,” Benenson still recognized religious pluralism in theory, yet his human rights model erased religion as a viable category of difference, even as it promised “as many Gods as there are people.” Footnote 98 Like other postwar visions of Judeo-Christian universalism, Benenson’s mental universe remained a Christian one, in which Judaism represented a theological helpmate, a partner-faith with which to prove the possibility of pluralism even without challenging the dominance of the Christian spiritual imagination. Judeo-Christian human rights, then, implied the eventual disappearance of the hyphen. When all was said and done, other religions would be included and dissolved within a Christian sphere of Western universalism. Footnote 99

Two years after Benenson’s failed 1962 approach to Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, Pope Paul VI visited Israel. That journey represented the first papal visit to the Jewish state, a hugely symbolic act in the context of both post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet, an unexpected controversy nearly derailed the rapprochement. At the last minute, Rabbi Nissim refused to meet with the pope at his lodgings in Tel Aviv unless the latter first came to visit him in his offices in Jerusalem. It was he who should grant the leader of the Catholic Church an audience, not the other way around. Footnote 100 Behind that argument lurked the larger question of interreligious encounter. The Second Vatican Council had raised new prospects for reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity. It had also presented Jews with a challenge. How could one fix the line between ethical cooperation and theological capitulation? Footnote 101 Was honest interfaith dialogue even possible without compromising core beliefs? Was a papal visit to the sovereign State of Israel a meeting of formal equals, or a bald assertion of the Church’s universal claims to theological supremacy in the Middle East and beyond? Could supposedly post-religious projects like international law and human rights ever transcend their Christian theological legacies? Footnote 102

History is not destiny. Religion is never static. Since the 1990s, an ever-expanding number of new religious human rights doctrines and actors have appeared on the global stage. Footnote 103 The three interrelated stories of three mid-century men we have reconstructed here hardly capture this rich diversity. Footnote 104 The possibilities for human rights, too, have fundamentally evolved because of changes in global governance, geopolitics, and international law, as well as larger trends in the dynamics of the secular and the sacred in Western society. Footnote 105 Most of all, the scale of globalizing religion has parochialized some of these questions, revealing them to be the contingent outgrowths of one passing moment in Western religious history.

Still, the core impulse to religionize human rights in minoritarian, majoritarian, or cosmopolitan terms remains very much with us. Footnote 106 We see it in the American and European discourses about international religious freedom and the status of Christianity and Judaism in the Islamic Middle East, as well as in the legal conflicts within Europe over postcolonial legacies of religion and human rights. Footnote 107 In these and other instances, religious diversity is a problem to be solved through proper balancing of minority needs, majority interests, and universal claims. Some contemporary human rights visions seek to neutralize theological difference by speaking of multiple sacred origins and common secular aims. Others consecrate that difference by stressing the variety of sizes, shapes, and diverse needs of religious communities within humanity. Still others seek to sidestep the entire problem by emphasizing universal norms compatible with religious traditions yet delinked from their authority. What all such contemporary models share is an anxious inheritance from that first moment of encounter with the new landscape of nations and states after empire. As we imagine new futures for human rights and religion today, we do well to remember that our own universalisms stem as much from our frames of difference as our aspirations to unity.

This article originated in a 2019 talk, “Religion and the Future of Human Rights,” held at the University of Pennsylvania under the auspices of the lecture series, “Religion and the Global Future.” I thank my hosts Steven Weitzman and Marie Harf for the invitation. For comments and suggestions, I thank Leora Batnitzky, Shira Billet, Mijal Bitton, Menachem Butler, Julie Cooper, Christine Hayes, Alexandre Lefebvre, Samuel Moyn, Benjamin Nathans, Umut Özsu, and Eliyahu Stern.

1 Letter from Secretariat, Office of the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, to Peter Benenson, 20 March 1962, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Amnesty International Archive (cited hereafter as IISH, AI), File 1026.

2 Letter from Peter Benenson to the Yitzhak Nissim, 30 March 1962, IISH, AI 1026.

3 Peter Benenson, “Are You a Fisherman,” IISH, AI 1008.

4 John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

5 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 21 July 1967, IISH, AI 1008.

6 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 15 February 1961, IISH, AI 1163; Letter from Peter Benenson to Clara Urquhart, 23 October 1962, quoted in Tom Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights: Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 274.

7 Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750 (ed. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene; Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series; London: Palgrave, 2012); Mark Goodale and Samuel Moyn, Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

8 Linde Lindkvist, Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) 11–43; idem, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Udi Greenberg and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Introduction: Special Forum on Christianity and Human Rights,” JHI 79 (2018) 407–9; Sarah Shortall, “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights,” JHI 79 (2018) 445–60; Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (ed. Sarah Shortall and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (ed. John Witte and M. Christian Greene; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

9 James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Louis Henkin, “Judaism and Human Rights,” Judaism 25 (1976) 435–46; Jonathan Crane, “Why Rights? Why Me?” JRE 35 (2007) 559–89; David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 26–35; and Samuel Moyn, “Louis Henkin, Human Rights, and American Jewish Constitutional Patriotism,” in The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (ed. James Loeffler and Moria Paz; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 93–117.

10 For a sensitive probing of the conjunctions of secular and sacred in the 1940s human rights moment, see Jenna Reinbold, Seeing the Myth in Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). On the broader questions of secularization and global religion, see José Casanova, Global Religious and Secular Dynamics: The Modern System of Classification (Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and Politics; Leiden: Brill, 2019).

11 For a good overview of the canonical narratives and new approaches, see Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte, “Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: Introduction,” in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (ed. Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 1–38.

12 On polycentrism and human rights history, see Jan Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good: Human Rights in International Politics since the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

13 On the modernity of “religion” and “human rights” as categories, see Leora Batnitzky, “From Collectivity to Individuality: The Shared Trajectories of Modern Concepts of ‘Religion’ and ‘Human Rights,’ ” in Religion and the Discourse of Human Rights (ed. Hanoch Dagan, Shahar Lifshitz, and Yedidia Z. Stern; Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2014) 547–72. On the emergence of the concept of religious pluralism in European thought, see Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” AHR 124 (2019) 511–38; H. S. Jones, “Catholic Intellectuals and the Invention of Pluralism in France,” Modern Intellectual History 18 (2021) 497–519; pub. online by Cambridge University Press, 25 September 2019; and Religious Pluralism: A Resource Book (ed. Aurélia Bardon et al.; Florence: European University Institute, 2015).

14 Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans ; Nathan Kurz, Human Rights and Jewish Internationalism after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Alexandre Lefebvre, Human Rights and the Care of the Self (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) 141–64; Buchanan, Amnesty International .

15 On the larger ties between nationalism, human rights, and decolonization, see Eric Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Bradley Simpson, “Self-Determination, Human Rights, and the End of Empire in the 1970s,” Humanity 4 (2013) 239–60; and Willem Gravett, “The Smutsian Concept of ‘Human Rights,’ ” South African Journal on Human Rights 32 (2016) 538–55.

16 Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

17 K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jonathan Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gene Zubovich, “American Protestants and the Era of Anti-Racist Human Rights,” JHI 79 (2018) 427–43, at 427–3l; and Lauren Turek, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

18 Moyn, Christian Human Rights , 65–132; James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018) 169–75; Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

19 Manu Bhagavan, “A New Hope: India, the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010) 311–47; Hans Roth, P.C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

20 On decolonization and human rights in the Middle East, see Andrew Arsan, “ ‘A Unique Little Country’: Lebanese Exceptionalism, Pro-Americanism and the Meanings of Independence in the Writings of Charles Malik, c. 1946–1962,” in Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (ed. Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake; London: Bloomsbury, 2015) 107–22; Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions,” Humanity 1 (2010) 111–35; and Politics of Religious Freedom (ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

21 See, for example, Perlzweig’s 1959 comment, “The meaning of the Jewish tradition for human rights” lies not in “theoretical terms” but in a concrete focus on securing justice for endangered “minorities” (quoted in World Jewish Congress, Proceedings of the Fourth Plenary Assembly [Geneva, 1959] 48); Maurice Perlzweig, “Human Rights and Responsibilities in Judaism,” Bulletin of the World Federation of United Nations Associations 22 (1967) 24–27.

22 For an overview of this term, see James Loeffler, “ ‘The Famous Trinity of 1917’: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnov-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016) 211–38. On the broader currents of religious internationalism, with special reference to Jewish internationalism, see Abigail Green, “Religious Internationalism,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 17–37.

23 Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Herzl to Jabotinsky (New Haven: Yale University, 2018); Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

24 Louis I. Newman, “The Compatibility of Zionism and Reform,” in idem, Anglo-Saxon and Jew: Jewish Questions of the Day; A Collection of Essays (New York: Bloch, 1923) 83–89.

25 James Loeffler, “Anti-Zionism,” in Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (ed. Sol Goldberg, Scott Ury, and Kalman Weiser; London: Palgrave, 2020) 42–43.

26 “Zionism and Liberal Jews,” Liverpool Echo (25 November 1929) 10; Maurice Perlzweig, “Liberal Jews and Zionism: Conflict or Co-operation,” The Monthly Pioneer (October 1928) 8–9; Maurice Perlzweig, “Jewish Attitude to Arabs,” Manchester Guardian (15 October 1936) 1, 11.

27 Maurice Perlzweig, Sabbath Services (London, 1930); idem, “The Reminiscences of Maurice Perlzweig” (interview, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 1993) 260–64; idem, “Some Recollections of the First Minister,” in The First Fifty Years of Progressive Judaism at North London Progressive Synagogue, 1921–1971 (London: North London Progressive Synagogue, 1971) 1–9.

28 Maurice Perlzweig, “Opposing Loyalties,” The New Judea (25 January 1929) 73.

29 Ibid .; Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Ideal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Yaacov Yadgar, Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017).

30 Perlzweig, “Opposing Loyalties,” 73.

31 Perlzweig, “Liberal Jews and Zionism,” 8–9; idem, “The Liberal Jewish Congress in Berlin: A Zionist Comment,” The New Judea (28 September 1928) 6–7.

32 Perlzweig, “Liberal Jewish Congress,” 6–7; idem, “Liberal Jews and Zionism,” 8; idem, “Israel among the Nations,” Young Zionist (August 1927) 13; idem, “Persönliches Bekenntnis,” Jüdische Rundschau (17 August 1928) 465.

33 Perlzweig, interview, 465; Noam Pianko, “ ‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94 (2008) 299–329.

34 Clemence Bolouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020) 103, 121.

35 Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019) 163–201.

36 Maurice Perlzweig, “The Ideal of Citizenship in Toronto,” 20 February 1948, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, MS-361, World Jewish Congress Collection (cited hereafter AJA, WJC), Series B, Box B34, Folder 2, “Sermons.”

37 Maurice Perlzweig, “Rabbi Urges United Nations Act on Human Rights,” 9 January 1948, AJA, WJC, Series B, Box B34, Folder 2, “Sermons.”

38 Maurice Perlzweig, “Jewish under the World Security Charter” (1945), AJA, WJC, Series B, Box B97, Folder 6, “San Francisco Charter, 1945–1946.”

39 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Challenge of Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017).

40 Lindkvist, Religious Freedom , 46–47.

41 Moyn, Last Utopia , 149.

42 For an account of the contested ascriptions of Western and Arab identity to Malik, see Glenn Mitoma, “Charles H. Malik and Human Rights: Notes on a Biography,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 33 (2010) 222–41, at 222–23. For a reading of Malik as an “Asian” and “Third World” human rights ideologist, see Glenn Mitoma, “ Mode d’assujettissement : Charles Malik, Carlos Romulo and the Emergence of the United Nations Human Rights Regime,” in Human Rights from a Third World Perspective: History and International Law (ed. José-Manuel Barreto; Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) 419–39.

43 Roth, P. C. Chang , 130.

44 Quoted in Mitoma, Human Rights, 117. On Malik’s engagement with Heidegger, see Martin Woesner, “Provincializing Human Rights? The Heideggerian Legacy from Charles Malik to Dipesh Chakrabarty,” in Human Rights (ed. Barreto) 65–101.

45 Charles Malik, speech to the World Council of Churches, 18 August 1954, quoted in The Evanston Report: The Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches 1954 (ed. Willem A. Visser’t Hooft; New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1955) 37. For an acute analysis of the central place of personalism in Christian human rights thought, see Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 85–106.

46 Charles Malik, speech, 4 February 1947, quoted in The Challenge of Human Rights: Charles Malik and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Habib C. Malik, ed., Oxford: Charles Malik Foundation; Centre for Lebanese Studies, 2000) 29.

47 Charles Malik, “Human Rights and Religious Liberty,” Ecumenical Review (1 January 1949) 404–9, at 404.

48 Charles Malik, “Christian Morals in International Affairs,” Harvard Divinity School Bulletin 24.1 (1960) 1–16, at 10–12. On conflicts with other drafters over this theistic agenda, see Roth, P. C. Chang , 177–78.

49 Charles Malik, Christ and Crisis (1962; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) 28; idem, “Christian Morals,” 16.

50 Charles Malik, “The Tragic Doubts of Men as to the Source of Their Individual Rights,” American Bar Association Journal 34 (1948) 654–55, 694, at 655.

51 Charles Malik, speech to Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission in New York, 20 April 1948, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Manuscript Division, Charles Malik Papers (hereafter cited as LC, MP), Box 209, F6.

52 Charles Malik, “The Spiritual Implication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” speech delivered to the World Council of Churches Commission of Churches on International Affairs, New York, 29 April 1949, quoted in Challenge (ed. Habib C. Malik), 137–38.

53 I am indebted to Alexandre Lefebvre for this formulation.

54 Quoted in Mitoma, Human Rights , 108.

55 Charles Malik, draft speech, LC, MP, Box 209, Folder 6, “Speeches.” This speech later ran as idem, “The Basic Issues of the Near East,” Annals of American Academy of Politics and Social Sciences 258.1 (July 1948) 1–7.

56 Rotem Giladi, Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law: Ideology and Ambivalence in Early Israeli Legal Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); James Loeffler, “The ‘Natural Right of the Jewish People’: Zionism, International Law, and the Paradox of Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht,” in Law of Strangers (ed. Loeffler and Paz), 23–42.

57 Charles Malik, “The Elements of Western Faith,” Social Action 16.9 (15 November 1950) 7.

58 For more on this exchange, see James Parkes, The Continuity of Jewish Life in the Middle East (London: Anglo-Israel Association, 1963), and Robert Everett, Christianity without Antisemitism: James Parkes and the Jewish-Christian Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 302–4.

59 James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times (London: Gollancz, 1949) 361. Parkes arguably shared a minoritarian vision of human rights with Perlzweig and his colleague Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; see James Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 181, 190, and idem, Prelude to Dialogue: Jewish-Christian Relationships (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1969) 192.

60 Letter from Charles Malik to J. W. Parkes, 15 January 1953, LC, MP, Box 209, F6. In 1954, an attempt by the World Council of Churches to issue a new theological statement on Jews and Judaism was derailed by Malik’s direct intervention. See Hendrikus Berkhof, “Israel as a Theological Problem in the Christian Church,” JES 6 (1969) 329–53, at 332, and Carl McIntire, Servants of Apostasy (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1955) 328–38.

61 Charles Malik, “The Peace of Man and the Peace of God,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 49.2 (October 1955) 6–12, at 10–11.

62 Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans , 168.

63 Maurice Perlzweig, “Human Rights and Religion,” Jewish Advocate (22 June 1961) 3a.

64 Perlzweig, “Human Rights and Responsibilities,” 27.

65 Malik, Christ and Crisis , 81–82.

66 Ibid ., 98.

67 For the canonical version, see Peter Benenson, “Dedication,” 28 February 1989, IISH, AI 928. On the debunking, see Tom Buchanan, “ ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37 (2002) 575–97.

68 Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame , 52–72.

69 Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre, “The Subject of Human Rights,” in The Subject of Human Rights (ed. Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020) 244–46.

70 Joseph Salmark, “Review of the Jewish Week,” The Sentinel (15 August 1930) 2.

71 On this episode, see Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans , 216–17.

72 Brian Drohan, Brutality in the Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017) 36–40.

73 Memo from Mr. Hugh Gaitskell to Mrs. Golda Meir, 13 November 1956, and Telegram from Foreign Ministry, Tel Aviv, to Israeli Embassy, London, 11 November 1956, Israel State Archives, Jerusalem (hereafter ISA) 329/8-חצ, “British Labour Party.” For the context of Suez’s impact on British Jewish Labour politicians, see Jack Omer-Jackaman, The Impact of Zionism and Israel on Anglo-Jewry’s Identity, 1948–1982 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2019) 46–51.

74 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eliahu Elath, 21 December 1956, ISA, 329/8-חצ; Peter Benenson, “The Zims of Syria,” The Spectator (1 November 1957) 8–9; idem, “The Cadillacs of Lebanon,” The Spectator (1 February 1957) 6; idem, “Going It Alone,” The Spectator (26 June 1959) 2.

75 For Benenson’s thoughts on decolonization, see his “A Different Kind of Commonwealth?” The Biggleswade Chronicle (21 November 1958) 17.

76 Moyn, The Last Utopia , 120–74. For the context of British decolonization’s deep impact on British society and personal identity, see Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

77 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 4 March 1960, IISH, AI 1163, “Correspondence from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 4 March 1960 to 11 October 1961.”

78 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 9 August 1961, IISH, AI 1163.

79 Peter Benenson, “Problems of the Catholic Lawyer,” The Wiseman Review 237 (Autumn 1963) 274; Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 26 March 1960, IISH, AI 1163.

80 Benenson, “Problems of the Catholic Lawyer,” 275–76.

81 Peter Benenson, “The Natural Law and the Statute Law: A Lawyer’s View,” in Understanding the Signs of the Times (ed. Franz Bockle; Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal 25; New York: Paulist, 1967) 56–57.

83 Jan Eckel, The Ambivalence of Good: Human Rights in International Politics since the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 159–89.

84 Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame , 65.

85 On the dilemmas of “Catholic universalism” in the 1960s, see Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Catholic 1968: Poland, Social Justice, and the Global Cold War,” Slavic Review 77 (2018) 638–60.

86 Letter from Peter Benenson to Eric Baker, 27 January 1961, IISH, AI 1163.

87 Peter Benenson, “Prayers for Human Rights Day” (1962), IISH, AI 1026; idem, “Correspondence with Churches,” Order of Service (1964), IISH, AI 1009, “PB II”; idem, “Symbolic Candle of Freedom,” The Times of London (9 December 1961) 4.

88 Peter Benenson, “Review of Collaboration with Tyranny in Rabbinic Law , by David Daube,” Natural Law Forum 11 (1966) 135–36; idem, The Other Face (Lausanne: Non-Ti-Scordar-Di-Me, 1979) 42, 88, 95.

89 Peter Benenson, “Review of Selected Essays: 1934–1943 , by Simone Weil,” Blackfriars 44.513 (March 1963) 136.

90 Benenson to Urquhart, 23 October 1962, op. cit.

91 Peter Benenson, interview by Tom Sargant, IISH, AI 991.

92 Benenson, interview by Sargant, IISH, AI 991.

93 Benenson, Other Face , 66.

94 Ibid ., foreword.

95 Ibid ., 1, 3.

96 Ibid ., 9–10.

97 Ibid ., 64–70, 73.

98 Ibid ., 73.

99 On the problematics of the concept of “Judeo-Christian,” see Arthur Cohen, “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” Commentary Magazine , 1 November 1969, and Shaul Magid, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition,” in Theologies of American Exceptionalism (ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/TAE2019_theologies.

100 A. Tag, “Spotlight on Personalities,” Herut (6 January 1964), 3 (Hebrew); “Rabbi Nissim Stands Firm in His Refusal to Participate in the Welcome Reception,” Ha-tzofeh (5 January 1964), 1 (Hebrew). For a contemporary reinterpretation of the controversy, in which the roles are reversed and Pope Paul VI is the party accused of refusing to meet Rabbi Nissim, see Benjamin Glatt, “Pope’s 1964 Holy Land Trip Laid the Foundations for Ties with Israel,” Jerusalem Post (4 January 2017), 1.

101 On the larger context of Orthodox Jewish responses to interfaith ecumenicalism, see Yigal Sklarin, “ ‘Rushing in Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rabbinical Council of America, Modern Orthodox Jewry and the Second Vatican Council,” Modern Judaism 29 (2009) 351–85, and David Ellenson, “A Jewish Legal Authority Addresses Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Two Responsa of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein,” American Jewish Archives 52 (2000) 112–28.

102 Emmanuelle Jouannet, The Liberal-Welfarist Law of Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 1–27; David Kennedy, “Images of Religion in International Legal Theory,” in Religion and International Law (ed. Mark Janis and Carolyn Evans; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999) 145–53; Judith Grbich, “Secrets of the Fetish in International Law’s Messianism,” in International Law and its Others (ed. Anne Orford; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 197–220.

103 Julia Berger, “Religious Non-governmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis,” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 14 (2003) 15–39; John Boli and David V. Brewington, “Religious Organizations,” in Religion, Globalization and Culture (ed. Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman; Leiden: Brill, 2007) 203–31; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

104 On the complex realities of later Middle Eastern human rights practices, with special reference to Israel and Palestine, see Kurz, Human Rights and Jewish Internationalism ; Lori Allen, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); and Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). For general surveys of emerging interrelated trends in scholarship and practice, see Human Rights Futures (ed. Stephen Hopgood, Jack Snyder, and Leslie Vinjamuri; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and James Loeffler and Mila Versteeg, “Foreword: The Future of Human Rights Scholarship,” Law and Contemporary Problems 81.4 (2018) i–xi.

105 Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).

106 Robert Bellah, “The Final Word: Can Christianity Contribute to a Global Civil Religion?” in Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (ed. John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 351–66; Elizabeth Castelli, “Theologizing Human Rights: Christian Activism and the Limits of Religious Freedom,” in Nongovernmental Politics (ed. Michel Feher with Gaëlle Krikorian and Yates McKee; New York: Zone Books, 2007) 673–87; Pamela Slotte, “The Religious and the Secular in European Human Rights Discourse,” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 21 (2020) 231–86.

107 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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Volume 116, Issue 1
James Loeffler (a1)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816022000372

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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.

Folk religion as the “life-world”: revival of folk beliefs and renewal of religious categorization in contemporary China

Vietnamese lived religion, confucianism and women: goddess spirituality in nguyễn dữ’s the young woman from nam xuong.

A gothic Taoism and its dual facets: possible worlds in The Haunted Monastery

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.

I use KRISIS in the form Barth uses in his text—as followed by Hoskins in his translation. This is important because this emphasizes its difference from our common English usage of crisis.

I expand on what I view as the meeting place and challenge of love in Philosophy and Theology in my essay “Weak Love? 17 Propositions” (Grimshaw, 2017 ).

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Philosophical Perspectives on the Relationship Between Religion and Science: Averroes, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Galileo

The Place of Religion. An Open Question in Schlick’s Philosophy of Culture

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George Karuvelil

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“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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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.

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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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Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction

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In book: Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (pp.Chapter 12)
Chapter: Religion, Equality, and Non-Discrimination
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Introduction

Published: December 2011
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This book explores the complex relationship between religion and human rights. It brings together a group of ranking experts to analyze the foundations and fundamentals of religion and human rights, with particular emphasis on the contributions of the world's major religions to modern understandings of human rights. It examines whether human rights are a universal good of human nature or a distinctly Western invention that is at odds with other cultures with different founding beliefs and values, and whether there is a need to frame human rights in secular or neutral language to make it legitimate and universal. The book also considers a number of human rights issues that confront religious persons and communities today, from freedom of conscience and choice to exercise of religion and beliefs, along with freedoms of expression, association, morality, and self-determination on which religious parties essentially depend. By way of introduction, the place of religion in the international human rights framework is discussed, along with the kinds of intersecting roles of religion and human rights that are needed to build a more effective human rights culture. The main themes of the book are also described.

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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).

Culture and Religion in Human Rights Universality Essay

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Introduction

The debate on the universality of human rights, the role of culture and religion in influencing the universality of human rights, the universal fight for human rights.

One of the challenges that both the national and international forums face is observing all the human rights. If such forums could perfectly manage this issue, problems such as insecurity, racism, oppression, and injustice among other vices would not exist. As a result, some questions about human rights linger the minds of many people. For example, several scholars pose queries such as, “Can human rights ever be universal?” While a simple “yes” or “no” would do, the response needs an intensive and extensive analysis bearing in mind the various factors that play a crucial role is regarding human rights as global or relative. For this reason, this paper will provide well-researched rejoinder to the above question with the sole focus of unravelling the mystery that has befallen the subject of human rights around the globe. In addition, the paper will also compare the answers by pointing out the factors, for instance, religion and culture and schools of thoughts such as relativism and activism that influence the application of human rights. It concludes that such rights may be viewed as both universal and relative.

The issue of whether human rights are universal continues to attract debate from various stakeholders. Human rights are the privileges and freedoms, which everyone is entitled to enjoy unjustifiably. Their universality means making them common (accessible) to everyone across the globe. According to Tharoor (2000, para. 3), ‘The philosophical objection asserts essentially that nothing can be universal; that all rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions…If there is no universal culture, there can be no universal human rights’. Tharoor (2000) argues against the rising ‘Western’ notion that presents human rights as a collective concept while ignoring the diverse elements that play a key role in determining the universality or relativism of such privileges. Hence, depending on the school of thought deployed, human rights may be universal as well as relative if the authorities responsible for their application use moral universalism. Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) present moral universalism as a concept that encompasses varied principles and values, which are common to all people, irrespective of their social, political, economic, historical, religious, cultural, and intellectual considerations and conditions (Eide 2000).

The universality of human rights depends on the different cultures and traditions. For example, rights that promote the equality of both genders are very controversial. Fagan (2009) asserts that a commitment to the universal legitimacy of human rights is not consistent with the dedication to the principle of respecting cultural diversity. According to Fagan (2009), each community will have its point of view concerning the equality of both genders. Religion also affects the universality of human rights. For example, according to Christians, human rights will not be universal if they are not founded on the values symbolised by God.

Moral universalism is characterised into two – the identity of humans and moral independence. The latter holds that any individual can decide to adopt morality or not depending on the first instinct that comes to him or her. With the help of human moral identity, people can use their morals without seeking influence from the social conditions. These two characteristics of moral universalism make human rights universal since anyone can access morals. Since a vice cannot become a virtue to a different group of people and vice versa, human rights remain universal based on this school of thought. For example, according to Schmitz (2010), murder is evil and punishable by the laws of the United States and in every nation in the world.

Ethical relativism argues against the universality of human rights. It holds that moral judgements could be proven right or wrong depending on a particular ground such as cultural, historical, or personal circumstances. However, none of them has more privileges compared to the other. Hence, the legitimacy or falsehood behind the judgements remains relative to the culture. The relativist concept also holds that the moral principles and values cannot exist, unless the social and cultural conditions determine them (Donnelly 2013). In essence, relativism does not support the universality of human rights because it focuses on concepts that are different from those that advocate the propagation of these rights across the world. While relativists believe in moral diversity, the formation of human rights requires a common moral ground. A relativist is likely to struggle in an attempt to become a strong supporter of human rights. In this case, a conflict of interest may arise. In descriptive relativism, the moral beliefs and practices in a particular place and time differ from those of another, meaning that relativists do not believe in the universality of human rights. Since prescriptive relativism evaluates moral diversity into two elements, negative and positive, prescriptive relativists contradict themselves when they argue that moral diversity can turn a negative action into a positive one. This contraction is in line with Tharoor’s (2000, para. 12) arguments, ‘many of the current objections to the universality of human rights reflect a false opposition between the primacy of the individual and the paramount position of society’.

From the concept of ethnocentricity, one’s culture or ethnic group may be superior to that of another. This concept compares the culture of one ethnic group to that of another with the sole focus of determining the best among them. Since human rights face the challenge of ethnocentricity, they incorporate culturally partial values and ideals from the world’s cultures. For example, in part, human rights may focus on western cultures while at the same time adopting the cultural ideals of the non-western countries. Such a case is likely to lead to the failure of adopting the human rights with beliefs from the non-western cultures in the western countries and vice versa. Therefore, harmonising these cultures is a crucial step towards universalising human rights. Christianity and Islam are universal doctrines on many levels since they have justifiable and equitable grounds for being universal. According to Fagan (2009), similar concepts exist in the universality of human rights.

Since almost every nations face injustices and abuses, both relativists and activists of human rights from every part of the world contribute to helping national authorities in fighting such voices in various ways. This situation reveals why humans rights should be viewed as a universal issue. For example, both relativists and activists help in spreading the truth and moral views in line with the cultural concepts of fighting injustice among other vices that trouble the society around the globe. However, although human rights vary, their supporters strive to promote and protect such gaps.

Relativists are advocates of relativism, which holds that there is no valid point of view. Hence, from this school, viewing human rights as universal is a misguided opinion. This group of people believe that absolute truth does not exist because every fact is relative to point of reference such as culture (Tharoor 2000). Different forms of relativism are applicable in diverse situations. For example, in Anthropological Relativism, the researcher uses his or her cultural beliefs to understand those of another society. Here, the disparity brings out the differences between the members of a culture and outsiders. According to Tilley (2000), whereas an insider is culture-specific, an outsider is likely to adopt a neutral view of the new culture because he or she can describe it in relation to his or hers or other cultures. On the other hand, as Mutua (2001) asserts, philosophical Relativism presents the truth of a particular proposition as dependent on the interpretation of the proposition or context of expression. From the two sides, it is evident that human rights cannot be universal.

Some of the must-do activities that require the attention of relativists include addressing issues related to human rights such as the right to life or shelter. According to Moravcsik (2000), they also have the responsibility of handling matters affecting a ‘particular’ category of people such as the violation of children’s rights. From Moravcsik’s (2000) line of thought, such rights differ from one country to another. Hence, declaring human rights a collective phenomenon may compromise the quality of justice that different countries accord to victims. From another perspective, regarding human rights as universal implies that some countries will be required to uphold privileges that do not have any significant impact on their citizens’ life. Tharoor (2000) concurs with this opinion. He claims, ‘some human rights are simply not relevant to their societies—the right, for instance, to political pluralism, the right to paid vacations (always good for a laugh in the sweatshops of the Third World), and, inevitably, the rights of women’ (Tharoor 2000, para. 5).

Human rights activists have a huge responsibility of providing education on various beliefs and human rights. However, they also adopt different strategies in different geographical locations, owing to the diverse cultures, hence demonstrating the relativistic nature of human rights. Being a relativist and a human rights activist could help people understand their cultural beliefs, as well as the rights entitled to them (Langlois 2013). However, it is almost impossible for anyone to balance these two concepts since they have different beliefs that seem to oppose each other, thanks to the lack of universality of human rights.

From the above expositions, it is clear that human rights may be viewed as both universal and relative, depending of the school of thought that one deploys to address them. The fight for the provision of universal human rights is a challenge to almost every nation in the world because of cultural diversity. One of the factors that make the universality of human rights a challenge is the fact that the western nations have cultures that are dissimilar to those of the non-western ones. As a result, trying to apply the human rights using beliefs from the non-western cultures in the western nations and vice versa may prove a daunting task. However, this factor does not rule out the universality of human rights. Harmonising these cultures is the perfect way to universalise these rights, although the move is almost impossible to be accomplished. Hence, countries should be given the liberty to uphold rights, which contribute to better livers of their respective citizenry.

Donnelly, J 2013, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice , Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Eide, A 2000, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights, pp.9-36. Web.

Fagan, A 2009, Human Rights: Confronting Myths and Misunderstandings, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England.

Langlois, A 2013, Normative and Theoretical Foundations of Human Rights, OUP, Oxford.

Moravcsik, A 2000, ‘The origins of human rights regimes: Democratic delegation in postwar Europe’, International Organisation , vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 217-252.

Mutua, M 2001, ‘Savages, Victims and Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 201-245.

Risse, T, Ropp, S & Sikkink, K 1999, ‘The power of human rights’, International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge , vol. 1, no. 1, pp.1949-1999.

Schmitz, H 2010, Transnational Human Rights Networks: Significance and Challenges . Web.

Tilley, J 2000, ‘Cultural Relativism’, Human Rights Quarterly , vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 501-547.

Tharoor, S 2000, Tharoor: Are Human Rights Universal? – World Policy Journal – World Policy Institute . Web.

Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality
Ethics of Relativism, Utilitarianism and Libertarianism
Researching of Postmodernism Theories
Children's Rights: Physical Punishment
Ethical Dilemmas in Social Workers' Practice
The Evolution of Human Rights: France vs. America
The Universality of Human Rights
Abortion in the Middle East
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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Religious Pluralism — Role of Religion in Society: Exploring its Significance and Implications

Role of Religion in Society: Exploring Its Significance and Implications

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Introduction, the significance of religion in society, the implications of religion in society, the debate surrounding the role of religion in society, the historical context of religion in society, the impact of religion on culture and identity, the role of religion in promoting social cohesion, the impact of religion on politics and governance, the relationship between religion and morality, the role of religion in promoting social justice and equality, the debate between secularism and religious influence in society, the impact of cultural attitudes towards religion on the debate, the potential consequences of religion's role in society.

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Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Religion, Community, and Culture

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

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

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Faith, Reason, and Culture

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

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Philosophical Perspectives on the Relationship Between Religion and Science: Averroes, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Galileo

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Religious Diversity and Theology

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Culture and Religion in Human Rights Universality Essay

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