Religion has always played a part in politics, and always will.
Walter McDougall, professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and editor of Orbis, the quarterly publication of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, maintains that "the interplay of religion and politics has been and remains more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests. In some cases," he observes, "apparent religious conflicts -- from early modern times to the Northern Irish and Bosnian strife today -- can be interpreted as familiar turf battles in which religious prejudice has [inspired] greater zeal and sacrifice from the masses. By the same token, the origins and outcomes of apparent political conflicts -- from the Crimean and Russo-Japanese wars to the recent war in Afghanistan -- were powerfully influenced by religion."
Contrasting three ways in which governments respond to the fervor of faith, McDougall concludes that "religious hierarchies that enjoy 'established' status almost always suffer as a result of their identification with the state, while virulently secular states invariably provoke the very religious expression they hope to suppress. Countries with the most religious liberty and diversity, such as the United States, tend to develop ecumenical 'civic religions,'" he observes. "Their politics oblige leaders to pay lip service to religious conviction by way of legitimating their claim to high office, but also to spurn religious agendas once in office since sectarianism of any sort can be a liability when it comes to governing a diverse population."
Writing in the Spring issue of Orbis, McDougall suggests that "our notions of history are skewed by the tendency of Western intellectuals to think in dialectical terms. Thus, we set realism and idealism, or secularism and religion, against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact," he recalls, "the most profound students of Christian moral theology from Thomas Aquinas to Reinhold Niebuhr argued that whatever is 'unrealistic' (hence contrary to natural law) cannot by definition be moral! Applied to statecraft, this means that to expect utopian results from diplomacy and war is inevitably to invite immoral consequences. . . . A truly moral approach to statecraft, therefore, takes human nature as it is, respects limits, and acknowledges the contingency of all human creations," says McDougall. "It is one that pursues and upholds international order, seeks peace but prepares in extremis to fight, practices proportionality of force, receives defeated enemies back into the fold, and is honest and realistic about one's own ends and means."
McDougall declares that "individuals and religious communities who dare to follow a higher calling . . . not only complicate statecraft, but puncture the modern state's pretense of being the ultimate arbiter of justice and best provider of human needs." He concludes that "religions wll neither disappear nor merge, cannot be drained out of politics, and ought not to be drained lest the world be rendered defenseless against far more destructive secular totalitarianisms. But, insofar as religions remain distinct and inspire obedience," McDougall predicts, "they will continue to make warriors of zealots and martyrs of peacemakers."
