Rethinking the Role of Religion in Changing Public Spheres: Some Comparative Perspectives

I. INTRODUCTION

Until the early 1990 there was a clear disparity between the growing significance of religion upon the world stage and the literature individual could read on this score in either scholarly or popular publications. Historian Scott Appleby stated candidly that "Western myopia upon this subject of religious power has been astounding."1 Former ambassador Robert A. Seiple, the first-ever U Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, criticizes the academic disciplines that address international affairs for giving religion "short shrift."2 For a lengthy time, scholars assumed that religions were the carriers of tradition and predicted that they would come into into decline because of secularization and privatization.3 The new increase in claims for the recognition and implementation of religious ideas, identities, values, practices, and institutions in the governance of nation-states and the lives of their citizens, however, indicates that these predictions were wrong4 In the words of Talal Asad, "a straightforward narrative of progres from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable."5

Spurr through globalization, democratization, and the rise of fresh media, this remarkable religious resurgence is evident in a variety of places-from scholarly work and popular interest to the increased awareness of the importance of religion in diplomacy and peacebuilding.6 Debates and publications regarding the appropriate part of religion in both emergent and longstanding democracies increasingly inform political will and public policy.

However, religious resurgence brings fresh problems for both emergent and established nation-states. This Article strives that nation-states can achieve auspicious governance only through careful management of religious and cultural differences and from one side respect for religious minorities and non-conventional religious clusters in increasingly multi-religious and multicultural national contexts7

Part II of this Article discusses the heightened part of religion, and the concomitant recognition of this character in the public sphere. Part III addresses the fresh prominence of religion in American public life and the critical character religious activism is now playing in contend againsted social issues. Part IV deals with the tension between secularism and religion and tenders a glimpse of some of the riddles associated with religious diversity and competition. Part V presents a brief conclusion.

II. BACKGROUND: THE INCREASED RECOGNITION OF RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

A. Academic Recognition of Religion in the Public Sphere

Prior to the early 1990 literature had been lacking in the area of religion in the public sphere, notably at the international horizontal This lack of recognition of religion caused scholars and looker-ons to downplay the significance of religion in domestic and global affairs.8 The early 1990 marked an upsurge in literature recognizing the part of religion in the public sphere.

One of the greatest in quantity influential and controversial of these writings was Samuel Huntington's piece, The Clash of Civilizations?9 Huntington argued that the world would be shaped, in large measure, through the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations, namely, Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. The article provok criticism through suggesting that the most important differentiating feature was religion and that post-Cold War optimism would be shattered by dint of dangerous and deep-rooted cultural conflict.10 Many scholars felt that Huntington oversimplified the mapping of the contemporary world by the agency of declaring that "[t]he fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future"11

Prescient or not, Huntington's work stimulated a deluge of long overdue studies upon the role of religion in international affairs. It sent die-hard secular political scientists and social critics into a tailspin, as evidenced by dint of the flurry of publications more attentive to the influence of religion in the last decade.12 A landmark close attention entitled Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft13 demonstrates that religion has been absent from the analysis of many international conflicts and their resolutions. This investigation advocates the reconsideration of religion as an important factor in international diplomacy.

Other published works have also helped focus attention upon the growing importance of religion upon the international scene. One of these publications was Jose Casanova's influential investigation Public Religions in the present World.14 This book reconsiders the relationship between religion and modernity and argues that many religious traditions have been making their way, sometimes forcefully, without of the private sphere and into public life at an increasingly transnational level15 This change of religion into the public sphere, notes Hent de Vries, is also facilitated through the radical transformation of "the functions ascribed to recent subjectivity, to the political, the economy, the nation, the state, the public sphere, [and] privacy."16