THIS is a well-researched, clearly written, helpful, and perceptive book, with a big flaw at its heart. It begins with two premises. The first is that secularism is in trouble. Pretty much wherever you go in the world, it is either creaking (United States) or crumbling (India, Turkey). The great hopes of secular nationalism which spread like wildfire in the decades of decolonisation seem like ancient history now.
The second is that religion is to blame. The author asserts that “religion is today a more salient feature of international politics than at any point in the last three hundred years,” and, although one might cavil at the timeframe here, the significance of religions to international relations cannot be in doubt.
The book accordingly begins with violent vignettes from the US Capitol, Jerusalem, Myanmar, and India, and part II, constituting two-thirds of the book, offers a detailed and well-evidenced analysis of how Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism are all deploying violent means to get their way.
The author’s central thesis is that it is not necessarily religiosity that leads to violence, however, but the conditions in which it is cultivated, and that, crucially, it is not oppressed minority religious groups that are most likely to resort to violence, but religious majorities, particularly those that feel legitimised by the state. Violence is a weapon not of the weak, but of the strong, in particular the strong who (mistakenly) feel that there is a threat to their hegemony, and who can rely on the authorities to support them, or at least to turn a blind eye.
The flaw in the book comes with the author’s conception of political secularism and the causal part that it plays in all this. He has a wholly idealised understanding of political secularism, as a doctrine of “separation [of Church and State], neutrality, equality, and freedom”, which is completely divorced from deeper philosophical secularism, and wholly and self-evidently fair and reasonable. So idealised is his vision that he is compelled to admit that “secularism itself is an ideal that is never fully realised.”
With this in place, he then treats the rise in religious violence as a consequence of the decline of this political secularism: for example, “the weaponization of Buddhism [in Myanmar] stems from the country’s crisis of secularism.”
If you define secularism in this ahistorical and idealised way, however, there is no real causal link, and you are, in effect, saying that the rise in violence is due to the decline in peace. In reality, secularism in its actual, lived — as opposed to textbook, idealised — sense cannot be so easily divorced from a substantive philosophical position, and has hardly been immune to violence itself. Indeed, it is arguably secular overreach that has given us Erdogan in Turkey or Modi in India.
Either way, the rise in religious nationalism and violence and the crisis of secularism are both symptoms of wider geopolitical, economic, and demographic forces that are refashioning our world in alarming ways.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.
God’s Warriors: Religious violence and the global crisis of secularism
Nilay Saiya
OUP £64 hbk, £19.99 pbk
(978-0-19-781354-6)
(978-0-19-781355-3)
Church Times Bookshop £57.60, £17.99
