The Religious and the Cosmopolitan

Stan Van Hooft’s Cosmopolitanism pays closer attention to religion themes than many works on this theme. He clearly recognizes the role that religion plays in human life, and criticizes Martha Nussbaum for her avoidance of the point: 

Despite basing her description on an analysis of the cultural productions and literatures of many peoples, Nussbaum seems to have downplayed an obvious fact: most people in most parts of the world are religious. We in the West may have developed a more secular mode of social existence and separated church from state, but the vast majority of humankind sees religious faith as integral to every aspect of their lives. . . . Whether our spiritual or contemplative quest is met through belief in a system of religious doctrines and commitment to a god, or whether it is met through a sense of awe and reverence at the wonder of life and the world, we all pursue an overarching conception of reality through which we can give an all-embracing meaning to our lives. Whether that reality is immanent in the world or transcendent to it is immaterial to the reality of the urge that we all have to attach ourselves to it. We do not live by bread alone. Even an atheist has commitments that transcend the givens of everyday life. My claim would be that religious or spiritual commitments, conceived very broadly, should be added to the list of features that give dignity to human life.” To Nussbaum’s ten human capability, he wants to “add an eleventh capability: the ability to conceive of an overarching conception of value that would give significance to human life, and the freedom to engage in any rituals or practices that express a commitment to that conception and that do not harm others” (77).

He recognizes that “there may be many who think that religious commitments are inherently irrational, but this would be a particular cultural perspective and it denies the apparent importance that religion plays in the lives of most of the world’s peoples” (77).

Despite this attention to the importance of religion, Van Hooft typically coordinates religion with ethnicity, race, color, sex, and nationality as a force of division. Cosmopolitan ethics must overcome these divisive factors, and hence must (to some degree) overcome the tendency of religious people to pay special attention to their “co-religionists.” Cosmopolitanism must “target” “forms of discrimination that arise from the victim’s being of a different nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, race or any other form of identity that is used to classify people into discrete groups” (5).

He knows that Christian missionaries crossed the seas to preach the gospel to peoples who lived in radically different ways in radically different circumstances, but “whether it be the attempt by Christian missionaries to bring exotic peoples to Christ or the attempt on the part of Islamists to establish a global caliphate, the missionary quests of most religions have the potential to bring them into conflict with each other and with the people they seek to proselytize”(12). Van Hooft is must more sympathetic to those religious thinkers who strive for “a spirituality that transcends organized religion” (12), since that’s a much more useful religion for cosmopolitan purposes.

Two thoughts suggest themselves: First, Van Hooft, like many, begins with a generic notion of religion. “Religion” begins as a term that describes something that transcends all particular religions. When he endorses religions that transcend all particular religions, his argument hasn’t actually advanced at all, despite the appearances. He’s already built a preference for religion-in-general into his definition of religion.

Second, Van Hooft misses the important contribution that religions – biblical religions, and Christianity in particular – have contributed to the formation of cosmopolitan ethics. He summarizes the Stoic contribution to the cosmopolitan vision (14-16), but skips from Cicero to the twentieth century without a glance at Christendom. He can’t grasp that the particular claims of particular religions might support a universal vision of human good.