Part III - Science and Religion

8 Scientific Worldviews in World Politics Rationalization and the Cosmological Inheritance of the Social Sciences

Bentley B. Allan

In the Weberian tradition, worldviews “imply a coherent set of values” that provide “answers to the broader questions of meaning, purpose, suffering, and injustice.”¹ Worldviews imbue the lives of their holders with “direction, organization, and unity.”² Weber distinguishes worldviews from other collections of beliefs and values in two ways. First, analytically, the coherence and comprehensiveness of worldviews distinguish them from organizational cultures or ideologies. Second, worldviews are distinct from myths or cosmologies to the degree that they form a system of rationalized beliefs and claims. They contain explicit values that tend to produce regularized conduct.³

In this chapter, I differentiate worldviews from other collections of fundamental beliefs about the universe: cosmological ideas. I define cosmology as a configuration of ideas and practices that relate humans to the nature of the world and the universe. Cosmologies weave together a variety of fundamental claims about humanity and reality. In previous work, I have distinguished between five kinds of cosmological elements:⁴

Ontology: fundamental units of matter, the forces that govern them, and categories of representation.

Episteme: modes and procedures likely to produce reliable or true knowledge of the universe.

Temporality: the nature and direction of time.

Cosmogony: the origins and history of the universe.

Human Destiny: the role or place of humanity in the cosmos.

On this conception, cosmologies are not fully coherent doctrines that all members of a social group internalize and understand.⁵ Rather, we should imagine that cosmological elements circulate in and through texts, memories, rituals, institutional rules, organizational procedures, and so on. They are available as resources for the creation of more or less coherent cosmologies in particular contexts. However, there is little basis for assuming that all individuals within social groups share a single set of beliefs about the universe.

On my account, worldviews are local stabilizations of cosmological elements. They draw together fundamental ideas about the universe into a coherent package of values, identities, and beliefs. In order to frame certain values as meaningful and natural, worldviews depend on ontological presuppositions about what exists and epistemic notions of how we know which values are worth pursuing. A worldview cannot exist without cosmological elements. But again, not all actors have a worldview. To use the concept wisely, we have to theorize the conditions under which worldviews can be produced and stabilized by individuals.

In this chapter, I use this distinction between cosmological elements and worldviews to renarrate the story of rationalization. On Weber’s account, rationalization processes make worldviews possible by creating abstract systems of beliefs that are instilled in individuals, orienting them to the fulfillment of universal values. At the same time, the rationalization embodied in scientific ideas threatens the cohesiveness of worldviews by accelerating disenchantment. This undermines our orientation to universal values and threatens to eliminate ethical constraints on action. Weber’s great insight here is to historicize the elements of action. I contend he did not take this far enough and that we can benefit from a deeply empirical tracing of the grounds of action.

My argument is that the rationalization narrative is better understood as a more specific historical process: the rise and spread of cosmological ideas from the Western scientific tradition. Specifically, I trace the history of two cosmological elements: materialism and object-orientation. Taken together, these cosmological elements create a backdrop for action in which subjects are separate from a material world of objects. The process of folding materialism and object-orientation into political discourses did not disenchant worldviews, draining them of meaning or eliminating value-orientations. Rather, it formed the basis of new modernist values of rationality, control, and growth which serve as the basis of world politics today. I suggest that worldviews centered on the values of “civilization” (in the colonial era) and “economic growth” (in the postwar era) rested on materialist presuppositions and object orientations.

With this history in hand we can better examine the scientific worldviews that appear in the social sciences today. My goal here is to show that the cosmological inheritance of the social sciences, materialism and object-orientation, must be examined. With Katzenstein and Kurki, I trace the desire to control the world back to scientific ideas, but I hope to add value by identifying some of the specific ideas involved.⁶ I suggest that materialism and object-orientation make the social sciences susceptible to colonial modes of analysis. But, rather than reject social science, I defend a pluralist field and present the possibility of a re-enchanted social science that reflexively grounds itself and its worldviews in cosmological traditions.

8.1 Worldviews and Cosmologies in Process

Following Katzenstein, worldviews are local, temporary sets of connected beliefs that express a strong sense of how the world works.⁷ On my conception, worldviews are local and temporary enactments. By temporary, I mean to highlight that the formation of a coherent, politically effective worldview is an achievement. Worldviews are the result of individuals expressing and refining collections of beliefs. Worldviews must be forged by weaving cosmological materials together with habits, emotions, values, and identities into relatively coherent frameworks. Their political effectiveness is always the result of sustained effort.

For this reason, worldviews are local. By local, I mean that worldviews are held, or enacted, by specific individuals, social classes, and professions. We should not ascribe them, as Weber seems to do, to entire societies or regions. On this view, worldviews are not likely to be deeply structural elements of the international.⁸ But they are often necessary to explain the actions of particular individuals and groups.⁹ For example, if we want to explain why Keynes acted the way that he did in the Bretton Woods negotiations, or why the neoconservatives in George W. Bush’s administration sought war with Iraq, we need to understand the worldviews of these participants. But not everyone has a worldview, and not every important event in world politics is shaped by worldviews.

The backdrop here is a world of processes in which actors, organizations, rules, values, and cosmologies are in motion.¹⁰ The values and principles underlying international order, for example, are not simply static lines of text written in charters and treaties. Those lines must be meaningful to a community of interpreters that consists of state officials, international organization bureaucrats, global civil society members, and epistemic communities. These actors carry and reproduce sets of beliefs and values. They creatively engage with them, pushing and pulling them to help solve problems. Thus, the ideas that underlie world politics are dynamically negotiated and in flux. Nonetheless, we cannot abandon the task of trying to specify the ideas that structure world politics. But to do so, we need to think about how ideas are stabilized in a processual world.

8.1.1 Modes of Stabilization

To explain stability in a world of process, we need to theorize the modes of stabilization that underwrite persistence and continuity. I want to highlight just a few modes of stabilization: social groups, anchoring practices, and what I call complementarities. First, stability can be underwritten by social groups that carry and reproduce relatively stable ideas. Consider the role of scientists, experts, and professionals. These groups carry and reproduce professional values, scientific models, and epistemic tools. Powerful processes of technical and professional socialization can impart similar representations, beliefs, values, ethoses, and desires. But even individuals shaped by coherent groups may drift apart unless their socialization is reinforced by anchoring practices. Anchoring practices are “repeated interactional patterns” that pull individuals to deploy the same actions and meanings.¹¹ In professions and expert groups, anchoring practices are usually premised upon an epistemic tool, such as clinical diagnostics for medical professionals or cost–benefit analyses for management consultants. These practices draw actors into similar contexts where they reproduce similar values, models, and desires over time.

Reaching for a general mechanism here, we might say that stability can be achieved by forging complementarities between ideas and practical, social, institutional, and political contexts.¹² Complementarities are alignments between ideas and contexts, such that the elements reinforce one another. Complementarities are forged by creative actors around the key purposes or anchoring practices of groups and organizations. They operate when ideas and practices lead actors to move back and forth within a set of categories, actions, and values.

For example, officials in the World Bank have disbursed loans on the basis of financing gap models.¹³ These models serve as an anchoring practice to help staff solve the epistemic and political problems that arise in their work. But those models also have to be aligned with the social norms and institutional rules that help officials execute their tasks in a complex organization. Beyond the Bank, financing gap models were legitimated and reinforced by academic growth theory. Growth theory was complementary to financing gap models, desired increases in national income, and institutional rules that promoted large loans. The complementarities across these elements helped stabilize each element. Nonetheless, the drawing together of disparate elements always forms a dynamic nexus that is shifting and evolving, even if it exhibits continuities.

Complementarities are not preexisting or functional entities. They are forged by creative actors that seek to align ideas and contexts. Creative actors must yoke together practices, rules, and beliefs, forging the connections that underwrite stability. There is play and contingency in the process of alignment. The form and content of social life emerges from the coming together of elements that each have their own contingent history.

The forging of complementarities is essential to the challenges of political mobilization. In a processual perspective, politics is about moving people.¹⁴ Moving people requires ideas, but also opportunity, resources, and organization. It requires creative work to align ideas with the necessary contextual factors. Constructing a stable, politically potent worldview is precisely this kind of creative act. But this local creativity is always suffused by multiple and intersecting structural processes that operate in similar – which is not to say the same – ways across space and time. Agency is always possible but never omnipotent. Creative agents must work with and against the cosmological and institutional resources at hand.

8.1.2 Worldviews in World Politics

In order to see how powerful worldviews are forged in world politics, consider the emergence of economic worldviews in the twentieth century. Recall that worldviews draw on cosmological elements such as ontological categories and epistemic claims about good knowledge. Since the late nineteenth century, the ontological categories of Western politics have been dominated by representations of epistemic objects like society, public health, labor, the economy, human rights, and the climate. These objects were constituted as distinct entities by scientists, experts, and professionals who defined, measured, and codified them. But they were not merely “constructions”: they reflected, and constituted, changes in practice.¹⁵ New practices, transactions, and flows brought together individuals into fields of action that could be demarcated from others.¹⁶ Thinkers and practitioners forged complementarities between the philosophical distinction between subjects and objects and a new set of epistemic tools for representing and intervening in objects.

Objects depend on both the modes of stabilization introduced earlier. Objects are stabilized by social groups of experts and professionals. Economists, for example, help produce and naturalize the economy. Objects are stable to the extent that they are embedded in practical, social, institutional, and political contexts. As Daston puts it, “scientific objects … grow more richly real as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations.”¹⁷ In the terms of this volume, embedding economic objects in worldviews gives them a place in the political projects of actors. From there, elements of worldviews are institutionalized in policy statements, organizational procedures, rules governing exchange, capital investments of firms, and so on. The economy is made rather than imagined.

In the twentieth century, a number of important groups in the United States and the Soviet Union developed economic worldviews. In the United States, for example, the economy was the basis for Rostow’s worldview, in which American liberalism would establish a world order wherein all societies would modernize into liberal democracies.¹⁸ In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party articulated a worldview in which “The New Soviet Man” would embody the modernity of an economic order led by the revolutionary class.¹⁹ The expansion of production through economic planning in the Soviet Union would usher in a new communist world modernity.²⁰ Thus, the postwar international economic order came to be structured by two competing superpowers, both of which enacted economic worldviews.

These worldviews were premised on cosmological elements. First, they relied on an ontology in which “the economy” is designated as an isolated social object in a field of social objects (alongside politics, society, public health, households, etc.). These worldviews were simply not possible before the 1950s and the 1960s because there was no concept of “the economy” before the 1930s. According to Mitchell, prior to the 1930s, references to “economy” denote the old, eighteenth-century principle of prudent management or frugality.²¹ It is only with the advent of a new epistemic tool, national accounting statistics, that the economy became a delimited object. A new concept and a new tool could then be aligned with diverse developments, such as the increase in financial flows, to create a genuinely new social sphere. That is to say, the economy is not merely a social construct, but is the product of the rearrangement of the world. As such, it provides a stable basis for the construction of new values and state practices of intervention.

Second, as Scott argues, both Cold War worldviews were premised on an epistemic basis he calls “high-modernism”: “self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”²² High-modernism is epistemic in the sense that it relies on assumptions about how knowledge can be used. It rests on an ontological depiction of the universe as a law-governed order. And it has a clear relation to values including the desirability of rationality and the imperative to dominate nature. In this way, high-modernism merges cosmological elements and the kinds of specific values that structure worldviews.

So, the contending worldviews of the Cold War were in part built upon a set of common cosmological elements which were creatively combined into different worldviews. What I want to suggest in the next section is that none of this was natural. It did not emerge from a universal process of development, modernization, or rationalization. Instead, it was the product of a more uncertain channeling of cosmological elements from the natural and social sciences into political discourses. Thus, the worldviews that circulate in world politics and social science are products of a particular history of cosmological change.

8.2 Rationalization: The History of Scientific Worldviews

Weber’s theory of rationalization offers an entry point to consider the history of worldviews in the West. Although Weber does not distinguish between worldviews and cosmological ideas, drawing the distinction helps reframe Weber’s theory of rationalization. Taken together, The Protestant Work Ethic and The Sociology of Religion argue that worldviews are a product of the rationalization of myths and religions.²³ Rationalization creates a world of external values that can structure subjectivity and motivate individuals.

By pushing the historical thrust of Weber’s argument further, we arrive at a conception of the self as constituted by cosmological elements.²⁴ This conception of a self that is relationally constituted by cosmological ideas helps us to unbundle the concept of rationalization and its supposed product, Western modernity, into more historically specific processes. My argument is that we can better understand the history of Western worldviews by tracing two cosmological developments: the emergence of materialism and the production of a world of objects. As we shall see, these developments provide resources for the construction of worldviews in world politics. Moreover, these ideational configurations were stabilized through their relations to one another (complementarity) and the economic and colonial contexts in which they were developed (anchoring). Finally, we shall see that they comprise part of what I call the cosmological inheritance of the social sciences. This inheritance orients us to control and makes it easy to slide into colonial modes of analysis.

8.2.1 Rationalization in Weber

Weber’s theory of rationalization is a key part of his overall theory of modernity, which aimed to explain the distinctiveness of the West. Weber placed so much importance on rationalization because he felt it was necessary to account for the emergence of capitalist development in the West.²⁵ This, in part, serves as a legitimation of the superiority of the German nation and Protestant value-orientations.²⁶ There are now a number of literatures that call into question the distinctiveness of the West and the need for a theory of Western exceptionalism.²⁷ Nonetheless, working through Weberian rationalization can help us reconsider the role of scientific ideas in Western worldviews.

Weber uses the term “rationalization” to apply to wide variety of processes: the systematization of religious belief, the increasing precision of military procedures, the legalization of political life, and so on. It refers broadly to the standardization, abstraction, and quantification of behavior in any social sphere. I want to focus on two effects of rationalization processes.²⁸ First, substantive rationalization produces value-oriented individuals and systems of ethics. Second, practical and formal rationalization increases instrumental rationality and pure means–ends action. For Weber, the rise of science intensifies the disintegration of ultimate values and the domination of formal means–ends rationality.

In The Sociology of Religion all the major world religions undergo substantive rationalization. Weber argues that the rationalization of religions results in prophets making increased ethical demands upon the gods. Over time, prophets tended to produce more complex and systematic theoretical accounts of the universe that depicted it as a “harmonious and rational order.”²⁹ These demands rested on “the increasing scope of a rational comprehension of an enduring and orderly cosmos.”³⁰

Furthermore, in salvation religions, prophets draw together the cosmological and the social, infusing everyday life with cosmological strictures and practices. This orients the religious individual to “a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life.”³¹ Since salvation depends on “both social and cosmic events,” individuals must pattern their conduct in a meaningful way. That is, systematized religion produces individuals that are oriented to impersonal and universal values. Integrated, rationalized worldviews cultivate a new kind of person oriented “to a cosmos of obligations.”³² Such people then act in more predictable or calculable ways – their action is formally rationalized.

In effect, Weber historicizes the basis of action itself. He provides an account of how people come to orient their action to a set of values that are not present or inherent in everyday life. Thus, the degree to which individuals pursue a cosmologically oriented life within a “meaningful, ordered totality” is itself the product of rationalization processes.³³

This is the basis of Weber’s explanation for the differences between the West, which produces capitalism, and other societies, which do not.³⁴ Weber’s argument is that only Protestantism produced the right combination of theocentrism (orientation to a transcendent god), ascetism (control of self as the path to salvation), and this-worldliness (desire to realize God’s will in this world):

Only ascetic Protestantism completely eliminated magic and the supernatural quest for salvation, of which the highest form was intellectualist, contemplative illumination. It alone created the religious motivations for seeking salvation primarily through immersion in one’s worldly vocation … For the various popular regions of Asia, in contrast to ascetic Protestantism, the world remained a great enchanted garden … No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual strata of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life. Nor did any path lead to that methodical control from the world-accommodation of Confucianism, from the world-rejection of Buddhism, from the world-conquest of Islam, or from the messianic expectations and economic pariah law of Judaism.³⁵

This revision of the argument of the Protestant Ethic represents the culmination of Weber’s work from 1905 to 1920.

In short, rationalization produces individuals who are meaningfully oriented to values. Moreover, those values fulfilled what Weber saw as the highest ideals of Western civilization: “autonomous yet compassionate and community-oriented individuals” that lived their lives in the pursuit of meaningful values.³⁶

The rise of science enters the story here as one of a variety of sources that threaten values. In the Vocation lectures, Weber argues that scientific rationalization has profound effects on worldviews. Science teaches us that “we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation.”³⁷ This knowledge leads to “the disenchantment of the world,” culminating in the withdrawal of “the ultimate and most sublime values” from public life.³⁸ Science, for Weber, cannot replace those values because it cannot answer Tolstoy’s questions: “What should we do? How shall we live?”³⁹

The consequences of this, for Weber, are widespread and significant. The disintegration of ethical worldviews threatens the sociological basis of Western civilization. As Kalberg concludes:

Weber could not discover an organization, class, or social stratum firmly anchored in modern Western societies capable of replacing ethical salvation religions as an institutionalized carrier of ethical rationality and value-rationalization processes … devoid of the personal dimension, the realms of economy, law, and science, as well as all bureaucratic rulership, now developed solely in relation to external necessities and impersonal rules, laws, and regulations. These arenas thus remained outside of – and unrestrained by – all ethical claims.⁴⁰

This led Weber to advocate a form of German nationalism in which moral obligation to the Volk would replace the passive instrumental rationality of the people.⁴¹

8.2.2 History

In this reading, Weber’s account of rationalization is not grounded in a careful history of how ideas produced rationalizing elements. Rather, it is situated in Weber’s attempt to make sense of Western distinctiveness in a world of difference.⁴² The result is a totalizing and abstract image of rationalization as a universal and inevitable process. However, as Joas points out, we should not treat all the phenomena Weber identifies together under the umbrella of a single, universal process.⁴³

Instead, we can unbundle modernity into a set of ideational and practical shifts linked together through contingent yet powerful complementarities. This may allow us to retain some sense of the overarching narrative of rationalization, in which the ground of action is transformed by long-term historical processes, without positing the necessity and unavoidability of disenchantment. My approach to this unbundling is to show how cosmological elements from the scientific tradition were incorporated into European and American political traditions. On this account, rationalization is the folding of cosmological elements (materialism and object-orientation) into social and political discourses where they formed the basis of worldviews based on control.

Starting in the sixteenth century, early modern natural philosophy in Europe was dominated by a materialist and mechanist ontology.⁴⁴ A materialist ontology posits that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are physical entities. A mechanist ontology posits a world that is governed by formal and efficient causes.⁴⁵ Forged together in a system of discursive complementarities, early modern materialism and mechanism offered a vision of the universe as lifeless matter in motion.

Materialist and mechanist ontological claims developed in opposition to a variety of vitalist and organicist views. Vitalist writers depicted a pluralist world of living entities in which nature operated as an agent.⁴⁶ Organicist thought emphasized not the power of interacting corpuscles, but the holistic representation of nature and the world as living entities. A pluralist world of living organic wholes was far messier and less predictable than the rationally legible world of mechanically interacting matter. Perhaps this explains why Calvin himself, who was so central to Weber’s story of rationalization, joined natural philosophers in opposing the “filthy dog Lucretius” and other vitalists.⁴⁷ Calvin admired the “exact diligence” of the astronomers because it revealed the “cunning workmanship” of God’s providence.⁴⁸

Other religious scholars attacked mechanism on the basis that it restricted God’s will and depended itself on a form of vitalism. Henry More, a seventeenth-century Cambridge philosopher, argued that mechanists implied that matter had “freedom of will” and the “knowledge and perception” necessary to act.⁴⁹ Instead, More suggested, “an Immaterial Being” was responsible for making matter move. Along these and other lines of contestation, materialism and mechanism were disputed ontological claims through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century. As such, materialism and mechanism did not fully displace existing traditions of thought and practice. They had to be worked into creative networks of complementarities alongside existing discourses and practices.

The broad acceptance of Newton’s view of the universe finally achieved in the eighteenth century can largely be explained by the fact that it was compatible with and could be drawn into religious worldviews.⁵⁰ Newton’s image of a rational, law-governed cosmos was consistent with the Christian belief in an omnipotent God that had created an ordered universe. Moreover, Newton, consistent with his own theological impulses, left room for God in the mysterious operations of gravity. This was consistent with More’s immaterial mover. It was also the reason Newton was denounced for relying on “occult forces.”⁵¹ The Newtonian view of the universe was not disenchanted. And it was stabilized through its relation to Christian ritual and political power.

Although strict materialism has been contested since its emergence, it has dominated scientific views of nature for centuries. A sure sign of its power is that even those, such as Newton, Kant, and Weber, who argued against materialism had to adopt the dichotomous division of the world into material and ideational forces.

The material–ideational division played an important role in the development of the colonial social sciences in the nineteenth century.⁵² In the shadow of Darwin, social anthropologists in Britain and elsewhere grounded their understanding of the new object “society” in a biological conception of humanity. Famously, Darwinism contributed to the rise of scientific racism in late colonial Europe. However, in British colonialism, scientific racism was less influential than social anthropology. Early anthropologists such as John Lubbock and Edward Burnett Tylor espoused a theory of sociocultural evolution on which peoples, conceived as distinct entities, developed along a linear sequence from savagery to civilization.⁵³ This formed the basis of the British Colonial Office’s position that colonialism was necessary to shepherd primitive societies through the process of development. Scientific racism was unsuitable for this doctrine because it suggested that inferior races could never attain civilization. Instead, British colonial officials believed in their own racial superiority and that their native charges could progress toward civilization.⁵⁴

Malinowski and his students later came to dominate British anthropology and played a central role in British colonial policy.⁵⁵ Such connections to colonial practice were not incidental, but an integral part of the network of complementarities that stabilized and supported Malinowski’s work. Malinowski’s “functionalist” anthropology posited a system of basic institutions that served to fulfill basic human needs.⁵⁶ The task of the anthropologist was to understand what function otherwise mysterious behaviors served. So Malinowski and other functionalists advocated for anthropologists to deeply immerse themselves within the social fabric to discern the true meaning and purpose of basic institutions, rituals, and beliefs.

The sociocultural and functionalist conceptions of society were not materialist in a reductive sense. Anthropologists in Malinowski’s tradition did not posit that race or biology was destiny. But it was materialist, and disenchanted, in a different sense. On the functionalist view, the basis of society is an aggregate of material bodies, and the only forces legible to social science are ones that register for those bodies. To be sure, societies are formed by bringing together individual bodies in a set of institutions, bound together by ideas and practices. But, as Malinowski and the functionalists made clear, the ideas were not really considered to be constitutive of peoples.

In colonial anthropology and imperial practice, ideas had only a functional relation to peoples: they help groups solve practical problems. Culture was a means of satisfying “basic individual biopsychological needs,” and was merely a generalization of kinship relations and economic structures, not a “systemic milieu” in which relationships were constituted.⁵⁷ Thus, any set of ideas which resolves the material problems of existence or Darwinian survival are just as good as any other. Hence, the normative value of colonialism and assimilation: they provide a better set of ideas to meet material needs in superior ways. In an ontological sense, this theory separated cultures from peoples. Doing so justified colonialism as a system for guiding peoples to better, more functional sets of beliefs. We can see here how colonial worldviews could draw sustenance from scientific cosmological elements.

That separation was related to a broader ontological and epistemic shift: the proliferation of “epistemic objects” after 1830.⁵⁸ These objects – society, labor, public health, the economy, and so on – divided the world into distinct spheres of action. The emergence of “society” was important because it made possible the rise of the social sciences generally.⁵⁹ It was first conceptualized in the eighteenth century as an “aggregation of human beings that have come together for a certain purpose,” as in a society of engineers. But by the end of the century, it emerged as a third sphere between households (the subject of the moral sciences) and the state (the subject of political economy).⁶⁰ Once created, the concept had a profound effect on social practices. An autonomous society could have effects on individuals and institutions, legitimating ideas like the “social welfare state.” The concept also initiated a process of demarcating other spheres and subspheres, proliferating the objects of the social sciences.⁶¹

Once demarcated, such spheres could be measured with statistical techniques. In the early decades of the twentieth century, these objects were conceptualized as cybernetic systems governed by law-like mechanisms. The social sciences promised to uncover these mechanisms. This altered the basic terms of government which were now responsible for managing these objects.⁶² The proliferation of object-experts enabled government interventions designed to change the dynamics of the objects.

Kusch argues that the roots of this phenomenon lie in the merger of Kantian thinking with technological advances:

This revolution consists in installing and mobilizing a world of objects outside a subject. That is why, from simple sickness to the vicissitudes of our physical and spiritual life, we always find the solution or the reason in this outside. And an outside is always given: from the simple reason that explains to me the cause of my sorrow to a large administrative issue that could become concretized in an Agricultural Extension Office.⁶³

Understanding and action are premised upon the separation between the inside of the subject and the outside of the world of objects. And, as we have seen, that outside is defined in material terms as dead matter in motion.

It is this separation that makes Weberian value-orientation possible and natural. As in functional anthropology, we as subjects are separate from the world of ideas and artifacts. We can pick up and use elements of the outside as we choose. This basic frame fuels the valorization and naturalization of reason. Reason could now be conceptualized and defined in means–ends terms as knowledge of the outside for the manipulation of the outside in the service of internal ends. Rationality itself is a value-orientation.

This shift underlies the scientific forms of rationalization identified by Meyer and his coauthors. They argue that on the dominant culture of world society, “salvation lies in rationalized structures grounded in scientific and technical knowledge.”⁶⁴ The widespread authority of science underwrites and benefits from a process of rationalization in which all actors are expected to use scientific and technical knowledge to solve problems.⁶⁵ But it is important to precisely state the effect of science here: it established a discourse in which the world is populated with material objects that can be defined in scientific terms.

Reason is then the task of gaining understanding and exerting control over these objects through means–ends rationality. The desire to control the world through experiment and action is also not natural. It too emerges from this history in which a materialist world of dead matter is displayed as a series of manipulable entities. The image of the scientific experiment, in which nature is carefully controlled to produce reliable information and outcomes, is part of a broader constellation of ideas that are incorporated into the Newtonian worldviews of the social sciences and the modernist worldviews that shape world politics.

In my retelling, Weber’s idea of rationality itself is a product of history. Kant of course assumed the existence of an a priori reason. But multiple subsequent traditions in social theory have sought to show that the grounds of rationality are themselves embedded in history. This is precisely what defenders of rational worldviews miss.⁶⁶ Indeed, Weber himself built a worldview on the concept of rationality. On the one hand, Weber valorized rationality-as-value-orientation under Protestantism. On the other hand, he critiqued rationality-as-disenchantment. His desire to diagnose the distinctiveness of the West led him here.⁶⁷

From here, we see that the concept of rationality deployed by Weber is not a natural object but a product of the history of rationalization that he himself identified. The systematization and standardization of action across spheres reflects the emergence of cosmological elements from the natural sciences in political and social discourses. Further, it reflects a long process of forging complementarities between materialism, mechanism, object-orientation, and other ideas. These ideas draw strength from one another to form powerful and persuasive networks of meaning. These networks can then be variously mobilized in specific worldviews.

Moreover, once we conceptualize the process of rationalization at this level of detail we can see why it does not eliminate values or value-orientation amongst individuals by draining discourses of meaning. Scientific rationalization provides a different set of ideational elements through which values can be constructed. Newtonian and Darwinian representations of the cosmos and humanity became the basis of many political worldviews.

In sum, rationalization processes change the conceptual material from which worldviews are made. This constrains and influences worldviews, but does not determine them. This balances the roles of structure and agency as laid out in Section 8.1. Structural processes like the movement of scientific ideas into political discourses have broad effects, but those effects leave room for creative action to forge worldviews and the networks of complementarities necessary to stabilize and mobilize them.

8.2.3 Rationalization in the Social Sciences

Katzenstein’s opening to this volume argues that we social scientists are stuck within Newtonian worldviews.⁶⁸ This section develops a related theme: materialism and object-orientation are part of the broader cosmological inheritance that enframes the social sciences today.⁶⁹ Further, building on Shilliam, I want to argue that the social sciences rest on rationalized, disenchanted discourses. The disenchantment of social science, which Weber himself struggled with, makes it harder to represent nonmaterialist elements and to take seriously the power of religion and cosmology.⁷⁰ From here, we can see how the coloniality of the social sciences in its functionalist, object-oriented mode separates peoples from cosmology at a basic level.

In Shilliam’s retelling, the story of the Haitian revolution usually notes two events in the build-up to the insurrection on August 22, 1791. On August 14, there was the “properly-political” meeting of slaves and workers at the Lenormand de Mézy estate. Ostensibly it was here that the revolution was born as creoles, drawing inspiration from the French Revolution, plotted anticolonial rebellion.⁷¹ On August 21, after two estates were prematurely set ablaze, there was a hastily arranged meeting of chiefs at Bwa Kayiman. There, Dutty Boukman, an early leader of the revolution, presided over a ritual with Cécile Fatiman, a Vodou priestess. The next day, the revolution began, and 184 sugar plantations were destroyed in the ensuing weeks. This second meeting is generally considered to be “merely a religious Vodou ceremony” that provided a signal to initiate the rebellion.⁷²

Shilliam argues that the colonial nature of social science excludes the possibility that the meeting at Bwa Kayiman exerted a real effect on the revolution itself. To do so, he highlights the importance of what he calls “African retentions” in Haiti. In 1791, half of the 500,000 slaves in Saint Domingue had arrived in the previous five years, and two-thirds had been born in Africa.⁷³ These people carried with them diverse cosmological traditions from the African continent. Thus, the meeting at Bwa Kayiman reflected African cosmologies, political hierarchies, and national groupings.⁷⁴ Shilliam describes how the meeting brought together chiefs of African nations with lwa (spiritual agents).

At Bwa Kayiman, Cécile Fatiman “is ridden by the lwa Ezili Kawuolo,” the patron of secret societies.⁷⁵ The Vodou conception of the self is radically relational and not reducible to conceptions of a closed subject. In Vodou, a person’s “seat of agency” can be “mounted” by a lwa. Via this mediation, a lwa can become an agent in the world, serving as a channel for cosmic forces. One of these forces is justice. In the context of a slave colony, mediation with the lwa is a means of bringing justice into the profane world:

Mediating with the lwa allows the profanely enslaved to channel forces from the spiritual hinterlands that bypass and exceed the control of their downpressors. The community is re-sanctified by gaining cosmic force and direction in the pursuit of justice: The lwa and the chiefs, moved to arms, gathered at Bwa Kayiman.⁷⁶

In this account, Shilliam presents the lwa as agents of the revolution: “If the lwa were not gathered at Bwa Kayiman with the chiefs, then there would have been no revolution.”⁷⁷ Shilliam asks, what moved the people? “If the people did not know that the lwa were riding (with) them to burn down the plantations, then they would not have moved their feet.”⁷⁸

The problem is not only that social science cannot capture the power of the lwa. That is certainly the case: the secular terms of colonial social science must declare the lwa “supernatural” and thereby render them inert and absurd.⁷⁹ But regardless of whether or not one is willing to entertain the possibility of lwa agency, Shilliam’s argument makes an important point: the colonial bias of social science makes the analyst privilege the causal significance of (white) legal-juridical acts over (black) cosmological ones.

Moreover, Shilliam’s argument shows us what is at stake in the social scientific representation of ideas as separate from peoples. As Shilliam puts it, “colonial science seeks to segregate peoples from their lands, their pasts, their ancestors, spirits and agencies.”⁸⁰ That is, by denigrating cosmological ideas as “super-natural” and “super-stitious,” social science denies the constitutive element that ideas and spirits play in the formation of peoples.

This may seem like a counterintuitive critique of constructivists and ideational theorists a century removed from Malinowski. After all, cultural theorists argue that ideas make a “people” distinct from a set of biological individuals. But in colonial science ideas form peoples only in a shallow sense. The functionalism of materialist colonial science posits that a people is merely a set of biological bodies appended to a set of ideas. Those ideas fulfill functional, practical purposes. But functionally equivalent ideas are all interchangeable. There is no regard given to the specific cosmological heritage of peoples. Such ideas, and therefore peoples, have no specific ontological status as unique, or culturally valuable, entities in and of themselves. Diversity and pluralism refer not to the products of specific complex histories which form distinct cosmological-geographical-biological entities. Rather, diversity and pluralism are mere numerical terms, referring to the proliferation of traditions, each with the same status within social science.

8.3 Interlude: On Parks in Social Science

On Saturdays, my daughter plays soccer in Druid Hill Park, a short drive from my home in Baltimore. The park opened in 1860, just two years after Central Park in New York. Druid Hill is similar in size to Central Park and is also surrounded on all sides by the city. But unlike Central Park, Druid Hill is not contained within Manhattan’s rigid grid. From above, Druid Hill looks more like the head of a dinosaur in profile. The park features the usual amenities: biking paths, soccer fields, and pools (which used to be segregated). But large sections of the park are left as forest, having never been landscaped.

I am happy in the park – between a rationalist, ordered garden and a relationalist forest – if it means I value and pursue a kind of general social science despite my processual and historicist commitments. But I don’t think parks should be monocultured. They should have a plurality of places to allow for a plurality of activities, all of which reflect the diverse and changing needs of a city.

Some theorists might suggest that taking history, process, and coloniality seriously means we must jettison any pretense to social scientific explanation.⁸¹ On such a view, a project which posits worldviews as a force in world politics is misguided. The inherent instability and undecidability of meanings implies that any attempt within International Relations (IR) to fix a meaning to the world is an act of power.⁸² As such, it tells us more about the productive power of IR as a discipline than it does about the world we purport to explain. Many theorists are unwilling to be complicit in the modernist productions of IR theory, and thus they adopt a critical stance against general or middle-ground theory.

Working from similar ontological premises, I draw a different conclusion. Social science theory in a processual mode can still strive to create general or middle-ground theories. But the purpose of those theories is not to create a catalogue of laws. Rather, it is to provide an agile base for an experimental approach to politics.⁸³ Theories, like worldviews, orient us in an uncertain world, allowing us to juggle multiple causal factors, see trade-offs, appraise opportunities, and engage with the world in novel ways. General theory need not be modernist, nor strive to disembody its objects from their contexts. Rather, by mapping the complexity of social worlds within legible frameworks, we can provide a flexible starting point for understanding and action without the dream of control.

Moreover, precisely because IR wields productive power, IR needs scholars who are willing to draw critical and modernist traditions together. Rather than leave the mainstream safe to ignore the importance of structural power, creative agency, history, and relationality, at least some of us should work to destabilize and change the conventional wisdom.⁸⁴ A starting point here is to use social science concepts to narrate and understand the complexity of social reality. But our concepts have to be located within a deep history alive to its contingencies and instabilities. Take for example the concept of worldviews. If we take Weber’s arguments about the emergence of worldviews seriously, it does not make sense to apply the concept without historical and social scope conditions. We cannot simply interpret history such that every actor has a worldview or value-orientation. But under the right conditions, worldviews are a useful tool for explaining the actions of individuals and groups.

Moreover, with Shilliam, we need to turn from the critical interrogation of concepts back to history. Decolonizing our concepts allows for new interpretations that more vividly capture the differences that mark the social world. Placing our own work in the colonial history of social science allows us to see without the constraints imposed by the coloniality of our discipline. From there, we might be more open to the values and commitments offered by other worldviews, cosmologies, and modes of life.

From this vantage point, Haas and Nau’s defense of individualism in this volume is unpersuasive because it ignores the history of the concepts they themselves deploy. They argue that “individuals can be educated liberally to become self-critical and eventually form and change their worldviews on rational and accountable grounds.”⁸⁵ There is much to admire in their defense of agency and liberalism. However, it is important to note that their rationally ascertained liberal individualism is itself the product of the historical conceptual developments partially outlined earlier. Any choice of worldview is itself highly structured by historical inheritance. And if the choice is considered rational, the room for agency has been delimited further. Choice is never complete. Choice of worldview is itself is a negotiation of relational connections to history, education, and other agents in our lives.

But, more deeply, Weber would say that we, as products of rationalization, are the inheritors of a rationalized frame of action which orients us to certain kinds of values and exposes us to the risks of disenchantment. We do not have “natural” worldviews. As much as we may want to go back to unquestioning enchantment, we cannot. This is precisely the challenge Shilliam presents us with: even if we try we cannot, from within social science, posit the agency of the lwa. So, the idea that we can and should rationally choose a worldview expresses a cosmological development we cannot undo. But we can grapple with and bring the tensions of our own rationalized history into our practice as critical, yet theoretically ambitious social scientists.

In the end, the difference between Haas and Nau and myself lies not in whether we acknowledge the fact of agency, but in where we locate it. Haas and Nau show agency at the surface: connecting up variants of the modernist, economic worldviews across the lines of the Cold War. Their argument is convincing, but it misses the cosmological backdrop which constrained the actors by placing them within a particular political landscape. This is not to say the actors did not exhibit real human agency – they did! But that agency is already relationally constituted in the sense that it was made possible by the configuration of historical inheritance and interactions with other actors.

In Druid Hill, the landscape upon which the children play is already ordered by history (and its messy configurations of knowledge, power, and agency). I cannot look at the swimming pools there without seeing the ongoing and present legacy of segregation and apartheid in my city. Whatever I do today does not erase that inheritance. Power is present in the landscape.

8.4 Conclusion

I take inspiration from processual and critical perspectives that offer relational views of the world, but I think we can put relational concepts to use in the world. I realize any attempt to assert knowledge is a play of power – one that could fall into colonial ways of thinking. But I personally feel a responsibility to act anyway, to fix meanings that I think are accurate and will have good effects on the world. This implies the necessity of a reflexive perspective. This reflexivity should be grounded in history.

My own historical work implies that our knowledge as social scientists acts as a channel for cosmological elements to enter political discourses.⁸⁶ Inspired by this, part of my intellectual project is to draw on alternative ontologies and epistemes and use them to refigure social science concepts to make more room for creativity, contingency, and change. In bringing processualism and history into the social sciences I seek to weaken the hold that materialism and object-orientation have on the social sciences today. This is not the same as advocating a worldview, but I do think that this work is important to the goal of deflating modernism and increasing ecological sensibilities in the long run. This supports the gambit that Katzenstein, Kurki, and others make: alternative scientific knowledges, such as quantum mechanics or ecology, could be harnessed to rework existing material and object-based conceptions of reality. This would provide a new platform for relating worldviews and cosmologies, as well as producing new ones. Staging this conversation in a nonhierarchical, decolonized manner is an urgent need in the social sciences, and in world politics more broadly.

Perhaps in a relational social science we could consistently enact a vision of selves and peoples that are deeply constituted and transformed by cosmological ideas. But that, I think, would require not just a different ontology but an earnest grappling with the basic colonial categories and impulses that still shape social science. After all, the social sciences are oriented, albeit inchoately, to social control. We still strive to create models of objects that allow the state and other actors to make targeted interventions. Moreover, the social sciences are poorly suited as a guide to the kind of inter-cosmological conversations that would help us relate different groups in nonhierarchical ways. Thus, we need to bring in resources from other traditions to work with our colonial past.

One promise of a decolonized, relational social science is that it might help us rethink the central problem of politics in a processual ontology: moving people. Tilly’s flattening of power into mobilization could be put to use by a social science that no longer reduces motivation to material, rational interest.⁸⁷ An alternative model of social change would take seriously that we need confidence in our actions – we need to know the lwa are with us. More than a proper map of the world, a social science which sought to intervene in the world would have to be a creative response to the world that cultivated faith in justice and collective action. However, to do that social science would have to recover some sense that action is more directly tied to cosmological inheritances, acknowledging that we are part of more complex relational wholes than our science allows us to admit right now.

Returning to Weber, this insight from Shilliam provides an alternative reading of disenchantment in the West. Perhaps disenchantment is a loss of faith in cosmology itself. And perhaps we can reclaim cosmology without resorting either to tongue-in-cheek spiritualism or to nationalist proxies (per Weber). Instead, we can posit that history is cosmological. The histories of peoples are histories forged within and through cosmological elements that leave their traces in stories, institutions, and family traditions. This creates a real cosmological inheritance that cannot be abandoned.

In this framing, we do not choose a cosmology, but inherit cosmological traditions that place various resources for meaning-making at our disposal. It is the creative act of weaving cosmologies from these resources that provides the promise of mobilization with some element of enchantment. Cosmology can be treated as a real source of enchantment while being seen as the product of history.

From this vantage point, we can take cosmology seriously while maintaining a reflexive and critical stance in regard to cosmological inheritance. This reflexivity can help us guard against unreflective nationalisms and racisms that may creep alongside the valorization of cosmological tradition. Grounding ourselves in a relational and processual understanding of history, without reducing people’s histories to pure function, could enable us to reclaim vivid and meaningful cosmologies.

9 Religious Worldviews in Global Politics

Timothy A. Byrnes

In the Preface to this book, Peter Katzenstein cites religion as one of our contemporary era’s “foundational worldviews,” indicating the degree to which religion is implicated in the concept and category of “worldview” that all of the contributors to this volume are seeking to define, explicate, and draw attention to. Indeed, this entire collaborative examination of worldviews and their role in International Relations (IR) relies, in part, on religious belief, religious practice, and religious modes of being as paradigmatic examples of the ways in which human beings throughout history have made sense of the world and their place in it. Katzenstein notes in Chapter 1, for example, that “worldviews contain arguments about the ontological building blocks of the world, the epistemic requirements of acceptable knowledge claims, and the origin and destiny of humanity.” This construction could almost serve as the definition of the kind of “arguments” that varied religious traditions have provided for millennia in response to fundamental questions related to existence and meaning. What is the nature of being? What is the role of faith in constructing systems of knowledge? Where did the world and human life come from? How definitive is human experience on Earth? And what awaits humanity, both at the end of an individual life, and at the end of human history, as we know it? For many individuals and communities over time, religion has provided the most relevant and most meaningful answers to these perennial questions. For many individuals and communities over time, in other words, religion has resided at the very center of encompassing and foundational worldviews.

My central goal in this chapter, then, is to emphasize the depth to which – and the diversity with which – religion is still implicated in many of the worldviews that characterize our contemporary era. Modernity dawned. But, to the surprise of many social theorists and behavioral analysts, religion did not just fade away. As a way of making sense of basic reality, human experience, and communal belonging, religion has stubbornly and pervasively survived. In terms of the categories being used in this volume, the religious worldviews that continue to provide meaning and grounding for so many people can often be quite mechanistic in operation. These worldviews constitute, at their core, meticulously tended “gardens,” with well-marked walkways and the promise of draconian sanctions for wandering off the prescribed path. But in other contexts and from other perspectives, religious worldviews can also be deeply relational. Relational religious worldviews are grounded in the intricate interconnections between humanity and the divine, between humanity and nature, and within humanity itself as the cocreative force of a world that is always in the process of becoming. In addition to constructing “gardens,” in other words, religious worldviews can also acknowledge the density of the “forest,” and even celebrate the uncertainty and inscrutability of the “jungle.”

Whatever metaphor one wishes to use in order to categorize them, however, I will argue here that religious worldviews – because they attach meaning to human experience and establish social order (or at least ascribe meaning to disorder) – are always deeply grounded simultaneously in both religion and in politics. In fact, I will go further and also argue that the category of worldviews points us to the way in which religion and politics relate to each other not as separate, distinct variables, but rather as coconstitutive elements of coherent, cohesive ways of being in the world.

9.1 Neglect of Religious Worldviews in the Analysis of Global Politics

A simple acknowledgment of the role that various forms of religion play in constructing worldviews relevant to contemporary global politics draws our attention to one of the great mysteries of modern scholarship in the field of IR: the relative paucity of reliance on religion as an underlying factor in explaining political outcomes on the global stage. To be sure, some IR analysts in recent years have responded to the unavoidable prominence of apparently religiously motivated actors on the world stage by acknowledging religion as a potential source of politically relevant identity, and a potential grounding for politically relevant interest formation. Nevertheless, recent examinations of research and publishing patterns reveal IR to have been slow to rethink the assumptions arising out of secularization theory and to reassess the role that religion might play in relations between states and among the broad array of nonstate actors engaged in contemporary world politics.¹

This myopia is particularly notable given how foundational religion, broadly defined, was in the very construction of the central theoretical schools of International Relations in the first place. Realism, after all, was originally grounded in a conception of self-interested humankind that was derived from religious understandings of sin and the “fallen” nature of humanity’s relationship with God.² Liberal institutionalism, alternatively, reflected a belief that relationships between and among states – as between and among individuals – could be based in the recognition of mutual benefit and the building of mutual trust. Some prominent early proponents of these notions were driven explicitly by their religious beliefs,³ and some viewed the role of international organizations from a decidedly religious perspective. Constructivism, in at least some of its iterations, relied from the start on the political meaning of identity – a category that for many (most?) human beings is grounded, at least in part, in religious belief, practice, and community.

The central reason that IR has resisted a recognition of religion’s enduring importance is the same misapprehension that has plagued social science more generally: an overreliance on a deeply problematic secularization theory holding that “modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals.”⁴ This overly simplistic understanding of the complex processes of secularization mistook the functional differentiation characteristic of modern life – the decline of totalistic social structures based solely in religion – for a much less certain diminution of actual religious belief and practice. Relatedly, the presumption of religion’s decline led many social scientists to discount the prevalence of what José Casanova has called the “de-privatization” of religion in our modern era.⁵

IR was perhaps especially susceptible to this analytical limitation because of how deeply the very founding of the field itself was grounded in the ostensible marginalization of religion in the arena of European power politics. In what has been variously called the “Westphalian presumption,”⁶ the “Westphalian synthesis,”⁷ or the “Westphalian legacy,”⁸ International Relations theory has long been laboring under the assumption that religion and religious motivations had been rendered insignificant to “modern” world politics by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The seventeenth century princes of Europe (disingenuously) declared that religion was too dangerous, too unpredictable, and too prone to conflict to serve as a meaningful grounding for their relations with one another. And so modern students of the state system that those princes created (inaccurately) presumed that they could safely ignore religion, at least as it related to the definition of state interest or the trajectory of interstate interactions.

Unfortunately, the theoretical echoes of the Westphalian “synthesis” endured long after the modern evidence ceased supporting the historical “presumption” on which the “legacy” was based (indeed, if the evidence ever did support it in the first place). But as Scott Thomas has phrased it, using purposefully religious terminology: the secularizing effects of the “Westphalian settlement established a political theology for modern IR … a doctrine that prescribes what the role of religion and political authority should be in domestic and international politics that has lasted for 300 years.”⁹ As rejection of religion settled into the “genetic code of the discipline of International Relations,”¹⁰ several generations of analysts grew to intellectual and professional maturity almost completely ignoring religion, either because they explicitly deemed it not relevantly present in the field of study they were advancing, or because they were simply ill-disposed to notice it. Peter Berger, manifesting the zeal of the epistemological convert, went so far as to argue that “the difficult-to-understand phenomenon [was] not Iranian mullahs, but American university professors.”¹¹

Some who have sought to account for so many IR scholars and other social scientists remaining so blind for so long to the effects of religion on world politics have speculated that part of the reason might simply be that these scholars tended not to be religious themselves. We know that religion is nothing more than antediluvian superstition, the thinking went. So, surely, such outmoded thinking cannot authentically motivate the behavior of our research subjects. I have lately begun to wonder, however, whether the presumption of irreligious identity on the part of contemporary scholars might itself be a form of the secularization myth. During a lunch discussion among a number of the contributors to this volume, for example, it became clear that each attendee had a personal “religious story” to tell. Some of these stories included continued membership in explicitly religious communities. Some, to be sure, did not. But all of these stories and the significance that the participants readily granted to them suggested that each participant in that discussion had emerged from a personal background that prominently included religious experience in one form or another. Might it be reasonable, therefore, to consider the possibility that many of my colleagues’ “worldviews” – the “basic ideas that shape the questions [they] ask or fail to ask, provide [them] with explanatory and interpretive concepts, and suggest hunches or plausible answers”¹² – have been shaped in part by their own exposure to religion?

One of the problems, I suspect, with acknowledging this dynamic in personal terms, and applying it analytically, is that emphasizing the widespread role of religion in contemporary politics in general and in the construction of worldviews more specifically runs counter to the deep commitment that most IR scholars have to reliance on scientific explanations that can be uncovered and specified according to the generally acceptable theoretical paradigms and methodological applications of the field. But Bentley Allan, in a chapter that focuses precisely on the sources and ramifications of this epistemological commitment, shows us just how limiting and distorting that reliance can be. Allan conjectures late in Chapter 8 that a full explanation for the Revolution in Haiti might have to include motivations and preferences related to the religious beliefs and predispositions of the revolution’s participants. Meaning no disrespect to Allan’s discovery or to his straightforward reporting of it, my response upon reading an early draft of his contribution was: of course! Given the widespread religious beliefs and practices of that place and time, why would our default position be to presume that religion was not a factor in the genesis and conduct of political phenomenon such as the Haitian revolution?

9.2 The Relevance of Religious Worldviews in Global Politics

Phrased more generally, given that huge swaths of the world’s population have (and still do) define their personal and collective identities and commitments in religious terms and in their relationship to “ultimate reality,” why in heaven’s name should we be surprised that many people ground their political commitments and political activities in their religious beliefs and worldviews? One central reason for our surprise, I suppose, is our headstrong insistence on the dominance of supposedly parsimonious explanations for complex and multilevel social dynamics that resist parsimonious explanation. To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest here that religion should be relied on as a totalistic explanatory factor in a simplistic or facile understanding of IR. We shouldn’t replace an unfortunate ignorance of religion with an equally inappropriate overreliance on it. What I do wish to suggest, however, is that it ought to be relatively uncontroversial to proceed under the presumption that, to cite a few examples: Islamists are grounded, in part, in their experience of Islam;¹³ Christian dominionists are grounded, in part, in their experience of Christianity;¹⁴ and the Dalai Lama is more than just a grandfatherly avatar of compassion and self-knowledge.¹⁵ These are all examples of highly consequential political worldviews (or spokespersons for them) that in my judgment one would have to be willfully blind not to acknowledge as profoundly, explicitly, and (dare I say it?) obviously grounded in religion.

Michael Barnett’s examination in Chapter 5 of the ways in which Judaism serves as the foundation of variable political worldviews in both Israel and the diaspora is a good example of the kind of analysis that takes seriously the religious concepts and categorizations that I argue are so foundational to modern worldviews. In my view, however, Barnett doesn’t go far enough in acknowledging the depth of the relationship between religion and politics in the construction of Jewish worldviews. Indeed, part of the problem in this connection is our continued insistence on positing a “relationship” between two “factors” that are so deeply intertwined and so mutually constitutive that the analytical distinction between them may be hard to sustain. The above-cited examples make this point. Islamism, Christian dominionism, and Tibetan nationalism are not merely the political manifestations of underlying religious worldviews. I would argue, instead, that they are in a foundational sense worldviews themselves: ways of being in the world that have been mutually constituted through the profound interconnectedness of religious commitments and political interests.

This is why it is so futile, by the way, to try to convince Evangelicals in the United States that their enduring support for the manifestly un-Christian Donald Trump is, itself, un-Christian. The version of Christianity practiced by many Evangelicals in the United States today is actually at its core Trumpist, or at least reliably Republican in nature. And it has been for at least the last several decades. Church (or mosque or temple) and state can surely be legally and constitutionally separated. But a separation of religion and politics is a chimera. Religion and politics are not so much distinct realms of human experience as they are, often, mutually constituted and mutually re-enforcing elements of a single internally coherent worldview.

American voters whose personal identities are firmly grounded in such a cohesive worldview can no more be expected to readily separate their religion from their politics than members of the Bharatiya Janata Party can be expected to separate Hinduism from Indian nationalism. In “Hindutva,” we have an example of the ultimate grounding of a politically consequential worldview in a religious identity.¹⁶ It is not that a “religious” identity competes with or supersedes the “political” in this construction of a distinctively Hindu/Indian worldview. Instead, there is in this case a true fusion, or mutual construction, of the religious and the political in the formation of a distinctive worldview that today defines the dominant articulation of Indian nationalism.

This example – and this way of understanding religion’s role in constructing worldviews – highlights the frequency with which religious beliefs, practices, and communities are implicated in fundamentalist political projects that epitomize the order, conformity, and predictability of the “garden.” Reacting to the kind of unsettling cosmological uncertainty described by Milja Kurki in Chapter 3, many people apparently rely on religion to provide the clarity of divine and human authority, the certitude of clearly delineated ethical frameworks, the comforting promise of eternal life, and the succor of likeminded hands to clasp onto in the frightening darkness. These religious worldviews often define themselves precisely around the conjuring of an omnipotent and omniscient God who casts a judge’s eye on humanity while maintaining a direct line of communication with a clerical caste of one form or another who then authoritatively interpret the divine will and intention. Those interpretations are, in turn, transformed by an earthly priesthood into “dogma,” which is used to justify political power of the most unassailable sort. Polish Popes, Iranian mullahs, and Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbis all claim exclusive access to God’s Truth, and all have constructed exquisitely detailed “gardens” that provide ordered meaning based in religious worldviews that drive non-negotiable political commitments.

As powerful as this gardening imagery is, however, it is not the only way of conceptualizing religion’s potential role in the construction of ways of being in the world. Religious beliefs, practices, and systems of meaning are far more diverse than the garden metaphor implies. Radical openness to uncertainty, after all, and to the relational fundaments of human experience are deeply foundational to nondogmatic traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. In systems of spiritual practice explicitly based in values such as detachment, the negation of the self, and the pursuit of wakefulness to the real, the metaphor of religious worldviews as “gardens” is difficult to maintain.

However, the potential grounding of relational worldviews in religious belief and practice is a broad phenomenon that stretches well beyond merely those traditions that are based more in practice than in dogma. In fact, on close examination it turns out that even the most dogmatic of religious traditions can define themselves in deeply seated forms of relational theology. For example, if “God is love” – as Roman Catholic children have been taught to believe from time immemorial – then the divine presence that lends ultimate meaning to human experience is not merely an anthropomorphized celestial “person,” but is instead the relational dynamic of creation itself. The very existence of the human race, in other words, is not merely a sign of God’s love. The mysterious reality of existence is, rather, the very expression and actualization of that love. Individual men and women, created “in the image and likeness of God,” are not enjoined to follow a detailed set of moral and religious laws simply as a kind of cosmic test or challenge by a distant self-interested judge. Instead, these moral and religious laws exist, in the first place, for the deeply relational purpose of knitting the human family together into a Church, into the “mystical Body of Christ.” This identity with the Christ, enacted in the sacramental experience of the Holy Eucharist, is a personal relation with the embodied “Word” of God, sent forth in order to reconcile God’s people to an eternal unity with the deeply benevolent Creator of the universe.

Looked at in this way, even one of the most dogmatic of religions does more than command its adherents to climb a ladder of ontological certainty toward a “God’s eye” vision from which order, conformity, and oppression can be imposed. A religion such as Roman Catholicism is inviting its members into intimate Communion with their God, and thereby challenging its adherents to embrace a form of courageous faithfulness in the face of an apparently inscrutable reality. Those climbing the ladder of religious belief, practice, and commitment may seek to convince themselves that they are heading ever upward to the safety of dogmatic certainty. But the ladder might more accurately be understood as the uncertain and rather treacherous upward path toward the life-defining act of leaping, faithfully, into the unknown.

One could argue, I suppose, that relational worldviews imply their own kinds of “Gods” that pose a threat to human freedom because we don’t really possess the capacity to truly know or resist their effects. But if a relational cosmology is grounded in faith or in the pursuit of what is “really real,” then the unknown itself is the basis of Truth and the human propensity to resistance is ultimately futile. We are, some religious worldviews might suggest, in the act of “becoming” through our relationships not only with each other, but also with that which we cannot measure, define, or know through Newtonian scientific methods.

I will leave others to argue over whether or not the “forest” or the “jungle” are appropriate metaphors for deepening our understanding of relational worldviews. But whatever metaphors we turn to, it seems that religious worldviews can and do span the categories that this volume was designed to highlight and compare. I would say that in this regard much depends on whether, in the words of novelist Sue Monk Kidd, one worships “the God of rescue” or “the God of presence.”¹⁷ But the central point is that a broad-based examination of the role of worldviews in global politics ought to have the welcome effect of clarifying our acknowledgment that religion, in all its diversity, often defines what Katzenstein calls in Chapter 1 the “basic ideas that shape the questions we ask or fail to ask, provide us with explanatory and interpretive concepts, and suggest hunches or plausible answers.”

9.3 Methodological Atheism and Informed Empathy

The stunning diversity of religion as a category of human experience is a central and straightforward reason why religion is implicated in such a broad array of worldviews. However, the analytical use of the category of religion may have been hindered in some ways by the complexity and controversy that can surround the very act of defining the term. Sociologist Christian Smith, for example, offered that “religion is a complex of culturally prescribed practices, based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, which seek to help practitioners gain access to and communicate or align themselves with those powers, in hopes of realizing human goods and avoiding things bad.”¹⁸ Got all that? Looking forward to “operationalizing” it as a “variable”?

William Cantwell Smith ascribes the definitional challenge associated with “religion” not only to the complexity of the object of study, but also to the fact that religion is so often seen by the analysts themselves as a system of ultimate meaning in one form or another. Given that “what a man thinks about religion is central to what he thinks about life and the universe as a whole,” the meaning that “one ascribes to the term is a key to the meaning that one finds in existence.”¹⁹ I have noted over the course of my own career in this field that scholarly communities engaged in the study of religion often include members who are themselves explicitly motivated by their own religious commitments. Controversy over the serving of liquor was a prominent feature of the initial meetings in the 1980s of the “Religion and Politics” Special Section of the American Political Science Association. Tying the complexity of the subject matter directly to the diversity and predilections of those examining it, W.C. Smith concludes that “to hope to reach any agreement … is perhaps to look for a consensus on ultimate questions of man, truth, and destiny.”²⁰

This definitional problem has bedeviled everyone from theorists trying to specify the role of religion in society to Supreme Court justices trying to identify what qualifies for protection (and limitation) under the free exercise and anti-establishment clauses of the US Constitution. But for our examination of religion’s relationship to (and embodiment of) worldviews, a lack of clear conceptual consensus is itself an indication of the depth of religion’s place in the category under examination. Definitional disputes among theorists writing about religion revolve mainly around the degrees to which varying approaches to the subject focus on the communal and institutional aspects of religion, or on its functional properties, or on its ethical or theological precepts. The disputes, in other words, are largely about the very question of exactly how religion and religions constitute and articulate various ways of being in the world, and of understandings of “how the world works.”

Religious traditions vary so extravagantly, one from the other, that some theorists even resist the category and argue that it is “a distorted concept not really corresponding to anything definite or distinctive in the objective world.”²¹ I don’t think we need to go that far in response to religion’s empirical variance, but it is advisable to steer clear, whenever possible, of sweeping pronouncements about the nature of “religion” per se. But again, such a caution serves our purposes well. If we acknowledge that worldviews are variable, then the degree to which, and the ways in which, religion is implemented in the construction of those worldviews can quite appropriately be expected to be variable as well. Even within a broadly defined religious tradition such as “Christianity” or “Buddhism,” diversity of structure, system, function, and ethos can also be significant, in the sense of both large and important.

Given this diversity, and given how often these various traditions rely on mutually exclusive truth claims, one is tempted (I am tempted!) to reject the authenticity of all of the claims and to retreat into rationalist justifications about which interests (presumably materialist) are really being served through religious means. In our examination of religious worldviews, however, it is best to suspend judgment about the validity or even the authenticity of religious claims and assume for the sake of argument that people actually believe – or strive to believe – that which they say they believe. Seth Kunin provided a helpful guide on this point when he extolled “methodological atheism,” or the idea that for social scientists “the claims made by believers themselves about the status of their religion or religious objects should be seen as data to be studied rather than as an authoritative statements about the nature of the object under study.”²²

Some scholars have preferred the term “methodological agnosticism” as a somewhat less dismissive way of approaching the religious beliefs of research subjects.²³ But whether adopting a methodological posture of atheism or agnosticism, “the analyst must assume [for the sake of the analysis] that the object being studied is a social rather than divine product.”²⁴ And, at the same time, social scientists seeking to make sense of religion’s place in social and political settings ought also to heed Ninian Smart’s advice to adopt a method of “phenomenology … that tries to bring out what the religious acts mean to the actors.”²⁵ “This implies,” Smart says, “that in describing the way people behave, we do not use, so far as we can avoid them, alien categories to evoke the nature of their acts and to understand those acts.”²⁶

This posture of “informed empathy”²⁷ seems particularly apposite in the context of specifying religious worldviews. A simple set of thought experiments, involving the three Abrahamic religions, should be enough to make the point. Imagine for a moment that you actually believed as a matter of undoubted fact that Yahweh had purposefully selected the Jews as His chosen people and that a central identifying feature of this unique Covenant was the Jewish people’s right to live perpetually in the Land of Israel. Would that conviction not have powerful effects on how you interpreted the sweep of human history, the appropriate place of the Jewish people in that history, and the very nature of regional conflict and IR?

Imagine for a moment, alternatively, that you actually believed as a matter of undoubted fact not only that Jesus of Nazareth was the unique incarnation of The One True God into human history, but also that this same Jesus would return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead so as to reward the worthy with eternal salvation and consign the unworthy to eternal damnation. Would that set of convictions not have powerful effects on how you judged the nature of human sovereignty over worldly affairs, the finality of physical death, or the role of sin and virtue in human affairs?

Finally, imagine for a moment that you actually believed as a matter of undoubted fact that there is no God but Allah, that Mohammed is His messenger, and that the Qur’án is the direct word of the sole Supreme Being who created the universe, and who calls His followers to follow His mandated law in all aspects of human life. Would that set of convictions not have powerful effects on how you understood the role that this body of law ought to play in human experience and how you might react to the efforts of outsiders to control the social structures and legal systems under which your community of believers ought to live?

To repeat, the adoption of this “empathetic” perspective does not mean that one accepts, in the sense of sharing, the truth of the cosmic, sweeping, and (often) mutually exclusive claims being made by the individuals and communities under examination. To the contrary, it means maintaining a “position of neutrality”²⁸ that allows one to credit in experiential terms the depth of the convictions under study without judging their theological validity. And in so doing, it becomes rather obvious how central religion is in a dizzying variety of contexts to the construction of worldviews. Religion is often at the heart of the processes through which a community’s shared “truth” is enshrined as a kind of epistemological consensus in a given social context. Religion, in all its complexity, can provide the indispensable common knowledge that allows a community to live together with meaning and confidence in what otherwise might present itself as a deterministic or risky world. Perhaps this is why so many social theorists who include religion in their analyses explicitly rely on the concept of “worldview” in order to capture what religion so often comprises and provides.

9.4 Weber and Geertz

Max Weber, to cite perhaps the most prominent of these theorists, grounded his notion of worldview in the individual’s relationship to specific elements of society, prominently including religion. Positing a dynamic relationship between religious ideas and economic behavior, Weber argued that different religious traditions would have different relationships with economic structures and practices, particularly those associated with capitalism. This dynamic was laid out most expansively (and most famously) in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber starts with the observation that “a glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency … the fact that business leaders and owners of capital … are overwhelmingly Protestant [as opposed to Catholic].”²⁹ Weber ascribes this finding to “the permanent intrinsic character of [the two Christian communities’] religious beliefs.”³⁰ And then, as the heart of his argument, he asserts that the characteristically Protestant imperative to provide outward indications of one’s membership in the select and saved requires a form of asceticism and industrious work ethic that is well suited to the spirit of capitalism.

Weber argues, in so many words, that religious beliefs at the individual level have variant relationships with modern capitalist practices, and that out of these particular relationships very different worldviews arise. Attitudes toward worldly economic matters such as thrift, industriousness, investment, trust, and the rest are closely related to religious belief. And those economic values, in turn, deeply influence other aspects of an individual’s (or a religious community’s) worldview, from ideas about appropriate family and social structures, to the setting of political priorities and interests, to convictions concerning the proper ordering of global relations.

These considerations bring to mind the several semesters I have spent over the years in Geneva, Switzerland, leading groups of undergraduate students as they performed academic study of the many international organizations that are housed there. Each and every semester, students would articulate in informal conversations with me a kind of visceral, vulgar Weberianism as they tried to make sense of the stark distinction between their living and working environment in (Calvinist) Geneva and the recreational opportunities afforded to them on weekend sojourns to, say, (Catholic) Barcelona. The students recognized immediately that the all-night adventures of The Ramblas were simply unavailable – virtually unthinkable, really – within the early-rising ethos of Geneva, whose skyline along Lac Leman is dominated by the imposing edifices and twinkling lights of … banks and insurance companies.

Weber’s disquisition on the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, of course, is one of the founding building blocks of modern sociology. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that he applied this same method to other religious traditions as well, finding, in the words of Reinhard Bendix, that “some had an accelerating and others a retarding effect upon the rationality of economic life.”³¹ Turning from Europe to China, for example, Weber argued that the “Confucian man’s … cardinal virtue was to fulfill the traditional obligations of family and office.”³² Embedded in a cultural system of kinship networks grounded in filial piety, followers of the Confucian ethic were at one and the same time sheltered from the potential hardship that provides incentives within capitalism, and oriented toward a form of harmony and social order that discourages the economic stratification that characterizes capitalism. As Bendix sums up the comparison: “the Puritans combined their ascetic conduct with an intensity of belief and an enthusiasm for action that were completely alien to the esthetic values of Confucianism.” “It was this difference,” he concludes, “that contributed to an autonomous capitalist development in the West and the absence of a similar development in China.”³³

Weber performed a similar comparative analysis concerning Hinduism in India. I don’t need to detail that analysis here beyond noting his emphasis on the ways that the caste system and a transient understanding of an individual’s relationship to personal identity and worldly achievement militated against “the incorporation of the acquisitive drive in an inner-worldly ethic of conduct.”³⁴ I should stress, I suppose, that in laying out Weber’s arguments I am not endorsing his views on the relationship between religion and economics – and that relationship’s role in constructing worldviews – any more than I am endorsing any other way of conceptualizing the role of religious belief and practice in establishing what is “really real” about “how the world works.”

Indeed, Weber’s theory seems particularly susceptible to oversimplification (see, for example, my earlier mention of my students’ attempts to account for their personal experience of Europe’s cultural variations). And all of Weber’s statements about how “Protestants” behave, how “Confucian” families operate, and how “Hindus” construct identity are exquisitely open to the charge that he essentializes very complex social phenomena. Nevertheless, Weber’s voluminous writings on religion represent a deeply theoretical effort to ascribe the content of different worldviews, in part, to the content of different religious belief systems. Protestantism, Catholicism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, he argues, have different ways of relating to economic structures because those different religious traditions represent very different ways of defining the ultimate reality underlying human life and human meaning.

For his part, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz explicitly ties religion to the notion of world views (two words for Geertz), or what he also calls “way[s] of seeing.”³⁵ Geertz defines religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”³⁶ The key to this definition is the characterization of religion as a “system of symbols” that serves to “synthesize a people’s … world view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order.”³⁷ These religious world views rest on conceptions of what is “really real,” a commitment to the proper ordering of supernatural and natural experience that the “symbolic activities of religion … are devoted to producing, intensifying, and rendering inviolable.”³⁸

The potential political significance of a “system of symbols” that undergirds “comprehensive ideas of order” should be obvious. Geertz argues that religion, understood in this way, “objectivizes moral and ethical preferences by depicting them as imposed conditions of life, implicit in a world with a particular structure.”³⁹ To cite the metaphor we are using here, this conception of religion imagines a “garden” constructed in intricate detail. The garden’s form, structure and layout are all understood by those who live within its borders as absolute givens of the natural order and profoundly symbolic of the cosmic reality that gives meaning to earthly design. For their religious advocates, then, opposition to homosexuality, say, or insistence on faithful stewardship of creation are not merely “positions” to be argued, equal in epistemological validity to their opposites. They are, instead, “mere common sense given the unalterable shape of reality.” “Religious symbols formulate a basic congruence,” in other words, “between a particular style of life and a specific metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each other with the borrowed authority of the other.”⁴⁰ Political interests grounded in metaphysical worldviews claiming congruence with The Truth are not likely to be particularly open to negotiation, compromise, or (sometimes) even rational justification.

These symbolic systems also produce widely accepted understandings of important aspects of human experience. Questions about the very existence of life itself, the perennial problem of human suffering, and the presence of evil in the world can all be answered through religious conceptions of general order. And, of course, conflict can be (and often is) based in contact between and among peoples whose “experiential evidence for their truth”⁴¹ lead them to differing “conception[s] of the established world of bare fact.”⁴²

9.5 The Sacred and the Profane

Geertz links religious systems of symbols and everyday life through the ultimate meaning that those symbols grant to “common sense” and “order.” Many other theorists, however, have drawn a clearer distinction between two realms of human experience, identifying them most often as the “sacred” and the “profane.” In a seminal work titled The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Romanian historian Mircea Eliade identifies the two realms of his title as two very different “modalities of being,” or “ways of being in the world.”⁴³ “Homo religius,” he argues, “always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, that transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real.”⁴⁴ These manifestations of absolute reality, or “hierophanies,”⁴⁵ drive the ritual orientation and construction of sacred space, space which for adherents to the resulting religious tradition is experienced as “the only real and real-ly existing space” amid “the formless expanse [that] surround[s] it.”⁴⁶

It is important to note here that Eliade is talking about actual physical space, the sacred designation of which powerfully influences the worldviews of those who acknowledge the sacrality of “our world” and its centrality in the cosmos. According to this conception, religious believers are quite literally “viewing the world” either from the confines of a sacred space itself, or at the very least from a frame of mind and spirit that is defined in terms of a very particular sacred space. “Our world,” as understood by adherents, is situated at the center of the universe – indeed, is the center of the universe – given that it is the place where the hierophany took place or where it is ritually recognized and re-enacted. Eliade offers the examples of “an entire country (e.g. Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), [and] a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem)”⁴⁷ as examples of the kinds of sacred space he has in mind.

Indeed, for many Jews, the Land of Israel is idealized as the “geographical center of the universe and the point of contact between the spiritual and material spheres.”⁴⁸ Zionism is one central manifestation of this understanding of sacred space, and the status and destiny of the modern legal state of Israel has resided near the center of contemporary debates concerning Jewish identity, as well as of contemporary constructions of how many Jews understand their place in an often hostile world. There is no Jewish creed, no Jewish Church. There is, instead, a Jewish people, albeit a diverse and complex one. And as a people, Jewish interests tend to revolve around the survival, sustainability, and flourishing of the collective. This is not merely a theoretical or mystical notion, of course, but rather a practical responsibility and duty, carried out through a history of unimaginable suffering, struggle, and forbearance. As Michael Barnett shows in Chapter 5, membership in that people, participation in that enduring history of struggle and survival, is what binds Jews together across vast geographic distances and amid significant diversity in terms of belief and practice.

The Christian religion, obviously, is more creedal in nature. Despite the great diversity of Christianity in institutional, social, and pastoral terms, the vast Christian Church is united in the belief that Jesus of Nazareth represents the unique, direct intervention of the divine into human history. Jesus is, in a sense, the ultimate hierophany, whose own manhood redefined human experience itself as sacred space, and whose own sacrificial death and redeeming resurrection redefined humanity’s relationships with death, eternity, and the divine.

For their part, Muslims valorize Medina and Mecca as paradigmatic sacred spaces out of which grew a people (umma) who should ideally be governed by rulers and legal systems attuned to God’s authoritative message, as contained in the Qur’án. Moreover, the call to pray (toward Mecca) five times a day, as well as the requirement (if possible) to visit Mecca at least once, have the effect of placing “our world” at the center of the universe, a center around which the proper ordering of human affairs ought to be oriented.

Eliade also argues in a vein directly relevant to our purposes here that this spatial cosmology serves to breed communal interests that tend to be exclusionary, geographically based, and absolutist. The idea that “our” communal space, in both physical and symbolic senses, is uniquely sacred and uniquely central to the meaning of human experience is not something that can be easily extended to outsiders or compromised with competing claims. Indeed, worldviews based in conceptions of sacred space often include within them definitions of outsiders as particularly odious and illegitimate: “As ‘our world’ was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work of the gods … so the enemies who attack it are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons, and especially to the archdemon … conquered by the gods at the beginning of time.”⁴⁹ When identity and conflict are defined in this way, it is no wonder that so many theorists and practitioners of IR have tried since at least 1648 to marginalize the role of religion in global affairs. It really can be that disruptive, dangerous, and noncompromising of a force.

No theorist of religion, of course, is more closely associated with the sacred/profane dichotomy than Emile Durkheim. For Durkheim, religion is defined as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a church.”⁵⁰ The whole key to this understanding of religion is its emphasis on function, on the mutually constitutive role of religion and society. Based in an examination of Totenism, and then applied to other religions, Durkheim argues that sacred objects represent both the divine and the group through the group’s shared understanding of the divine. A central function of religious belief and practice, in other words, is actually to form and define the group engaged in the belief and practice itself, and to construct “solidarity” among adherents. As Kunin puts it: “ritual practice serves the social function of validating and strengthening group cohesion.”⁵¹ The whole enterprise, for Durkheim, is definitively collective.

Sacred objects and rituals give meaning to life, but in an even more fundamental way they also function to create the social realities from which a collective can actually have a shared worldview. At its most basic core, this type of religious worldview is defined by the conviction that we are sacred while they are profane; our system of identity and solidarity is based in ultimate reality while theirs, to put it mildly, is not. At the same time, as Durkheim stated in his original definition, this conception of religion’s functional role in constituting society also involves the recognition of “prohibitions” that serve to construct moral ethos and to “devalue the importance of the individual as a mediator for social facts.”⁵² Religion forms identity, defines it in collective terms, and works to focus the collective’s worldview on that which renders its social structures sacred.

History shows us, of course, that these sacred systems of solidarity can, and often have been, closely linked to national identity and state sovereignty. In cases as diverse as Poland, Iran, Israel, India, and Tibet, religious worldviews can define a people’s understanding of their place in the global order and define the interests that the society’s leadership is expected to advance. But in our modern era, it is just as common for religious solidarity to cut across national identities and state borders. Numerous sacred social structures are defined in “transnational” terms as systems of solidarity and belonging that are constructed through shared belief and, perhaps even more profoundly, shared ritual.

I have spent many years, for example, studying the political role of transnational Catholicism in a variety of settings.⁵³ Along the way, I have never failed to be impressed by the consistency of ritual that I have encountered in Catholic communities all across the globe. The order of service, the role of music, and, most importantly, the centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic worship clearly function as experiences of effervescence that construct the Catholic Church, as such, and form bonds of solidarity among more than a billion Catholic adherents worldwide. In a similar way, the transnational Islamic umma is not just knit closer together by the Five Pillars of Islam. It is, in Durkheimean terms, actually constructed by that set of divinely mandated ritual practices that function to engender solidarity and define identity. And of course, in the words of Huston Smith, “Judaism is a faith of a people.”⁵⁴ There is great significance placed within Judaism on the preservation and cohesion of that people, and on the functional construction of that people into a nation. From Abraham’s acceptance of the covenant with God, through the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, to the eventual dispersal in a global diaspora, the national identity of the Jewish people – separate and apart from any other definitions and articulations of sovereignty – has been a basic element of how many Jews have viewed their place in the world.

In this way of viewing religion, then, a “Catholic worldview,” or an “Islamic worldview,” or a “Jewish worldview,” or any other religious worldview is more than a way of seeing the world based on theological tenets. Such religiously defined worldviews are, at a deeper level, ways of being in the world; they are ways of constructing the most meaningful and most basic social structures, and ways of delineating who qualifies for being recognized as part of the sacred order.

The implications of including these religious worldviews in our approaches to global politics can be immediate and profound. Much of modern International Relations theory, for example, identifies survival – in both individual and collective terms – as the overriding “interest” that needs to be protected and advanced in virtually all political interactions. Religious worldviews that do not acknowledge death as final, however, or that do not even conceive of death in particularly negative terms – some even prominently value and reward martyrdom – will be at odds with, and potentially problematic for, systems of global order that assume survival as an overriding value. Common military considerations such as deterrence and the avoidance of collateral damage may look very different if one is viewing this world as a prelude to the next, if one sees earthly death as a moment of clarifying transition to a faithfully anticipated eternal unification with a Divine Being and coreligionists who have previously gone on to their “heavenly reward.”

9.6 Conclusion

Describing what he called “Islamic exceptionalism,” Shadi Hamid wrote that “the tendency to see religion through the prism of politics or economics (rather than the other way around) isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it can sometimes obscure the independent power of ideas that seem, to much of the Western world, quaint and archaic.”⁵⁵ Applying Hamid’s point more generally, I argue here that religious “ideas” – or, more broadly conceived, religious beliefs and practices – have played and continue to play central roles in the construction of politically relevant worldviews in a wide variety of contexts. In fact, rather than claiming that the relationship between religion and politics should be viewed as the former constructing the latter (rather than the other way around), I argue that these two foundational aspects of human life and community relate to each other as mutually constitutive elements in “systems of order,” “ways of viewing the world,” and, most essentially, ways of “being.” According to this way of viewing religion’s place in modern life, beliefs, practices, and meaning that we generally classify as religious in nature are not epiphenomenal or incidental to some other dynamic that is “really going on.” They are not atavistic holdovers that we can either wish away or presume will go away soon. They are, instead, in many places and for many people, the defining features of contemporary life.

To be sure, secularism does seem to be on the rise in some societies and polities,⁵⁶ and it is certainly plausible to imagine that those secularizing dynamics might spread geographically and demographically in the coming years, decades … centuries? But even modern political orders that are based in liberal individualism and that place humanity at the center of individual and collective meaning still have to contend today – and will continue to have to contend in the future – with nonsecular and antisecular elements of their populations that view the world from very particular perspectives. What I have chosen to call religious worldviews – while acknowledging their great diversity – are manifestly still animating the way that many people understand their identity, their interests, and their conception of how the political order should be structured. That being the case, we who purport to illuminate the workings of global politics – or, if you like, International Relations – should take these religious worldviews as seriously as do those who embody them.