Religious mobilizations

Charles Taylor, the 2007 Templeton Prize winner, gave an excellent, though unfortunately poorly miked, lecture at AAR. His theme was “religious mobilization,” which he introduced first by discussing the peculiar modern phenomenon of “political mobilization.” Political mobilization means activating passive political actors. As Taylor developed this notion, he said that political mobilizations have become in the modern world a way of perceiving and describing founding events for political orders. Prior to the modern era, the question “How did your tribe emerge?” would have been nonsensical to many peoples – the gods founded our society time out of mind. But moderns can point to a series of human actions at the founding of their regimes, human actions that convince or coerce groups into forming political entities and, importantly, changing their identities in the process (everyone within a certain area loses regional identity and becomes “German”).

The notion of political mobilization is a stage on the way from a society that is pervasively religious to one that is secular. The people that emerges from a political mobilization needs to have something to mobilize around, a “marker” that serves as a point of identification and integration. In many early modern states, the markers are still religious – as in early America or in many liberation movements in which political and religious identities are fused (Irish, eg, or Poles).

Taylor described various ways that religion can play a role in a political mobilization. Religious markers can serve political purposes even when the political movement involves little religious practice (eg, Serbian appeal to Orthodox identity); but some political mobilizations around religious markers involve a high level of religious practice (Islamist movements). Reform movements call for a return to original purity, and sometimes appeal for a reorganization of a whole society on the basis of some pure form of the religion. Finally, religious markers can be used to support a call for a moral consensus to preserve a minimum of civilization.

From this analysis, Taylor drew the conclusion that religious and non-religious markers often occupy the same kind of social space, fill the same political and social roles, share ambitions for molding society, and hence are thrown into rivalries. Add to this the fact that religious movements operate within the modern situation of political pluralism and the demand for tolerance. The resulting scenario is far too complex to describe in terms of “secularization” or in terms of a clash between “modern” and “premodern” forces. Religious movements share much with modernity, and even the most backward-looking reform movements are innovative in a distinctively modern way. Nor can we explain these religious phenomena as the effect of manipulation by power-hungry elites. As traditional societies break down and people move, forcibly and otherwise, into cities, religious mobilizations provide some stability and continuity with traditional ways of life.

Taylor was most interested in the way these factors affect religion. Religious practices tend to get homogenized and a whole range of practices becomes delegitimated because consensus has become the desideratum of religion. Grassroots cooperation among religions is undermined. When religion reshapes life, customs and habits are turned into markers of solidarity with the group. Women’s bodies and their covering, thus, becomes a central battleground in Islam.

And, most importantly, there is a shift in the center of gravity of religion, as power becomes a key value for religion. Piety expressed in the register of mobilization tends to turn violent; piety is expressed in a passion for purity, and purity is expressed by hostility to impurities. Purity, originally a religious concept, returns as a component of a religiously-marked political mobilization, and turns bloody.

Taylor remarked on the way violence sneaks up on political and religious movements. Robespierre said at the beginning of the revolution that the death penalty should be abolished, then instituted the Terror and the guillotine (a sanitary modern form of ritualized death, Taylor pointed out). Christianity is a religion of peace and love, but has sometimes turned into something like its opposite.