The question “What is religion?” has again been roiling the academy, the courts, and public debate. In 1965, the Supreme Court of the United States opined on this question, deciding the fate of would-be conscientious objectors who would not affirm the existence of God. Relying largely on Paul Tillich, the Court ruled in their favor, expanding the notion of “religious belief” beyond its conventional Western confines. This article reexamines the issues raised in this case by exploring the theology of Paul Tillich, particularly its critique of religion as a separate sphere and its challenge to basic tenets of liberal political theory inherited from John Locke. The article, however, also juxtaposes the religion-expanding aspects of Tillich's thought with his strictures about “demonic” distortions of religion, requiring an excursus into Tillich's notions of the divine/demonic relationship. Tillich's rejection of the compartmentalization of “religion” led him to declare that more religious meaning may be found in putatively “secular” artifacts, such as Cubist art, than in conventionally “religious” symbols and institutions, including the Church. This approach both demands a radically interdisciplinary approach to “religion” and casts a skeptical eye on some putatively “religious” claims. The article concludes by juxtaposing Tillich's anti-essentialist critique of “religion” with more recent, and dramatically different, critiques, particularly those advanced by Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood.

I thank the Leiden Journal of International Law for this opportunity to address the provocative responses by Jean-Claude Monod and Lorenzo Zucca to ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’. In this short reply, I seek to clarify some misapprehensions, as well as to sharpen the differences between us.

The goal of this article is to initiate an interdisciplinary and historical reflection on one of the central preoccupations of our time: the relationship of religion to international order. This current project grows out of my long-standing work on the genealogy of modern internationalism. In my past work, I have argued that internationalists constructed their own disciplines in tandem with their construction of nationalism, to such an extent that modern ‘internationalism’ and modern ‘nationalism’ must be understood in relation to each other; in the present essay, I contend that ‘internationalism’ and ‘religion’ have an equally mutually constitutive relationship. This article seeks to retell the story of international law over the past century through the lens of its relationship to religion – a lens that both overlaps with and differs from that of nationalism. Its historical narrative is rooted in the early twentieth century – a period to which so many of our ‘modern’ cultural conceptions may be traced. Its methodology is broadly interdisciplinary, setting changing international legal conceptions of religion in relation to contemporaneous developments in domains such as sociology, religious studies, and historiography. This is the first piece of a series of projected studies on the construction and contestation of ‘religion’, ‘the secular’, and ‘the international’ over the past century. It is also my first publication associated with the interdisciplinary Religion and Internationalism Project, which I co-direct at Brown University.

International lawyers, especially human rights lawyers, praise the Nationality Decrees decision as a watershed in the progressive expansion of international jurisdiction. Reexamination of the case challenges this understanding. The case proves to have involved a confrontation between rival colonial conceptions: French stress on the intimacy of an imperial tuteur with its protégés versus British focus on consent to subordination. Reexamination also reveals the decision as highly restrained, rejecting a French call for a judicially formulated colonial code. The case's protagonists bequeathed a conflicted conceptual legacy concerning international authority and nationality policy in whose wake debates about today's new internationalism follow. [Un protectorat] reste encore, à quelques égards tout au moins, au dehors, en marge, de façon qu'il y ait un dernier effort, un dernier acte à accomplir pour que ce territoire, qui reste nominalement, par une subtilité juridique, séparé du territoire national, s'y touve enfin réuni.[A protectorate] remains, in certain respects at least, outside, in the margin; so that a final exertion, a final act remains to be performed; in order that this territory which remains by a legal nicety nominally separated from the national territory may be finally united to it.Alfred de Lapradelle, French Oral Argument, Nationality Decrees Case