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Introduction
The former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, himself a committed Christian, remarked in the late 1970s: “You can't run a country by the Sermon on the Mount.” Yet, referring to the fraught situation in the Middle East, with its continual demonisation of the enemy and endless tit-for-tat killings, my German colleague Heinz-Günther Stobbe observed around the same time: “The Sermon on the Mount is the most realistic text in the New Testament.” The two comments neatly sum up the dilemma of religions in the public arena: the case could be made that their idealism, their promise of transforming society by transcending it, is indispensable to public morality and good government. Yet when such aspirations are turned into a programme, suspicions arise: in India the dharma is being proposed in the form of the Hindutva ideology as the only viable basis of the state, while some Muslims claim that only the implementation of the Sharia can establish a just polity. ‘Political religion’, then, is a term loaded with ambiguities: should religion be instrumentalised by politics, or should it be kept separate from the political sphere? Or alternatively, is it the case that religions of whatever type are constitutively political in their different ways, such that their political orientation will always come to light in the public sphere (May, 1999)? And if any of this is true, how can a social scientist study it?
We would therefore do well to be cautious about addressing the topic of ‘political religion’, whether in the context of Religious Studies, which some see as an illegitimate child of Christian theology, or International Relations, which might be characterised as extending the study of the political institutions of nation states to include the relations between states themselves. The inherited presupposition of both disciplines is that the secularisation and consequent privatisation of religion are fundamental to modernity, that any deviation from this canonical view represents a threat to the normative principles of liberal democracies, and that the politicisation of religion, its re-entry into civil society as a public actor, is some kind of distortion or anomaly whose study can safely be left to those whose interests run to social deviation and sectarianism.
Can the Catholic Church be fundamentalist? Contemporary scholarship has shown that fundamentalism can take other forms than scriptural literalism. It consists in a rationalizing of traditional certainties in the face of pluralism and change. Its Catholic form could be described as “morphological,” residing in the structures of authority and power. Protestant reactions to Dominus Iesus missed the fundamentalist logic implicit in its synthesis of christology and ecclesiology. They praised the reaffirmation of Christocentrism but were dismayed that Methodists and Muslims were portrayed as inferior for essentially the same reasons. The document not only fails to reflect Vatican II's program for decentralizing authority but also overlooks the implications of Nostra Aetate 4 for interfaith dialogue. Its assertion of soteriological and theological superiority raises ethical questions. Dialogue is a religious act of welcoming the Stranger. Its refusal contains a potential for violence.
Ecology has become a religious concern, but its religious significance remains ambivalent, and politically it is open to exploitation by the right and the left. An ecological ethic needs to be related to the justice tradition with its correlative concepts of rights and responsibilities as these apply to “nature,” but it also needs an interreligious foundation. Buddhism and Christianity are able to make complementary contributions toward formulating an ecological ethic. “Justice” in the West has both biblical and Roman origins, but the Western concept of ius may also be correlated with the Indian concept of dharma as universal harmony and order. Justice may also be placed in the larger context of an ethic of care based on disinterested love of all beings and the transcendence of conflict. The concept of responsibility, however, remains central to the formulation of an ecological ethic and poses specific, though complementary, challenges to both Buddhist and Christian traditions.
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