Sociologically speaking, throughout history religions have played a dual social role. On the one hand, as Émile Durkheim well analyzed, religions have primarily served as a force for social integration, generating and regenerating norms, values and collective identities, which served to maintain both ties of internal solidarity and external animosity towards others. On the other hand, as Max Weber highlighted, religions have also served, in times of crisis and social transition, the prophetic and creative function of stimulating fraternization processes beyond the clan, tribe or society itself. Both functions had their positive side, generating bonds of solidarity and promoting fraternization, as well as their negative side of sacralizing violence and the forced conversion of the other.
Theories of secularization and of modernity had assumed that both functions, although operative in the past, could no longer be performed in differentiated modern societies, making religions increasingly irrelevant to the functioning of the modern world. The active role of various religions in relevant political transformations that took place simultaneously in 1979 in places as diverse as Iran, Poland, Nicaragua, and the United States, forced a rethinking of the potential role of religions in the public sphere of modern societies, processes that I qualified as deprivatization of religion.1
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, perpetrated by Muslim jihadists with immediate global repercussions, forced a reconsideration of the potential role of religions in international geopolitics. Suddenly, governments, international organizations, social scientists, and journalists began to take religion more seriously, albeit for mainly negative reasons, that is, for the power of the sacred to upend secular structures of global governance. The time has perhaps come to also reconsider the potentially positive role of transnational religious communities and institutions in rethinking and reforming global governance structures.
Currently, it is possible to observe both the negative role of certain religions in the configuration of national and international conflicts, as well as the positive role of others in the search for solutions to the many global challenges that are affecting contemporary societies at this time of transition to a new global dis/order, still in a state of uncertain formation.
The role of the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Kirill in sacralizing the present war of aggression against Ukraine as a "just war" and even as a "holy war" is the most obvious case of the latent power of religion in the sacralization of war and sociopolitical violence. But Kirill is not simply “Putin's altar boy”, as Pope Francis called him, but together with Metropolitan Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev he is the ideological author of the political theology of the russkiy mir (world of Rus). In its Russian imperial secular version, the world of Rus includes Greater Russia, White Russia (Belarus) and Little Russia (Ukraine), and the “military operation is justified”, to de-Nazify (i.e., denationalize ), de-militarize and de-Ukrainize the population of Ukraine, forcing them to become “Russians” or “little brothers” of Russia again.
In its politico-religious version, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church carries the title of Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus, which means that he considers Ukraine his own canonical territory and denies Ukrainians the right to form their own Ukrainian churches. (Orthodox, Greek-Catholic or Protestant). The annexation of the Ukrainian territories of Galicia and Volyn, at the end of the Second World War, led to the violent liquidation of the historic Ukrainian, autocephalous Orthodox and Greek-Catholic churches by the Stalinist regime with the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was the only official Church established in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Since 2014, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass have been accompanied by repression by the Russian Orthodox Church as it attempts to re-establish its territorial monopoly.
It must be taken into account that the aspiration to a religious territorial monopoly is not a peculiarity of the Russian Orthodox Church, but rather has been a constant in the religious-political dynamics of the nation-state of the modern age, as a legacy of the Constantinian imperial model of Christianity. , in force in both the Byzantine Empire and the Western Holy Roman Empire. The system of modern territorial states that emerged from the Peace of Westphalia exacerbated the model of religious homogeneity under the cuius regio eius religio principle (the sovereign monarch determines the religion of his subjects). The result was a homogeneously Protestant northern Europe and a homogeneously Catholic southern Europe, in which religious minorities had to convert by force or emigrate by force. In between, three bi-denominational societies (Holland, Germany and Switzerland) were formed with their own territorial divisions made up of pillars, Länder and Protestant or Catholic cantons that lasted until the end of the 20th century. But in reality, the model of state confessionalism and religious territorialization of churches and peoples preceded the religious wars of the modern age, which accompanied the formation of the Westphalian system of sovereign territorial states. In fact, it can be argued that the modern state confessionalization process was initiated in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs with their decision to expel Jews and Muslims, forcing all their subjects to convert to the Catholic faith. Similar processes of ethno-religious cleansing have accompanied the formation of sovereign territorial nation states around the world with the colonial and postcolonial global expansion of the Westphalian system.
The German sociologist Max Weber offered parallel definitions of the State and the Church. Both are institutions that claim territorial monopoly, of "the means of legitimate violence" in the case of the sovereign State, and of "the means of salvational grace" in the case of the true Church (extra ecclesia nulla salus). Modern religious nationalisms are what bring about this fusion of state territorial dynamics and religious monopoly homogeneity, even in the context of millennial religious traditions such as Hinduism or Exile Judaism that were not associated with such monopolistic territorial ecclesiastical dynamics. Similar dynamics of ethno-religious cleansing are observable with the dissolution of multi-religious empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, or Russian) or the formation of postcolonial states on the Indian subcontinent or in Asia between cultures characterized by traditional religious pluralism, or in the Orient. Middle and in Africa. It therefore seems more accurate to attribute this sacralization of ethno-national violence not to religious intolerance per se, but rather to the sacralization of the nation state or modern nationalism fused with or without religion.
In this sense, national-Catholicism, national-socialism, national-communism, national-Hinduism or national-Zionism, despite their enormous differences, share dynamics of sacralization of collective violence against others, in the sense Durkheimian of the sacred, not because of its affinities of religious intolerance, but because of its common national qualifier. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led many analysts, particularly those with secularist leanings, to once again intrinsically associate religious intolerance with sociopolitical violence, recalling the old religious wars of the modern age, but forgetting about the violence. most recent untamed genocide of the 20th century.2 Undoubtedly, the last century brought about some of the most serious collective genocides in the history of humanity. But most of them are not attributable to religious doctrines, but rather to structural dynamics and modern secular ideologies, even if they might also entail traditional ethno-religious conflicting dynamics.
For this reason, the intrinsic association that so many analysts find rather superficially between Islam and political violence is also questionable. In fact, the war on terror, or the global war against supposedly Muslim terrorism, was conveniently used by many states to advance their own imperial or neocolonial geopolitical projects, or to repress their own ethno-religious minorities, as was the case with the national regime. -Russian imperialism in Chechnya or the case of the repression of the Chinese national-communist regime against its Tibetan-Buddhist or Uyghur-Muslim minorities. But this is none other than the Westphalian dynamic of the cuius regio eius religio, in the key of the secular absolutist State.
In this sense, the same international system of nation states, institutionalized in the United Nations, is the source of global disorder when the absolute sovereignty of the State is not limited, either by internal democratization processes, or by international legal norms. The war in Ukraine has made it clear that, in the words of Pope Francis, “the UN has no power.” It has no power because “the great powers”, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, have veto power, which places them above the norms that they themselves are supposed to uphold and protect for the benefit of all. When the country that currently presides over the Security Council allows itself to violate all international norms, the Helsinki Accords and international law with impunity, clearly the entire international system falls into disarray.
The question for all of us is whether we are going to be able to turn this humanitarian tragedy into a kairos moment, that is, at a fair, critical and opportune time, which urges us to create new structures of transnational solidarity that can be transformed into new structures international, capable of facing the great global challenges that we find ourselves with: migratory and refugee movements fleeing all kinds of humanitarian disasters, growing economic inequality and an increasingly precarious subsistence not only in the outer peripheries of the south but also in the internal peripheries of the most developed countries, pandemics that affect the public health of all societies and the growing ecological crisis in large parts of the world caused by the Anthropocene.
The war in Ukraine coming after two years of a global pandemic should not only grab our attention but call us to action. Global challenges require global responses that, obviously, neither the global capitalist system nor the international system of states, the two great structural forces that lead to globalization processes, seem capable of providing by themselves. Using once again the prophetic words of Pope Francis in his encyclical Fratelli tutti: “Also, when I was writing this letter, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly broke out, exposing our false assurances. Beyond the different responses given by the different countries, the inability to act jointly was evident. Despite being hyperconnected, there was a fragmentation that made it more difficult to solve the problems that affect us all. If someone believes that it was just a matter of making what we already did work better, or that the only message is that we must improve existing systems and rules, they are denying reality” (point 7).
The global era we are entering is not the end of history, as some Western modern philosophers insist, but requires the construction of new norms and systems if we are to move from the globalization of reigning indifference to a globalization of fraternity, as advocated by Pope Francis and other religious leaders. The global capitalist system and the international system of states are the two dominant institutional structures, which can only contribute functionally to a globalization of indifference.
Again using the prophetic language of the Pope, "the economy kills." But it is so, not in the sense of the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism, because it is a system that is supposedly based on the universal exploitation of the proletariat to reproduce itself. It kills, because the contemporary global economic system can do without large masses of population in the southern outer peripheries and in the northern peripheries, since it no longer needs them as a reserve of labor force to reproduce itself. Large masses of humanity can be discarded, as an unskilled labor force, having to survive in the precarious subsistence of informal economies. According to Davos jargon, all these people cannot become stakeholders, an interested party in the system. Capitalism today reigns supreme as the system capable of efficiently producing enough wealth to cover the basic needs of all humanity. But the system continues to show its inability to redistribute these wealth equitably. Today, in the midst of the constant expansion of wealth and growing inequality within and between nations, advanced democratic societies already seem incapable of finding political consensus, not only to redistribute wealth more equitably, but also to recognize in solidarity the value and dignity of all people who feel abandoned by both the economic and political systems.
Lately, Pope Francis has made an effort to promote with speeches and actions "the culture of encounter", which is absolutely necessary to overcome the growing polarization -political, ideological, moral, and cultural- that is permeating our democratic societies.3 The promotion of the culture of encounter, at all levels, interpersonal, between communities, cultures, peoples, societies and civilizations, is one of the most urgent ethical-normative tasks of our global era. As always, it is the weakest and the poorest who suffer the most serious consequences of all contemporary global crises. Therefore, "the preferential option for the poor" is not simply a biblical ethical requirement, but is the only appropriate response, both from a Christian perspective and from a realistic position of universal humanism.
Only through the mobilization of the normative resources of social justice, peace, fraternal human solidarity and integral ecology already existing in global transnational civil society, still in formation and in need of greater institutional structuring, can there be hope for a new development model. overall integral. Such a model will first have to emerge from below, from the base of transnational movement and network practices, before they find broader social institutionalization. It is here that global religious traditions and institutions, which in fact already have a transnational structure, can serve to promote a globalization of fraternity.
Despite the dysfunctional nature of many of the religious institutions, which is manifested above all in the still ongoing scandals of sexual abuse and in the still dominant clericalism and patriarchy, religions will have to be taken more seriously, as long as they show themselves capable of to contribute in some way to "the culture of encounter" and to strengthen the bonds of global human solidarity "beyond all borders" and all social divisions. In Durkheimian language, religions could once again serve as a sacramental symbol of a sacred transcendence that has the power to unite people in new bonds of solidarity and global fraternity. From a sociological point of view, such bonds of solidarity are absolutely essential to develop both individually and collectively the strength and courage to respond, creatively and responsibly, to all the pressing challenges that we are facing as humanity. It is an open question whether religions, in dialogue and in collaboration with non-religious groups, will be able to respond to such a common and urgent task. |||
broader social utionalization. It is here that global religious traditions and institutions, which in fact already have a transnational structure, can serve to promote a globalization of fraternity.
José Casanova is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Religion and Theology at Georgetown University (USA).
