Why Politics Cant Be Freed From Religion

Religion. Power. Politics. Ideas and institutions that have been laden with a baggage of meanings picked up through the course of history and which, unfairly or not, are often defined by these historic and social contexts. In this thought–provoking book, Ivan Strenski unpacks the central concepts and influences of religion, politics, and power, and provides a new theoretical framework to think about what they mean in today s society. In addition to offering radical critiques of the religious and political perspectives of thinkers such as Talal Asad and Michel Foucault, Strenski moves beyond the theory in applying his intellectual framework to a variety of real–world issues, including insights into suicide bombers in the Middle East.

Erudite and engaging, Why Politics Can′t be Freed From Religion provides a timely and highly original contribution to our understanding of these concepts. It tries to dislodge readers from conventional thinking about politics and religion, and in doing so, helps make sense of the complexities of our twenty–first–century world.

Acknowledgments xi

1 When God Plays Politics: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power, and Politics 1

2 Interrogating Religion 8

1. Religion Trouble 8

2. Seeing Religion: Six Common Clichés 11

3. Gagging at the Feast of Two Unexamined Assumptions: Religion, All Good or All Bad 14

4. The Religion–Is–No–Good Cliché 21

5. The Second Set of Two Clichés: Religion Is Belief and Belief in God 24

6. Religion s Private Parts 33

7. Powerless in Paradise 35

8. Two Ways to Eliminate Religion 36

9. Is Religion Our Phlogiston? An Historical Test Case 39

10. Talal Asad s Religion Trouble 42

11. The Trick of Defining Religion 46

12. Owning Religion 50

13. How Durkheim Took Ownership of Religion 55

14. Religion and Its Despisers 59

3 Interrogating Power 62

1. Confronting the Paradox of Power 62

2. How Power Plays Havoc with Thinking about Institutional Violence 66

3. Whom Should We Blame? History on Trial 70

4. History s Helper: We Should Also Blame Foucault 81

5. Problematizing Power in South Africa 84

6. Foucault versus Foucault 88

7. Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Hierarchy 90

8. What More Is to Be Done? Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Social Force 97

4 Interrogating Politics 100

1. Defining Politics 100

2. Where There Is No Politics: Despotism and Totalitarianism 102

3. Autonomous Politics 105

4. Where Our Politics Makes No Sense 107

5. Politics, the Construct 109

6. Two Pernicious Views of Politics 112

7. History Lessons for Professor Morgenthau 116

8. What Constitutionalism Owes the Council of Constance 119

9. The Emergence of the Political . . . from the Religious 123

10. Machiavelli and Luther: Critical Contributions to the Autonomy of Politics 125

11. Foucault s Fault II: Everything Is Political 130

12. The Hidden Fascism of Thinking that Everything Is Political 133

13. Public and Private: No Absolute Line of Demarcation 135

14. Resisting the Panopticon 136

15. Afterword: The Autonomy of Politics and the Nation–State 140

5 Testing Interrogations of Religion, Power, and Politics : Human Bombers and the Authority of Sacrifice in the Middle East 142

1. Is Suicide Bombing Religious? 142

2. Making Too Much of Religion in Suicide Bombing: Islamofascism 144

3. Dying to Make Too Little of Religion in Suicide Bombing: Robert A. Pape 147

4. No Religion in Suicide Bombing: Talal Asad 150

5. How Religion Helps Explain Human Bombing 153

6. Human Bombing Is Catastrophe, but also a Triumph of Secular Immortality 155

7. Human Bombing = Jihad + Sacrifice 160

8. Sacrifice or Suicide? 164

9. But Do Any Muslims Really Think Human Bombers Are Sacrifices ? 168

10. Sacrifice Makes Authority 175

11. How and Why Sacrifice Works: The Authority of Sacralization 176

12. How and Why Sacrifice Works: No Free Gifts 180

13. Concluding Remarks 182

References 187

Index 196

Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including: Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002); Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003); The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006); Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion and Thinking About Religion: A Reader (both Wiley–Blackwell, 2006).

Overall the book is an excellent contribution.   (Political Studies Review, 1 January 2013)

But as a powerful myth–buster of some of the great fallacies about religion and politics, or even as a primer in the study of religion for undergraduates, it works very well and would serve to provoke lively debate.   (Modern Believing, 1 April 2012)

"The book is written in an accessible and engaging style, and readers who are new to the field of religion and politics will find it readable and helpful". (Religion, September 2010)