The Immanent Frame

The 2010 elections changed a lot about the makeup of Congress, but did they change much about American secularism? A new poll shows partisanship in pulpits is rare, issue-based politics is alive and well, and Islam’s electoral prominence is ripe for future manipulation.

Minnesota politics is a bit, well, different.  But uproar over the place of religion in an election mailing may show that, at last in terms of the stakes of secularism debates, Minnesota’s not so strange after all.

In a country as religious as the Philippines, it would be easy to assume that clerics have a significant hand in driving voting behavior.  Looking at some recent examples and public opinion data from the Philippines, however, complicates this assumption.  It appears, in fact, that the most religious Filipinos are also the most suspicious of clerical involvement in voting.

In taxi cabs and formal interviews, I’ve been told that the study of secularism in the Philippines is a bit of an oxymoron.  Even Catholic clerics and constitutional lawyers admit that the Filipino wall of separation is of indeterminate height. “The Church gets away with a lot here,” as one Catholic subject told me.

As I transition my SSRC research from Senegal to the Philippines, I am constantly ruminating over the question: why compare these two places?  Developing some coherent answer to this inquiry is a crucial task for helping me build theory on the idea of After Secularization.

In between my research trips to Senegal and the Philippines, I will be staying in Cortona, Italy, for a two-week summer school on religion and democracy with the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM). . . . The IWM is hosting a remarkable blend of scholars and students grappling with many of the same questions that drive our SSRC DPDF After Secularization group: religion, democracy, the secular, and modernity.  The chance to spend a couple of weeks with scholars like Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Dipesh Chakrabarty—and in the Tuscan hills no less—is a little slice of grad student heaven.

Ruthie, Grace and David here, reporting live from the IWM International Summer School in Philosophy and Politics in Cortona, Italy. We are here with forty graduate students and post-docs and an inspiring group of faculty from over 20 countries to explore a range of issues related to religion in public life. And over the next two weeks, we look forward to sharing some of our discussions with the readers of The Immanent Frame. Today we would like to talk about an issue we discussed in the first session of our course on “The Role of Faith in Public Discourse,” taught by Nilüfer Göle and Michael Sandel.

As I depart from Senegal, a more important passing has taken place within the Mouride Sufi brotherhood.  Serigne Mouhamadou Lamine Bara Mbacké, Khalife general of the Mourides, died last Thursday.  For a student of religion and politics, the post-mortem patterns of partisan condolence have provided yet more evidence of the powerful place of the Mourides in Senegalese society.

What makes a religious political party? The question is more than semantic in Senegal.  The constitution bars political parties based on religion or sect (Article 3.1), so when a young leader within Senegal’s Mouride Sufi brotherhood, Serigne Modou Kara Mbacké, formed a political party in 2004, the ban was put to a test.

What would FIFA President Sepp Blatter make of the Hand of God? With his declaration that there is “no room for religion in soccer” and that religious gestures could pose “a danger” at the World Cup, maybe Blatter would dub Maradona’s iconic 1986 goal the Hand of Fate.  This all seems perfectly appropriate as I prepare for summer fieldwork studying laïcité in Senegal.