Religion and state entanglement and interstate armed conflict initiation, 1990–2010

ABSTRACT

The relationship of religion to armed conflict initiation, as opposed to occurrence, remains understudied and undertheorised. The same is true for the relationship of religion to armed conflicts between states, cf. intra-state or extra-state conflict. This contribution adds to the understanding of both of these conflict outcomes. It examines the relationship to interstate armed conflict initiation of state religion, operationalised as government involvement in religion in the Religion and State dataset of Jonathan Fox. We find sufficient evidence to conclude that religion–state entanglement does raise states’ propensities towards first use of military force. Official religion and official support are both strongly correlated with that outcome. Legislative support to the majority religion is also well correlated with it. State-level discrimination against minority religions is weakly but positively correlated, but heavy regulation of majority religions is not correlated. We further find evidence that minority discrimination, majority regulation and legislative support wield their effects in tandem more strongly than they do individually. The foregoing supports the theory that official religious preference does make states more militant.     

The beast from the abyss

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the nineties brought a series of armed conflicts, civil wars and outright war to the Balkan Peninsula. The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) was entangled in these conflicts. The SOC’s involvement in these wars has sparked an academic discussion about the role of religion, especially that of the SOC, in these conflicts. This discussion has so far mainly been social scientific in its scope and preoccupied with nationalist movements and political elites, and has therefore not sought to investigate the SOC’s own reflection on the war. Secondly the discussion of the SOC’s role has been on some level detached from the broader discussion of Christianity’s relation to war and violence. This article will provide an in-depth study of a selection of Serbian Orthodox reflections on war and its relationship to Christian, and in particular Eastern Orthodox, tradition, bringing forth ways in which parts of the SOC views war and violence.     

Conceptualizing the Religious Dimensions of Armed Conflicts: A Response to “Shrouded: Islam,War, and Holy War in Southeast Asia”

Here I react to an article published in Volume 53 of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion by Ian Barter and Zatkin‐Osburn. My principal disagreement with Barter and Zatkin‐Osburn concerns their operational and methodological critiques of my work. However, the exchange also speaks to larger questions of how to conceptualize and measure religious dimensions of armed conflicts. It also highlights the importance of methodological pluralism in the study of religion and conflict.     

Individual‐level and community‐level effects of war trauma on social representations related to humanitarian law

Theoretical and empirical accounts of violent intergroup conflict or reactions to victimization suggested psychosocial processes that are likely to paradoxically enhance war victims' justification of violations of humanitarian norms. To test for differences and similarities between individual and community reactions, multilevel analyses of the ‘People on War’ dataset were conducted. This data combines survey responses from fourteen different communities recently involved in armed conflict (N = 12, 047). At the individual level, findings support a specific cycle‐of‐violence hypothesis, indicating that victims of war report less support for a legal conception of humanitarian norms than do non‐victims. In contrast, at the community level, the higher the rate of victims, the more frequently community members adopt a legal conception of humanitarian norms. Further, the strength of condemnation of humanitarian norm violations is positively related to war duration and magnitude of fatalities. These findings are interpreted within a social‐representational framework. The collective experience of generalized vulnerability strengthens a shared perception of the need for formal justice, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the psychological consequences of community members' individual experiences of war trauma. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paul Tillich's Perspectives on Ways of Relating Science and Religion

Where do Paul Tillich's views of the relationship between religion and science fit in Ian Barbour's four classifications of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration? At different levels of analysis, he fits in all of them. In concrete religions and sciences, some conflict is evident, but religion and science can be thought of as having parallel perspectives, languages, and objectives. Tillich's method of correlation itself is a form of dialogue. His theology of nature in “Life and the Spirit” (Part 4 of his Systematic Theology) fits the integration type. His strong “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion” (in Theology of Culture) is a latent natural theology. His system of the sciences is a form of synthesis, a type of integration.     

Creative Thinking for Peace or Blessed are the Peacemakers

Taking as a starting point the debate that began following a televised sermon in which she questioned German military action in Afghanistan, Margot Kässmann reviews the contemporary challenges about war and peace that face society and churches. Drawing on the experience of the ecumenical movement in the 20th century, Kässmann argues for the need for a “just peace” perspective to which religions can contribute by mediating in armed conflicts, engaging in dialogue and promoting trust across national, cultural and religious boundaries. In such a “just peace” perspective, state actors need to invest funds, energy, people and imagination into areas of conflict before the outbreak of violence.     

Religion and Suicide

Religion impacts suicidality. One’s degree of religiosity can potentially serve as a protective factor against suicidal behavior. To accurately assess risk of suicide, it is imperative to understand the role of religion in suicidality. PsycINFO and MEDLINE databases were searched for published articles on religion and suicide between 1980 and 2008. Epidemiological data on suicidality across four religions, and the influence of religion on suicidality are presented. Practice guidelines are presented for incorporating religiosity into suicide risk assessment. Suicide rates and risk and protective factors for suicide vary across religions. It is essential to assess for degree of religious commitment and involvement to accurately identify suicide risk.     

The Making of the Reliably Religious Boy

In Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson (D. Capps, 1997) and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor (D. Capps, 2002), I argued that men are no less religious than women, but their religiousness is different from that of women because it has its psychological origins in the emotional separation between a boy and his mother around the ages of three to five. Employing Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (S. Freud, 1917/1963) essay, I suggested that their religiousness is rooted in an ontological state of melancholy (which is different from the psychological state of depression). In Men and Their Religion I identified the religions of honor and of hope as the primary forms of male melancholic religion, and suggested that humor is a third form that may come to one’s assistance when one experiences the limitations of the other two religions. In this article, I focus on my own early adolescent years (age 11–14) and explain how one boy became reliably religious, that is, how he embraced or internalized the religions of honor and of hope. In the companion article, I will explain how these two religions were relativized—and thereby preserved—by the religion of humor.     

The facts and fictions of religion: make believe on Avatar Forums

Recent scholars of religion have begun to explore the relationship between religion and fiction. Within this context, Johan Huizinga’s theory of religion as make believe or play has received considerable attention. James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) has inspired behaviour that can be thought of as religious, despite the film’s clear foundations in fiction. Scholarship on fan communities has debated whether such groups can be considered religions. This article develops Huizinga’s account using Kendall Walton’s theory of make believe. Walton’s theory enables the interpretation of fiction into overlapping games of make believe in fan communities. The conversational threads on Avatar Forums show how norms of discourse that preclude disagreement allow the frames of reality and fiction to blur. These norms of discourse provide a means of understanding the process by which media myths can become the basis of fiction-based value structures within the cultic milieu. However, the theory also presents significant problems for theorists of religion in terms of the structure of religious belief and religious experience.     

Drawing a line between the religious and the secular: the cases of religious education in Sweden and India

Abstract

Religion as a school subject – Religious Education (RE) – is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both countries are secular, but where is the line drawn between the secular and the religious? Allowing the two contexts to meet reveals the particularities of each. The impact of Protestant Christianity, specifically Lutheranism, is evident in Swedish RE: religion is to be defined through beliefs and words, and religious actions should be excluded from classrooms. The Swedish context highlights ‘knowledge of’ religions, but avoids religious action. In India, there is no explicit RE, but Indian education does include learning from religion as well as ‘doing religion.’ The Indian approach is very inclusive, to the point of emphasising, as teachers put it, a common core of all religions. Both systems of RE offer particular opportunities and face certain difficulties in dealing with the contemporary globalised world.     

Religion and right-wing populism in Italy: using ‘Judeo-Christian roots’ to kill the European Union

ABSTRACT

This contribution offers new directions to explore how implicitly religious customs and norms may influence voting for right-wing populist parties. It also suggests an indirect influence of government regulation of religion on the rise of populism in the European Union. The church–state relationship is viewed as providing a stable context for religious biases to emerge, thereby enabling populist forces to capitalise on a sense of loss of national identity which in turn reinforces citizens’ negative attitude towards immigrants, particularly of different religious backgrounds. Combining the Religion and State Project Round 3 (RAS3) dataset with electoral and socio-demographic data, this contribution presents time-series analyses and linear regression in order to explore the impact of religious factors on populist voting patterns and support for the Italian Eurosceptic populist movement, the League, between 1992 and 2014. I argue that the success of this populist party lies in its ability to use an adaptive mythology that plays on pre-existing religious norms to stoke fears of a decline of cultural homogeneity and a loss of political and economic power.     

Fake religions,politics and ironic fandom: the Church of the SubGenius,Zontar and American televangelism

This paper challenges recent arguments that the Church of the SubGenius (COSG) is a ‘real’ religious organization, in that it purportedly provides a path to spiritual enlightenment. Besides downplaying the COSG’s comedic aspects, these essentialist approaches have largely ignored its historical development within the American ‘alternative’ underground of the 1980s and early-1990s. Drawing on interviews and the analysis of participatory media, this paper examines the COSG alongside Zontar, a stridently political zine named in honour of a B-movie monster that its founders claimed to worship. It is demonstrated that these interrelated, intentionally ‘fake’ religions emerged in the context of a turbulent American culture war, and confronted a conservative evangelicalism perceived to be a political threat. While the founders of the COSG and Zontar accordingly attacked and satirised politically engaged television preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, their approaches to certain less explicitly political televangelists can be considered examples of ironic fandom, shot through with flashes of genuine admiration. In all of these activities, the founders of these fake faiths participated in a cultural discussion about authentic Christianity in America – playful religious work more indicative of the COSG’s cultural significance than its alleged status as an ‘authentic’ religion.     

The Psychological Benefits of Humor

In Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor (2002), I proposed that men have two primary ways of being religious—the religion of honor and the religion of hope. I also proposed that because these two religions do not always have their desired outcomes, men have developed a third way of being religious, the religion of humor. In A Time To Laugh (2005) I have expanded on my claim in Men and Their Religion that if men have three religions—honor, hope, and humor—the greatest of these is humor. In the course of doing the necessary research for a book on humor, I acquired and read a few books and a host of articles that explored the psychological benefits of humor. While I did not report on these studies in the book, I believe they are relevant to the assumption that a religion will have psychological benefits for those who embrace it. This article therefore provides a review of empirical studies of the psychological benefits of humor in order to answer the question whether a religion of humor is likely to have psychological benefits and, if so, what these might be.     

Spirituality,the opiate of scholars of religion?

This review discusses Craig Martin’s approach to religious individualism and more widely the ways in which social scientists can make sense of individuals’ identities, beliefs and practice, as these seem more volatile and eclectic than ever. In particular, it is interested in the ‘critical’ study of religion developed in Capitalizing Religion. This review underscores the convergence between this book and other recent works regarding epistemological weaknesses affecting the contemporary study of religion (and in particular the ‘paradigm of spirituality’). It discusses Martin’s original contributions – in particular, a critical analysis of the ideological origins and biases underlying the categorisation of freely chosen spirituality vs. coercive religion. Finally, this review tries to further Capitalizing Religion’s argument by drawing on my own empirical work on the popularisation of meditation, yoga and kabbalah, sharing Martin’s critical approach and interest for the ways in which social structure and cultural norms affect individuals’ religious life.     

Response

Located in China along the boarders of China and several Southeast Asian countries, Southwestern China is characterised by ethnic diversity and the influence of various world religions, especially that of different schools of Buddhism. This article examines how the De’ang people transform the cosmological order of Theravada Buddhism to reassert the indispensable position of their indigenous agricultural goddess, the Mother of Grain. Corresponding to myths that portray the reconciliation between the goddess and Gautama Buddha, the rituals dedicated to her are performed primarily by women, while male monastic institutions participate on certain ceremonial occasions. A comparison with similar beliefs and rituals in other cultural groups in the region demonstrates that the Mother of Grain in De’ang religion offers an exceptionally strong local challenge to the male bias embedded in Buddhism. By examining the conflicts and compromises between Buddhism and the indigenous religions of Southwest China, this article analyses the complex local negotiations of gender ideologies when world religions and local beliefs are at odds.     

INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

This is an introduction to the Symposium on “Science, Religion, and the Rise of Biblical Criticism,” which has been designed as a thematic section for Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. The Symposium demonstrates the importance of and need for greater interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, theologians, scholars of religion, and historians in tracing the origins and development of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion. Often neglected is the role biblical criticism played in guiding and constructing narratives of conflict. This series of articles thus attempts to redress this gap in the scholarship by explicitly focusing on the advent of historical‐critical scholarship of the Bible and how it changed perceptions about “science” and “religion.”     

Helping Enemies Communicate

Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina has historically been home to people of different religions, cultures, and languages. Over the past century, the region experienced three wars and tremendous demographic change, which led to inter-group conflict. Projection and projective identification are dominant mechanisms in these social groups; distrust is prevalent, stemming from a series of transgenerational events and memory transmissions. A large group was formed from members of different ethnic groups with the intention of enabling the participants to gain awareness of their own role in these national/religious conflicts. This article discusses the formation and outcome of this experiment.     

Auto-immunity in the study of religions(s): Ontotheology,historicism and the theorization of Indic culture

Despite the prevalence of post-colonial theory in the humanities and social sciences, why is it that the two main secular formations in the study of religion(s), as philosophy of religion and history of religions, continue to deploy very similar mechanisms that reconstitute past imperialisms such as the hegemony of theory as specifically Western and/or the division of labor between universal and particular knowledge formations? To answer this question this paper stages an oblique engagement between the seemingly divergent discourses: (i) philosophy of religion, (ii) history of religion—more specifically the area specialism called South Asian religions, and (iii) post-colonial theory especially where these discourses intersect with the discipline of Indology and the representation of Indic phenomena. A different version of this engagement occurs in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR). A post-colonial reading of the LPR reveals closer and often unacknowledged connections between the birth of these two disciplines. More importantly the LPR anticipates the auto-immunizing mechanism that underpins the continued lack of engagement between the various disciplines of contemporary religions. Ironically, this mechanism, it will be argued, is located in the very heart of the comparative enterprise itself.     

Relations between church and state in Russia today ∗

Abstract

According to its constitution the Russian Federation is a secular state in which all religious associations are equal before the law. The constitution also guarantees freedom of religious choice and practice. Federal legislation, as well as the legislation of the republics, should be in accordance with these clearly formulated principles. Many provisions in the federal law on religion of 1997, however, are in conflict with them. Moreover, in practice the statement in the preamble to that law regarding the historical role of Orthodoxy and that of other ‘traditional religions’ is arbitrarily interpreted to justify a privileged position for Orthodoxy and to some extent for Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. The ‘secularity’ of a state does not entail the marginalisation of religion. A secular state should take account of the historical role and importance of each religion. The Russian state may legitimately award Orthodoxy a position of primus inter pares and privileges of honour in comparison with other religions on the basis of proportionality. These should not, however, take the form of legal advantages. Orthodoxy can perfectly well play the role of ‘official’ religion, but it should not be a ‘state’ religion. It would be advisable to establish a system of bilateral agreements between each religious association and the state and to create a fiscal system that allowed citizens who declare that they belong to a given religious faith to devote part of their taxes to the financial support of that faith.     

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.