Deft as this is, there remains a certain ambiguity surrounding any such search for aspects of supposedly universal phenomena. His case studies have a sky-world and gods, and so do meet normal criteria for a religion, bearing within them an engagement with an Eliadean encompassing “non-ordinary reality.” But I have investigated another preconquest situation that appears not to. It is from one of the places Bellah does not write about, southern Africa. For South Africa in early times, I did not need religion in reconstructing how agropastoralists lived and how they apparently saw themselves living.

To rephrase: in the cases Bellah examines, the Carib- and Navajo-speakers and desert aboriginal Australians, it is the gods or spirits and an “other world” that allow us to easily attribute religion to them. But what to do in other cases? Bellah correctly refuses to call “religious” the basic (totemic) phenomena Émile Durkheim examined in Australia and repudiates the notion of a universal, primordial monotheism. Yet he is not so interested in the question of when religion is, or is not, and he recognizes religion in his argument, in fact, by many different criteria.

In southern Africa, ancestors were chiefs and other fathers in the past, whose presence had registered in men’s collective actions and fates. The personal movements of ancestors occurred in “greatness,” bogologolo, a space equally similar to Western “history” as it is comparable to the Dreaming of the Walbiri that Bellah discusses. It is problematic to see religion in it. For one thing, at first, in missionaries’ accounts, the notion of having an old religion was absent in South Africa. Only after basic translations were accomplished and rehearsed in rituals (in church), did the old religion appear as a concept. It therefore began its life as a disjointed series of improbable beliefs, customs, and rites, immediately preceding Christianity or Islam, their corrected versions.

To make this point in tangible form, consider the distance between two phrases, both originating in the same Sechuana words. The first is a phrase people heard from early missionaries, some version of the following: “The chief’s (or the ancestor’s) people will be gathered and their production made fertile and they will have a lovely settlement.” These words meant just that, and might be said in various circumstances, most straightforward, some metaphorical. After the old deployment of patriarchal terms connected to power and to ancestral chiefs uniting men was ended, however, leaving behind the Christians’ use of the same vocabulary, the above phrase became, “God’s people will be saved and dwell in a millennial kingdom on earth (or go to paradise after death).” The same phrase in a different context, so a different meaning: that shift defined the creation of religion in South Africa.

Missionaries had only local concepts and locutions in which to express themselves, and they had difficulties because they did not know the language right away, and because they had not yet enlisted Africans in group behaviors and rituals that would create their world. The vocabulary they wanted to use was already heavily trafficked, and had to do with past chiefs, fatherhood, ancestry, and larger forms of subordination with immediate import; it motivated men and women to endure hardship or go to war. Ancestors and chiefs of the past and in the present formed a latticework of possible affiliations, some of which were activated, and some of which were allowed to die over time. A communal ethos, a common body of oral lore, offered people (married men especially) a set of strategic choices, and in turn conditioned public memory. The life of this ethos blocked Christianity’s way.

Missionaries well grasped the necessity of constructing the sacred realm with existing terms, choosing underused words that might more easily take new meanings. Missionary Robert Moffat protested that he was frustrated because African people had no spiritual realm and were instead utter pragmatists, trusting only of what they could see with their own eyes. There were real forces binding people to the communities they lived in, under which they used the word ancestor (modimo); but no one, single [M]odimo (“God” in the missionaries’ lexicons) governed the world. Yet this was what Modimo was said to be! Thus its introduction as a concept used by Christians required their nullification of its meaning in ordinary interactions. From then on, ancestor and God diverged, two branches from a single concept and word.

The history of this working-out of religion and not-religion, insofar as we know it, unfolded from the later half of the nineteenth century, not before. It was only then that ordinary black peasants in the middle of South Africa midwived the religious domain among themselves, and the process was (in-line with Paul Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method) not instantaneous. After about 1840 one could adopt a new faith and meaningfully protest that one’s loyalty to a chief would continue; after 1880 one could preach as an Anglican and be a Sotho even during wartime (never before); after 1915, one could for the first time be a Christian and Zulu at the same time.

Talal Asad has shown how problematic colonialism makes the whole project of describing what people “believe,” as has Greg Dening. Among archaeologists, the category of cultic or religious (as is well known) is conveniently large, good for grouping together objects whose functions are mysterious. On slender evidence (it seems to me) whole lost societies are imagined to have operated as religious centers. It has often been much the same in ethnographies of African and Polynesian societies (on which archaeologists draw), wherein opaque chains of reference or ritual are grouped together as religion. My view is they may be better positioned within the realms of ideology, politics, and art. The danger in factoring in “religion” to political explanations of preconquest societies is that scholars sometimes imagine that their own lack of knowledge was a native opacity, and so a source of indigenous occult power. The sign of their ignorance slips somehow into the evidence pile.

The Sri Lankan Government has to fulfill its positive obligations under the right to freedom of religion…The right to freedom of religion or belief is a universal right enjoyed by all human beings and therefore by members of all religious communities, whether old or new and whether they have been established in a country for a long time or recently.

In her conclusions, the Special Rapporteur invoked a particular vision of religious freedom that has become dominant among human rights agencies, NGOs, foreign governments, and academics. According to this vision, religious freedom names an ideal social condition that may be reliably reproduced in differing national contexts through the elaboration and enforcement of particular regimes of legal rights—rights which, if properly administered, will protect minority religious communities against majoritarian politics and harmonize diverse religious interests. This vision—which can be seen with particular clarity in documents such as the US International Religious Freedom Act—treats religious rights as apolitical instruments and as legal standards that stand outside of struggles for power and the narrow interests of particular groups. In this vision, religious rights appear as the morals of historical stories, embodying the transcendence or settlement of social discord: they emerge after the Thirty Years’ War, after the American Revolution, after World War II.

However, as several contributors to this forum have pointed out, legal provisions regarding religious freedom do not emerge from history fully formed and self-interpreting. At their core, they are iterations of words and texts, (re)produced and (re)authorized by different persons or groups for different purposes. What they mean depends on local facts.

This contribution expands upon this observation by offering a different story about drafting religious rights in a particular place and time. I will show the ways in which religious rights, as rhetoric, serve not as apolitical instruments, but as indicia of political alliances; not as generic, universalizable norms, but as specific formulations of norms suited to particular moments and in service of particular political programs. In this version of the story, religious rights, rather than conclude conflict and harmonize societies, signpost disagreement.

To see this, one has to begin at the end: to begin with the text of religious freedom provisions and work back. To do so is to treat religious rights not as the solution to the problem of religious strife of persecution, but as a problem itself, or at least as an object to be explained: Why this rendering of rights and not another? Why religious rights at all? Why now?

I explore these questions through a brief illustration from my research on religion and law in twentieth-century Sri Lanka, or, as it was known during the period in question, Ceylon. The “freedom of religion” paragraph in the 1943 “Constitution for a Free Lanka” is similar to provisions for religious freedom contained in other human rights instruments. It reads:

Freedom of conscience and free profession and practice of religion, subject to public order and morality, are hereby guaranteed to every citizen. The [Free Lanka] Republic shall not prohibit the free exercise of any religion or give preference or impose any disability on account of religion, belief or status.

The paragraph was included originally as one of eight discrete paragraphs of “Fundamental Rights” compiled into a “Fundamental Rights Chapter.” Today this paragraph seems unremarkable, even vaguely familiar, a somewhat bland collection of legal guarantees similar to those found in other transnational religious freedom instruments. Yet, in 1943 Ceylon the paragraph was considered not ordinary, but controversial—a carefully crafted protest against empire.

The “Free Lanka” Constitution was a draft independence constitution prepared by a group of Ceylonese politicians who hoped that it might serve as a legal charter under which the British Crown would transfer powers of self-government to a local Ceylonese parliament. Unlike other drafts prepared at the time, it was not produced in consultation with British officials. It was the work of a cohort of young nationalists who rejected the idea that an outgoing British government should “give” to Ceylon the legal charter that announced its independence.

The inclusion of a section on fundamental rights indexed the drafters’ anti-colonialist nationalism. In the 1940s, fundamental rights were taboo for Crown constitution-makers. British legal advisors who participated in the drafting of independence constitutions followed a Colonial Office policy regarding “bills of rights”: they were not to be included. As one influential British constitution-maker of the period put it, “[A]n English lawyer is apt to shy away from [Fundamental Rights] like a horse from a ghost.” Officially, British legalists opposed justiciable bills of rights because they were not part of modern English law and because such rights might undercut parliamentary sovereignty by requiring that future legislators adhere to the political values of the present. Unofficially, the British recognized an inconvenient friction between “bills of rights” and the colonial project as a whole: if the Crown were to acknowledge and entrench fundamental rights as absolute and binding on governments, it would risk exposing the illegitimacy of colonialism more generally, insofar as colonial governments acted without consideration of such rights.

The drafters of the Sri Lankan religious freedom provision recognized this and framed religious freedom as a fundamental right, in part, to amplify its anti-colonialist tenor. In speeches, newspaper articles, and letters to overseas’ organizations such as the Indian National Congress, the drafters directly linked the push for fundamental constitutional rights with the campaign for independence from British rule. These advocates claimed that the British, as participants in the newly-formed allied “United Nations,” were bound by the “human rights” expressed in the “Declaration by the United Nations.” In a manifesto drafted slightly later, the drafters of the Sri Lankan religious freedom provision even outlined a program of “five freedoms” for Ceylon—deliberately echoing Roosevelt’s famous fourfold formulation—of which the first was “The Freedom from Foreign Rule.”

By articulating religious freedom through the idiom of fundamental rights, drafters gestured towards sources of legitimacy that were broader than (if not directly dominant over) the British Crown. They plotted religious rights, and their constitution as a whole, within a legal-philosophical terrain that treated rights not as benevolences extended by rulers, but as guarantees that conditioned the legitimacy of rule itself: governments did not authenticate rights; rights authenticated governments. This alternative approach to the legitimacy and the origin of rights had radical implications. On the one hand, drafters were able to (and did) criticize the colonial government’s legitimacy by accusing it of failing to grant adequate fundamental rights to those who lived in Ceylon. On the other hand, they simultaneously claimed as a fundamental right, “the right to independence and a free constitution.”

The inclusion of religious rights as fundamental rights also targeted a more immediate, local audience. The paragraph on religious freedom was designed in opposition to another paragraph on religious freedom—one framed under the guidance of Ivor Jennings, one of Britain’s leading constitutional scholars at the time and the author of the derisive assessment of fundamental rights quoted above. In a separate constitutional draft, Jennings had proposed to ensure religious freedom by placing certain minimal limits on the lawmaking powers of parliament. In his version, religious freedom was to be secured by preventing lawmakers from enacting bills that would confer advantages or disadvantages on particular religious communities, impinge upon the “free exercise” of religion, or “alter the constitution of any religious body.” When compared with Jennings’ formula, it wasn’t only the inclusion of “fundamental” religious rights that distinguished the nationalists’ draft, it was the nature of the rights chosen. Whereas Jennings rendered religious freedom through a series of negative legislative prohibitions, the nationalists framed religious freedom in terms of positive as well as negative liberties, prescribing not only limits on government’s powers, but guarantees of state protection for religious lives—limits and guarantees that applied not only to legislatures, but to all agents and actions of the Republic.

The politics of rights-writing extend even further. Jennings modeled his religious freedom paragraph on provisions contained in the Ireland Act of 1920, a law ratified by the British parliament, which, while permitting limited Irish “home rule,” maintained London’s claims to the island. In a contrasting move—which would have undoubtedly been recognized by Crown administrators at the time—the nationalists’ paragraph on religious freedom took its language from the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, a document that aimed to establish total Irish independence from the British. As one of the Ceylonese drafters put it, the “Free Lanka” Constitution drew from a text that effected in Ireland “a definitive break with the past” and “conduct[ed] what, in law, was a revolution.”

We can now view the nationalist’s construction of religious rights in a new light: as a polemic against Jennings’ and an invocation of alternate discourses from Europe, the U.S., and India; as a desire to mark particular distinctions and affinities (with Ireland in 1937 and not 1920, with the allied United Nations and not Britain alone); as an effort to treat constitutions not as something given to a nation by colonial governments, but as something claimed by its citizens. The legal syntax of religious rights, read against the grain, historicized, reveals the very thing that rights-discourse obscures: the fragile, contingent, interested, political nature of religious rights, and the embeddedness of rights discourse in larger local, regional, and global struggles for power and control.

The nationalists’ paragraph of religious rights was not included in Ceylon’s independence constitution. And this is part of the story too. What determined the shape of religious rights in 1940s Sri Lanka (and elsewhere in Southern Asia) was not simply a concern with the importance of resolving religious disputes or protecting religious communities, but a concern with making sure that the language chosen signaled the appropriate alliances and echoed the appropriate politics. In Ceylon, where the handover of power occurred exclusively by way of negation with the Crown, colonial politics prevailed over anti-colonial politics and Jennings’ draft, rather than the nationalists’ draft, served as template for the 1948 Ceylon Constitution. In India, where anti-colonial movements had much greater influence on the process of decolonization, a new, more nationalistic constitution (completed by a sovereign Constituent Assembly just after independence) cast religious freedoms in the idiom of fundamental rights. In each case, the rhetoric of religious freedom bears the marks of struggle, perhaps more than resolution. It imprints the politics of the 1940s: the politics of fundamental rights, the politics of colonial resistance, and the politics of constitution-making in the twilight of empire.

These are strong claims with powerful appeal. In India too, national narratives would trace today’s secular democracy to the foundational moment when religious freedom—taken in a broad sense, at least—was established as a political ideal. Many regard Indian secularism to be deeply rooted in an ideal of equal respect for all religions. The annual reports issued by the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom over the past several years credit the Indian achievement by noting that the constitution protects religious freedom. But they also observe that laws at the state level have restricted this freedom. The 2010 Report cites legislation restricting religious proselytizing, which it describes as “‘anticonversion’ laws,” but which are properly known as Freedom of Religion acts.

The Report’s choice of nomenclature glosses over an important debate about the meaning of religious freedom in India. Many critical observers of Indian debates over conversion argue that to interpret religious freedom to include a right to proselytize, as is normative in American foreign policy and human rights law, is to impose “a Western conception of religion and religious freedom on the rest of the world.” They argue that religious freedom so construed favors “proselytizing religions,” like Christianity, over “non-proselytizing religion,” which is more typical to India.

I will not dwell on this line of argument here except to note that it has a long and respectable pedigree. Far from confined to the Hindu Right, it is integral to a prominent tradition of Indian secularist thought: the Gandhian tradition, first articulated during the 1920s. This explains the fact, also glossed over in the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, that many “progressive” Indians support restrictions on proselytizing. In an important sense, the Indian secularist imagination took shape as an intervention in the politics of religious freedom.

What is the politics of religious freedom? As others in this series have remarked, the question hinges on what we take religion to be. Critical reflection has called into question whether it is possible to produce a sufficiently neutral definition of religion to allow religious freedom to be administered to all persons equally. But this is more than a question of majority bias—important as this question is, more is at stake than whether religious freedom is interpreted in such a way as to privilege Christians over Hindus, or Hindus over Christian and Muslim minorities. We must ask what is foregrounded when we speak of religion and what forms of politics our talk of religion might exclude. This is particularly true when we consider the politics of religious freedom outside Europe and North America.

The International Religious Freedom Reports on India only hint at this larger story. Untouchability is illegal in India, but members of the Scheduled Castes or Dalits—castes formerly referred to as “untouchable”—continue to face discrimination and violence regardless of their religious affiliations as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist. Their struggles for equality make their appearance in the State Department reports only briefly, when they involve religious conversion: “some Dalits who sought to convert out of a desire to escape discrimination and violence encountered hostility and backlash from upper castes.” But Dalits are subject to discrimination, even by their co-religionists, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim. A mere change of religious affiliation does not bring escape from caste-based discrimination. So just what kinds of practice are we talking about, using this imprecise language of “religious conversion”? What forms of political practice does our attention to religious freedom conceal?

I want to draw attention to the different forms of political struggle that have come to be sheltered under the language of religious freedom in India, but that are also obscured by it. By considering the Indian case from the vantage point of caste, I also hope to provoke a rethinking of the truism that religious freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. Critical reflections have taught us that the category religion is neither natural nor universal, but derives from a modern, European history. The history of religious freedom in India is therefore a history of (partial, incomplete) translations. I cannot do justice to this complex history in this brief post (see more in my contribution to this volume). Instead my aim is to highlight the problem of translation.

From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, the category of religion organized the colonial policy of the British government in India. It informed the colonial policy of religious toleration, and it informed the practice of extending political representation to Indians as members of communities. Indian political elites learned to speak this language of religion, and to invoke their right to religious freedom against the intrusions of the colonial state.

But in India the English-language discourse of religion was specific to the civic arena of colonial politics. Scholars have often remarked upon the divided or “bilingual” quality to colonial politics: the civic arena, which was organized by a quasi-liberal political idiom, was confined to a relatively small circle of social actors—the English-educated elites—particularly when they addressed their British rulers. Outside this narrow arena, political effort in colonial India was organized by vernacular idioms that reached deeper into Indian society and drew upon a longer history on the subcontinent. Scholars often resort to using a religious vocabulary to describe the vernacular idioms of politics outside the civic arena. But to do so obscures the labor of translation that was required when Indian actors represented their political struggles before the state.

Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, those judged to belong to low or “untouchable” castes took part in what I refer to as “ritual-political” struggles for dignity, respectability, and equality of treatment with (Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu) upper castes. Ritual-politics targeted the “meticulous rituals of power” that constituted certain caste groups as subordinate. Low castes were prevented from adopting the dress or ceremonial of superior castes, were required to show prescribed forms of deference in their postures and their forms of greeting, and were often excluded from equal access to common spaces. In the ritual-political initiatives of the low castes, these distinctions were loci of resistance, together with restriction from use of common wells and vessels, exclusion from common schools or education, debarment from owning land, forced obligations to perform demeaning tasks, and unpaid labor.

Some of these ritual-political initiatives—I have in mind the shuddhi activities associated with the Hindu reform organization, the Arya Samaj—came to be identified as “religious conversion” and, during the 1920s, became the focus of national debates over religious freedom. For the members of “untouchable” castes who actively pursued shuddhi into the first half of this decade, shuddhi was important not because of any nominal change of religious identity it brought about, but because of the way it could be made to serve the ritual-political struggle against caste oppression. But in the 1920s, Indian elites translated this politics of shuddhi into the language of religious freedom: they debated whether religious freedom should protect shuddhi “proselytizing,” or whether “proselytizing” posed an intolerable threat to peaceable relations between (in this case, Hindu and Muslim) religious communities in India. As elites translated shuddhi into the language of religion and religious freedom, the struggle against caste inequality dropped out of sight.

A great deal has changed in the politics of caste and in the politics of “conversion” between the 1920s and today. As this brief history of religious freedom in India suggests, we must ask not only what kinds of politics the active promotion of religious freedom in India might facilitate, but also what forms of politics and modes of collective action it might foreclose.

—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

The right to religious liberty is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies that guarantees the peaceful co-existence of religiously diverse populations. While all members of a polity are supposed to be protected by the right to religious liberty, religious minorities are understood to be its greatest beneficiaries in the protection it accords them to practice their beliefs freely without fear of state intervention or social discrimination. Conventional wisdom has it that religious liberty is a universally valid principle, enshrined in national constitutions and international charters and treaties, whose proper implementation continues to be thwarted by intransigent forces in society such as illiberal governments, religious fundamentalists, and traditional norms. Insomuch as the Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, are supposed to be afflicted with the ills of fundamentalism and illiberal governments, then the salvific promise of religious liberty looms large. In this brief post I would like to question this way of thinking through a consideration of the career of religious liberty in the modern Middle East (for a fuller development of the arguments here, see my forthcoming article, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History).

As I will show, far from being a universally valid, stable principle, the meaning and practice of religious liberty have shifted historically in the Middle East, often in response to geopolitical struggles, the expansion of modern state power, and local regimes of socio-religious inequality. Rather than treat the history of the Middle East as simply one of aberration from the norm of Western tolerance, in what follows I would like to consider how this history makes us rethink the normative claims enfolded in the current advocacy of the right to religious liberty and the universal good it is supposed to facilitate. In offering these reflections, my intent is neither to promote nor to reject the right to religious liberty but to force us to consider the contradictions and paradoxes that lie at the foundation of this much coveted right.

Let us consider briefly the historical trajectory of religious liberty in the late Ottoman Empire that offers an interesting contrast to its historical unfolding in Western Europe. The modern conception of religious liberty—with its attendant notion of individual conscience and belief as the proper locus of religion—was unknown in the Ottoman Empire until well into the mid-eighteenth century. As is well known, under the Ottoman millet system “the people of the book” (Christians and Jews) were granted limited collective autonomy over certain juridical affairs (including issues of marriage, family, and worship) but were otherwise treated as social and political unequals of Muslims. This juridical autonomy was one of the primary ways in which the Ottomans managed to rule over an immense diversity of religious faiths for over six centuries. Importantly, this “nonliberal model of pluralism” was different from the liberal model in that each religious community’s autonomy was justified not in terms of groups versus individual rights, but in terms of a political order in which difference was paramount. The Ottomans did not aim to politically transform difference into sameness as does the modern nation-state; instead various contiguous religious groups were integrated through a vertical system of hierarchy in which Muslims occupied the highest position. Importantly, the liberal individualist notion of civil and political equality that makes the modern conception of freedom of belief possible was not the paradigm in this pre-modern period.

Things of course started to slowly change with the birth of the modern state wherein the terms “majority” and “minority” came to serve as constitutional devices for resolving differences that the ideology of nationalism sought to eradicate, eliminate, or assimilate. The Ottoman Empire formally adopted the right to religious liberty in 1856 (under the famous Hatt-i Hümayun decree) largely under European pressure. This pressure was far from a benign attempt on the part of Europeans to promote religious tolerance in Ottoman lands: their own record toward “Christian dissidents” much less non-Christian minorities was hardly tolerant at the time. Notably, the European pressure was a product of long-standing geopolitical struggles between Christian European states and the Ottomans. Christian European rulers had made repeated attempts throughout the sixteenth century to assert their right to protect Christian minorities within Ottoman territories. As long as the Ottoman Empire was strong it was able to accommodate these pressures without compromising its sovereignty, but once Ottoman power started to decline it was unable to resist Western European incursions on behalf of Ottoman Christian groups. As early as the sixteenth century, Ottoman rulers had granted special privileges—known as “capitulations”—to Western European traders that ensured a considerable degree of self-government in matters of criminal and civil jurisdiction as well as freedom of religion and worship. Eventually, as Ottoman power declined, these privileges came to apply not only to Western traders but also to European missionaries and eventually indigenous Ottoman Christian communities (what were then called “Eastern Christians”). Notably, no parallel privileges existed for non-Christians residing in territories ruled by Christian empires at this time. Macolm Evans, in his magisterial history of the right to religious liberty, notes, “Within this framework, the role of Western European States as protectors of the religious freedom of their subjects within the Ottoman domains easily elided into a claim entitling them to champion the liberties, religious and otherwise, of all Christians in the Empire.”

When Ottoman rulers adopted the modern conception of the right to religious liberty in 1856, the fate of non-Muslim communities in the empire was only formally but not substantively transformed. As historians of the late Ottoman Empire point out, for the Ottoman rulers the right to religious liberty served as a dual means to fend off increasingly powerful Christian missionary movements on the one hand, and to shore up the Islamic character of the empire on the other. The empire had already lost large parts of its territory (one-third by 1878), and the Ottoman reformers were eager to bring Christians who had become protégés of foreign states (under the system of capitulations) back under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman state. For many Ottoman Christians, however, the right to religious liberty served as a means of claiming Western protection against systemic discrimination, in the process transforming their identity and self-understanding.

In contrast to the Ottoman rulers and Ottoman Christians, religious liberty meant something quite distinct to the European missionaries who had considerably expanded their activities in the Muslim world by the nineteenth century. For these missionaries, religious liberty was a crucial means for securing the right to proselytize freely among Muslims and Christians without constraint from existing laws and prohibitions against religious conversion. In Egypt, for example, Euro-American missionaries, who had failed to win converts among Muslims, concentrated their energies on Coptic Orthodox Christians whom they had long regarded with disdain and outright contempt as practitioners of a depraved form of Christianity. Importantly, American and European missionaries enjoyed the protection of British colonial authorities in Egypt, and the colonial period (1882–1918) was the apex of missionary activities in the region. The advantages accorded to Westerners under the Ottoman capitulations proved to be crucial for the missionaries in gaining access to Egyptian rural and urban populations. These missionaries made ubiquitous use of international diplomacy and colonial and foreign offices of Anglo-American governments in their cause, internationally advocating for the adoption of religious liberty in forums as diverse as the League of Nations, the Paris Peace Conference, the U.S. State Department, and the British Foreign Office. The recent passage of the International Religious Freedom Act by the U.S. Congress (1998) to promote the right of religious liberty (particularly Christians) in the Middle East must be placed within this long geopolitical history in which Western powers have often violated the principle of state sovereignty under the guise of promoting religious tolerance. No non-Western nation-state in modern history has been able to exert the same pressure to advocate the rights of religious, racial, or ethnic minorities living in the Western world.

Given the history I have tracked here, it is important to realize that the meaning of religious freedom has varied historically depending on the geopolitical position of the players in the Middle East. Furthermore, the career of the right of religious liberty has hardly been one of secular neutrality in the Middle East. Through much of its modern history, the right to religious liberty has served as a means to either promote campaigns of religious proselytization to win Christian converts, or to consolidate the majoritarian ethos of the emergent modern state. This history forces us to consider how religious liberty is not simply a juridical means of protecting the individual believer from state coercion. Rather, crucially, it is a technique of national and international governance whose proper exercise has always entailed realpolitik concerns.

One may ask at this point, how have the religious minorities of the Middle East been affected by these geopolitical struggles over religious liberty? The answer to this question of course varies depending on the history of each nation-state in the region. If we take the example of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, the largest Christian population in the Middle East, one would need to start with the history of the longstanding rivalry and struggle between Western and Oriental Orthodox Christianity (of which Coptic Christianity is a part). Throughout much of modern history, starting with the Roman Catholic Church, Western Christendom has continued to view Coptic Christianity as a primitive form of Christianity whose salvation could only come from the West. This view was further entrenched by the wave of Protestant missionaries, initially sent from Europe (Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Lutherans) and later the United States (Presbyterian Evangelicals), none of whom had success with Muslim converts and concentrated their energies on the Copts. In light of this rivalry, it is not surprising that Coptic Christians historically resisted European offers of patronage to “protect and represent” the Copts against Muslim rule. Thus, unlike, for example, the Maronite Christians of Lebanon who made strong alliances with French colonial powers, the Copts were at the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle against the British and were equal players in the shaping of the nationalist project in the 1940s and 1950s.

Despite this distinguished history of Coptic resistance and the enshrinement of the right to religious liberty in the Egyptian constitution, Coptic Christians have continued to suffer from various forms of formal and informal discrimination in postcolonial Egypt. In recent years, the discourse of religious liberty has become a dominant idiom in the Coptic struggle against social and state policies that marginalize Copts on the basis of their religious identity. In this struggle, however, religious liberty once again is not a stable signifier but means very different things to different groups.

At the heart of the contested meaning of religious liberty in Egypt is a political system that has enshrined the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the Coptic community and created a church-state entente that makes it difficult for secular-lay Copts to change the terms of debate. As a result, the Coptic Church tends to deploy a communitarian understanding of religious liberty that serves to consolidate its authority over the religious and social life of its followers. This conception sits in tension with an individualist notion advocated by secular human rights activists grounded in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), both of which privilege notions of personal conscience, belief, and choice. The Euro-American Coptic diaspora, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Christian evangelical global network, champions a third concept grounded in Article 27 of the ICCPR that foregrounds a collective conception of religious freedom as a right of minority groups. Finally, the Egyptian government promotes its own narrow conception of religious liberty aimed at securing the Islamic character of the Egyptian nation and national-security interests.

It would be wrong to assume that religious liberty consists of simply protecting certain groups or individuals from the exercise of state power (that is, drawing the separation between church and state firmly and resolutely). The people who are supposed to benefit most from the modern principle of religious liberty—namely, religious minorities—are not merely protected from abuses of state power but are also transformed by virtue of their subjection to the calculus of state and geopolitical power in unique and unpredictable ways. The shift, for example, from a group-based understanding of religious liberty to an individualist one in international legal discourse is more than a conceptual shift; it also affects the substantive meaning and practice of religious liberty as well as the kinds of subjects who can speak in its name.

In concluding this post, let me point out that these contrastive deployments of religious liberty are often read as the cynical instrumentalization of an otherwise noble principle in the service of realpolitik or corrupt ends. Seen in this way, the principle itself—its logic, its aim, and its substantive meaning—remains unsullied by the impious intentions of the empires, actors, and states that sought to promote or subvert it. Such an argument needs to be complicated for several reasons. As I have shown, far from being a measure of a culture’s intolerance, religious freedom has been tied from its very inception to the exercise of sovereign power, regional and national security, and the inequality of geopolitical power relations in the Middle East. These differential meanings must be understood, I want to suggest, not simply as opportunistic deployments of a single noble principle but as reflective of the contradictions and paradoxes internal to the conceptual architecture of the right to religious liberty itself and its global history. Insomuch as the right to religious liberty is enabled by conditions of geopolitical inequality and differential sovereignty between the First and Third Worlds, it behooves us to rethink the global good its advocates often promise to all peoples of the world. Indeed, if the universal promotion of religious liberty has been ridden with colonial and neocolonial agendas, then how does one grapple with the legitimate and important question of providing protections to religious minorities across the Western and non-Western divide? What other procedural, legal, and social mechanisms do modern polities make possible that can be separated from the exercise of geopolitical domination, interests, and power? Is such a separation possible not just conceptually but practically given the intractability of politics from all human rights struggles of our times?

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NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having a dawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

NS: Do you think something had to change in the minds of people to build this kind of movement? Take the assassination of Anwar Sadat, compared to the uprising against Mubarak. One had machine guns and grenades, and the other had millions out in the street, mostly peacefully. What accounts for the difference?

TA: Well, it isn’t as if the recent events were totally without precedent.

NS: No, there had been decades of organizing—and, of course, there was the example of Tunisia.

TA: There had been strikes and demonstrations for a long time, and there was the Kefaya movement, although it was rather limited and somewhat elitist. But peaceful protests in the past have not attracted much attention from the Western media. I do think things have changed, but I don’t think it was quite like a conversion, so to speak, nor was it all pre-arranged and carefully thought out as a revolution. In some cases, people discover that they’ve got some power they didn’t think they had—even a technique that they don’t intentionally develop, but which they suddenly find themselves with and begin to understand. Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

NS: Does the sense of suspicion that you were talking about fit into those comparisons? Is it like jealousy in love, or doubt in religion? How uniquely Egyptian is it?

TA: I’ve been thinking of it as something intrinsic to revolutionary situations. If you look back even to the French Revolution, and certainly to the Russian Revolution, that’s exactly what always happens. The revolution eats its own children, as the saying goes—partly because there’s so much at stake. There are so many enemies, and you don’t know who they are or who will do what. I see it simply as part of such a situation, which can never be resolved by final answers because it is always generating new questions on one side or another. No revolution is ever finished.

NS: Can you say more about how that suspicion took form in Cairo?

TA: I had a discussion with some friends of mine just before the March 19 referendum, and all the left-wing ones were saying that they’d be voting no. I remember thinking that it doesn’t quite add up. To say no would be to say that there would be no elections in September for the national assembly as originally planned, and that the army would stay on ruling the country for another year and a half. And yet these same people had already said that they didn’t trust the army! “Yes,” they said, “but we want the army to be replaced by a committee of three civilians.” But you know that’s not going to happen, I said. So there seems to be a certain inconsistency here: one becomes so suspicious about some possibilities that where one should be suspicious one isn’t.

NS: Since coming back to the United States, have you noticed a shift in how the West perceives the Muslim world?

TA: Well, I don’t read newspapers regularly—so you might be in a better position to answer that than I.

NS: Really? Why don’t you read newspapers?

TA: It’s not that I have any sound reason for it. I haven’t read newspapers for thirty years because I find that, for some reason, they tend to break up my mind. They write about so many different things, and you’re always going from one thing to another, and then on to another, unrelated to the last. I like to read journals—weeklies. I also watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and some of the news programs on Russia Today. Listening to TV newscasts is less disruptive, strangely. So I’m not sure I can adequately answer your first question as to whether there has been a change in Western depictions of the Muslim world or not.

NS: I suppose I’m thinking about the difference between the images we saw of the “Arab Street” in Tunis and Cairo and, say, those during the Danish cartoon controversy—

TA: Shouting, and the rest.

NS: Yes, shouting, and burning flags, intense violence, people getting killed and killing each other—this sort of self-immolating fury. And then, suddenly, we have this other set of images, where two dictators get knocked off in the space of a few months, in a relatively orderly and impressive way.

TA: I think one should distinguish between the cartoon affair, which mostly involved Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Western media haven’t been interested in the long history of political protests and strikes in Egypt, say, as they have been in the sexy cartoon affair. The significance of the current uprisings is not just that they are peaceful. It’s that they indicate a major unsettling of a region strategically crucial to Western powers.

NS: What do you think made the Danish cartoon incident such a crisis?

TA: I’ve written about this at length in several places a couple of years ago. I think it was partly the continuing obtuseness of liberals, especially in Europe—liberals who are almost never consistently liberal. That particular scandal was unfair to the immigrants, and somewhat hypocritical. Liberals like to say that everything should be up for criticism. But we know it isn’t. And now in the US we have a state that is increasingly invading our privacy, and there seems to be very little resistance to that from liberal intellectuals. Anyway, shouldn’t we be more disturbed by the intellectual undermining of things we think of as eminently rational and decent? We should be ready to ask ourselves whether perhaps they’re not quite as rational or decent as we thought. But instead of learning how to deal with immigrants as part of our society we think of them as invaders.

NS: It sounds like the revolutionary suspicion that you were talking about earlier—seeing enemies everywhere except where it matters most.

TA: Normally, the element of hypocrisy in itself is not terribly interesting. What interests me more is that the cartoon scandal raises questions about how we think of freedom, including religious freedom, and about the language that is used to defend some of the things we think of as most valuable, if not sacred, to us.

NS: In the case of the cartoon controversy, for instance, free speech.

TA: Yes, if you want to put it that way.

NS: What’s being asserted, then, when Western, secular liberals claim that a cartoon about Muhammad is free speech and shouldn’t be apologized for? What is encoded in that claim?

TA: I think one thing that’s encoded there is a certain attitude toward religion in general, toward Islam in particular, and also the attitude that nothing is sacred. But there is also a sense of “these wretched immigrants who don’t understand our culture.” The encoding in this whole cartoon affair was a secularist one, which categorized the cartoons as free speech, even if they were deliberately provocative—not just deliberately provocative, but insulting. Why do it? What’s the motive? I’m talking about speculation and suspicion; what is the motive for wanting to attack Muslims? Why not just say, “If you riot in the streets or kill somebody, I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer the consequences under the law”?

NS: Well, wasn’t there a principle at stake: the right to provoke if one so wishes, and to criticize religious beliefs?

TA: Yes, but why do we want to exercise that right in some cases and not in others? I’m not just after prejudice, but the morphology of our provocative choices. There was much talk, sentimental and romantic, of a duty to fight for the right to free speech. As soon as an incident like this happens, we’re immediately regaled with stories about Bruno at the stake, and the Catholic Church, and so on. One doesn’t quite have to think in these terms. Our problems are not medieval problems. The challenges are not the same. For God’s sake, let’s think clearly! All this complaining about religious dogmatism—we know very well that some of these secular critics are about as closed-minded as you can get on all sorts of issues. Even as eminent a theorist as John Rawls says that certain kinds of reasoning should not be allowed into the domain of politics because all they do is create irresolvable conflict, so that only what liberals deem rational can be allowed to enter public space. Is it the case that religion always produces conflict that can’t be resolved peacefully? Doesn’t secular provocation—“fighting words”—lead to violent conflict? Does every conflict in society have to be “resolvable”? Of course there have to be limits on provocation.

NS: What about the election in the Palestinian territories of Hamas, or even the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood right now in Egypt? There’s this incredible suspicion right now in the West, which views these factions as unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we’ve taken political measures to suppress them. Is that a kind of censorship, too?

TA: Yes, I think you’re right. The need to control and predict non-Western movements is what it’s partly about. But let me give you an example of what I think happens, mistakenly, in the explanations secularists give of the Muslim Brothers. The Brothers’ ideas are really, in many respects, in a state of flux. The younger members often contest or disobey the directives of their leaders. There are different currents within the movement itself. Their present situation is also an expression of the fact that—and most people in the West don’t know this—the Muslim Brotherhood was savagely repressed by past Egyptian governments for 60 years. They have been put in prison, hanged, tortured, exiled. I say this not because I think one should be sympathetic to them because of what they’ve suffered, but because, like so many people who have suffered, they have developed an instinct for mere survival. In my view, having talked to some of them, simply how to survive politically, as an organization, is what their leadership has learnt best over time. Their minds are focused on that aim and have become rigidified. They’re not able to think freely enough yet—about freedom of thought, speech, and action—to take advantage of the new situation.

NS: Perhaps, when repression is involved, suspicion can turn to paranoia.

TA: Yes, for both persecutors and persecuted. Because the Muslim Brothers have contradictory positions and are in many respects confused, my friends in Egypt say, “Ah, you see? They say one thing and mean another! One member says this and another says that!” What could quite reasonably be seen as fluidity, uncertainty, and disagreement on their part gets represented as speaking with a forked tongue. I’ve heard so often the remark: “This is just a game that the Muslim Brothers play.” This makes me wonder whether anybody else in politics plays games! Liberals? Socialists? Conservatives? Don’t they say one thing and then do another, or compromise on their principles for the sake of practical ends? That is, in part, how an obsessive suspicion closes off the mind to any serious attempt at understanding what’s going on. For most of my left-wing friends, the Muslim Brotherhood equals hypocrisy and the hidden determination to establish a totalitarian state. I think this a priori suspicion is wrong. I don’t think, by the way, that there’s even a danger of anything like that happening. In comparison to other groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah—with whom, I should say, I do have sympathies—the Muslim Brothers do not have a militant wing. This hasn’t been sufficiently recognized. In the past they were involved in violence, but for many decades now they’ve moved away from it toward a more or less parliamentary line—like Eurocommunism—rather than a revolutionary one.

NS: But isn’t the concern about what could happen if they were voted into a position of power over the police and the military in Egypt?

TA: Yes, but the point is that they would have to get into that position of power in the first place, and the military isn’t their instrument. There’s always a possibility, of course, that they might become a dominant force in government and that they might use the police repressively, like the Mubarak regime. But would that mean a totalitarian government was imminent? For God’s sake, even in the United States the police are used to harass various kinds of movement—peace movements, ecological movements. The security measures now in place here have deeply invaded our liberties and privacy. Still, the United States is not (yet) a totalitarian state, it’s a secular state and it’s highly unlikely that its secularism will be abandoned anytime soon. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers would have to have a very substantial presence in the national assembly before they could do anything really significant, and I doubt that they will have that. In any case we don’t even know what policies the Muslim Brothers would support as members of a government, because the policies haven’t been sufficiently formulated and agreed upon yet. Let’s bear in mind the difference between the promises made by Obama the candidate and the decisions taken by Obama the president. They tell us that democracy is all about compromise and being realistic.

NS: Consider someone who would oppose a right-wing, religious party in the United States. Is there any difference between opposing such a thing in one’s own country, where one understands what’s at stake and what’s at play, and opposing an ostensibly similar party in a foreign country, just by saying, “I wouldn’t want that myself”?

TA: Yes, I can understand that—

NS: Or is there something different that we have to understand about the other society that makes the two incomparable?

TA: I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

NS: How much does the fact of their being religious fuel the suspicion leveled against them in the West and among liberals generally? Should it?

TA: I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.

NS: How does having grown up and having been educated on both sides of the colonial divide affect how you look at situations like this? You often see colonialism where other people are blind to it, it seems.

TA: Yes, but I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

NS: Is such intervention the same as the old colonialism? Or can it be better than that?

TA: It’s neither better nor worse, but it’s certainly not the same. I recall something Hillary Clinton said, in some conference or other, to the effect that in the end the government is concerned not with promoting democracy, as such, but with promoting America’s national interest. That would have to come first. At the same time, she said she would be the happiest of persons if the two things converged—which of course makes the ideal of democracy into an instrument, not an ideal. But I can understand that. I can see why she would say that, because power is what the modern state is about. I can see why the US would want to have what it calls “stability in the region,” a region in which the US has such immense interests—in its oil, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the confrontation with Iran, and so on. I can see that they would want to have, in every country, some kind of influence, if possible. I might want to attribute everything to colonialism or imperialism, but I think that won’t do. But then nor would I want to say, “Don’t blame imperialism, it’s all your own fault really!” It’s not a question of fault, it’s a question of the way in which various forces collide and intervene and shape what are regarded as national interests.

NS: It’s interesting that you seem so accepting of this interventionist order—

TA: No, I am not accepting of it, certainly not. I’m trying to see things as they really are. But, at the same time, I’m aware that this means not being able to invoke one’s own moral position very easily. Perhaps that’s why I said, early on, that I am a pessimist. I have felt for a long time now that we have gradually—and when I say “we,” I mean everybody in the modern world, and I’ll say more about that—worked ourselves into a situation that is truly tragic, in the Greek sense of having no real resolution. There are the most awful prospects before us, with the kind of technological warfare we now have, with the fantastic extension of consumerism and money, with the consequent growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, with the destruction of the environment, and with the ramifications of climate change and nuclear energy. I really hope that this is simply a sign of my being old. It may well be, because I don’t see things in the way that a younger person would, I’m sure. I see it all as being absolutely disastrous. But people will try to resist, and they should.

NS: How? I think of the Human Terrain Teams that were dispatched in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which anthropologists and other experts in local culture and language would be embedded with military units. Should an anthropologist, someone with a more textured view of what’s happening on the ground, be a part of that process of intervention so as somehow to improve it?

TA: No, certainly not—absolutely not. That’s not resistance, that’s collusion. I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But it doesn’t follow from a pessimistic outlook that one just has to accept things as they are and ask fellow anthropologists to do the same. In any case, I’m very much against the kind of involvement you mention, making things smoother for empire.

NS: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?

TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.

NS: “We’re all in it together.”

TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.

NS: Whose fault is it, then?

TA: Again, it’s not a question of fault. There’s a long history of human choices that is leading us all, unintentionally, to where we shall soon be—at a dead end. Some of these choices were more momentous, affecting far more people, than other choices. Some of us now are in a more powerful position to choose than others are. “Mankind” is not an agent.

Christianity has been spread around the world for many centuries now. In the sixteenth century, the conquistadores brought Catholic Christianity to South America and the Philippines. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries brought it to India, Japan, and China. In the nineteenth century, Catholic and Protestant missionaries planted the faith in the colonies established throughout the world during the age of European imperialism. But this dissemination of the Christian faith was not called globalization. It was called “propaganda fidei” or “Christian mission.”

Now, it is European and North American historians and anthropologists who are leading the discussion of global Christianity, and its “global critique” is the work of Western philosophers and theologians. What is new about this global Christianity and why are Western intellectuals now concerned about it?

What is new, I think, is the changing position of Western intellectuals—both Christian and secular—in the world order, and the consequent expansion of their horizons. Such expansion takes place under two conditions: first, new forms of communication enable people in one culture to encounter the ways of life and thought of another; and, second, one or both sides are cognitively and morally vulnerable to the effects of the new encounter. One can have the first condition without the second. For example, if one society invades and subdues another through overwhelming power, it is not necessarily morally vulnerable to the new experiences to which it is exposed. The hegemonic society’s elites can just dismiss the other’s strange customs as primitive and inconsequential. To overcome its weakness, the elites in the invaded society may feel pressured to acquiesce in this condescension and to imitate the beliefs and values of the politically superior country in order to acquire its power. The powerful society, in effect, has pulled the weaker society into its own horizons. But if the power relationship is relatively symmetrical, if one society encounters another on a relatively equal footing, the cognitive frameworks of both may be vulnerable to destabilizing re-interpretation. The horizons—the scope of possibility for thought and feeling and belief—of both may expand.

During the ages of Western conquest and colonization, the Christianity implanted around the world was defined and controlled by imperialist powers. Westerners could be proud of having brought their faith to their new dominions and could take satisfaction in transforming those dominions, at least partially, into their own religious likeness—but only partially, because it was usually thought that the “natives” could never fully understand the subtleties of theology and could never be fully trusted to govern themselves. Until after the Second World War, the bishops and leading clergy in most Catholic colonies were European, as were the leaders of Protestant denominations. With movements toward de-colonization, that began to change, but the hegemony of the Western powers ensured that the normative standards for Western theology and ecclesial polity were set in the West itself. Even the theologians of liberation got the foundations of their theological education in universities and seminaries in Europe and North America.

Now, however, Europe and North America have lost their relative standing in the world and stand on something closer to equal footing with new centers of wealth and power around the globe. This leads to a destabilizing expansion of horizons, which in turn leads to anthropological and theological discourse about the globalization of Christianity.

Intellectuals who carry on their reflections within this new horizon notice certain things that they previously hadn’t taken seriously. One of these is the vigor of kinds of indigenous popular Christianity that were marginal to the old missionary enterprise—the kinds with a stripped down theology and a heartfelt faith and hope in the direct experience of the Holy Spirit. Although the origins of these forms of Christianity are in religious movements that began in the West, they were often regarded with suspicion, or as inconsequential, by Western leaders of Christian denominations in Asia and Africa. From the Western leaders’ point of view, one problem was that these forms could easily be propagated by local Christians, without the benefit of sophisticated Western training. In the past generation, it has indeed been these forms of Christianity that have grown most rapidly, even while the forms of Christianity that once dominated the West have gone into decline. At the same time, many of the rapidly growing forms of Christianity in the two-thirds world take on the flavor of their local cultures and seem alien to many Western Christians. This is what is often of concern in the current Western discourse on global Christianity.

Perhaps our situation today is not unique but happens whenever a religious homeland loses its hegemony. Perhaps our situation—for Western Christians and “post-Christians” alike—is akin to that of the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement in the first century CE. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the diaspora of the Jews, they saw the form of their faith that had been adapted by Paul to be more acceptable to Gentiles now suddenly beginning to grow in dynamic fashion, eventually taking on forms that its Jewish forbearers—and even Paul—might have found barely recognizable. The stone that the builders rejected now became the capstone. It is appropriate that several of the articles in this special issue focus on the role played by the apostle Paul, because he began the first of many globalizations of Christianity.

For these reasons, there is a deep and important relation between the social sciences and theology, which goes beyond the secular emancipation of the social sciences. Christianity has produced both the vocabulary into which non-Christian realities are being translated and part of the reality to which Christians and non-Christians alike have to relate. This calls for a reflexivity that cannot be captured by an “Anthropology of Christianity” if that narrowly confines itself to the study of Christianity. Such reflexivity is part of a conceptual project that received its inspiration from Durkheim and Mauss, and which was developed further at Oxford by E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, Rodney Needham, and Louis Dumont. Under the influence of Foucault, Talal Asad and others have connected this inquiry into the nature of knowledge to the study and critique of imperial power. It deals with the conflicts and contestations that arise from the field of (colonial and postcolonial) power in which religions are constituted. It cannot restrict its analysis to Christianity, since Christianity is an element of these encompassing imperial interactions. Theologies of dialogue that have been added to pre-existing theologies of Christian superiority and triumphalism have emerged out of the postcolonial situation and have to be engaged at the same time as theologies of evangelical warfare. Christianity’s claim, in both liberal and evangelical forms, to be the foundation of Western civilization has never disappeared and continues to form the battleground on which cultural encounters all over the world take place.

It is doubtful whether what we are seeing today is simply a new global prominence of Christianity. Rather, it depends on where one looks. Europe is quite rapidly becoming secular, in the sense that Christian churches are losing their membership and church attendance is generally in decline. In Europe and other parts of the world, one also sees a mobilization against Islam. The new prominence of discourse on religion in Europe is directly caused by the unease felt by secularized Europeans about the presence of Islam in their midst. It is certainly not to be taken as a de-secularization or a renewed prominence of Christianity. If one looks at China, one can see that a larger space has been opened up for religious practice after a century of oppression, but also that Christianity is only one of the elements of a complex religious scene. If one directs one’s attention to South and South-East Asia, one may see the mobilization of Hinduism against Islam, Islam against Christianity, Buddhism against Islam, and Confucianism against “folk religion.” In parts of the Global South, Christianity’s conflictual expansion should be understood as part of this wider phenomenon. It is important not to be too “presentist” about this aspect of globalization. Many of the religious phenomena we see today have their roots in the nineteenth century. The secular onslaught against religion in the Communist world had its roots in evolutionism and historical materialism. And the struggles around Christian missionary activity also have their roots in the nineteenth century, as does the deep secularism of European intellectuals.

Philosophy has never been able to completely shed its roots in Christian theology, despite the deeply anti-metaphysical project of analytical philosophy. What is called continental philosophy continues to be heavily invested in theological thought, as the work of Teilhard de Chardin and Jean-Luc Marion (or, in the Jewish tradition, that of Levinas and Derrida) testifies. However, it is the global challenge of Islamism that has forced deeply secular philosophers, like Jürgen Habermas, to at least partly engage their Eurocentrism. The secular project in the West has been so successful that Christian philosophers like Charles Taylor think that they live in a secular age. The fact, however, remains, that the majority of humanity lives in the Global South and is not secular, although secularism as a political project can be found everywhere.  At this juncture in world history, philosophy needs to critically engage not only the traditions of Europe but also those outside of Europe. This has hardly happened, and therefore it is anthropology rather than Western philosophy that continues to be the disciplinary site of that engagement.

By far the greatest problem for the anthropological study of Christianity today is that it is not part of a comparative endeavor that examines the interaction of religious movements and projects in different regions of the world. In South, South-East, and East Asia, we find extraordinary competition between different religious movements: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and others. Also, within these religions this competition is intense—for example, between Shi’as and Sunnis, or between Protestants and Catholics. Since Christian missions were the first modern endeavors of their type in the world, many of their tactics and strategies have provided models for other religious movements. Education, health care, and social welfare are the fields in which these movements are competing with each other, often without much presence of the state. In refugee camps in Asia, one finds also a heated competition for the souls of the displaced.

An element that needs careful consideration in the study of religious networks and competition between religious movements is the issue of religious freedom. The U.S. in particular is at the forefront of attempts to enlarge the space for Christian missionary activity in countries that limit possibilities for proselytization. It brings the issue up during trade negotiations, like those around entry to the WTO. While one can sympathize with efforts to make the exercise of religious practice and belief more free in countries that have long faced suppression of religion, the fact that there are close connections between such clamors for religious freedom, American evangelism, and American politics makes it into a highly contested issue. Perhaps the anxieties surrounding Saudi Arabian support for Wahhabi mosques in Europe can be referred to for a better understanding of the anxieties that surround U.S. supported Christian evangelism in Asia.

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NS: Tell me about the genesis of your studies in China. How did you choose the region where you have spent the last twenty years doing fieldwork?

MY: I received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to do field research on nongovernmental organizations and the emerging civil society in China. Since my other research had been in urban contexts, I wanted to study a rural environment. A Chinese friend took me to visit his relatives in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, and I was taken aback by both the social dynamism of the economic activities there and the impressive revival of traditional Chinese culture—quite different from the usual dreary, impoverished life in much of the Chinese countryside I have seen. The ethos of families going about their daily business as well as frequent indulgence in festivals and rituals reminded me of growing up in the 1960s in Taiwan. I checked out many NGOs in Wenzhou—a stamp collecting association, a Writer’s League, a local business association, and a privately owned technical middle school—and found that none of them were really independent of the state. But I found that truly nongovernmental and grassroots organizations all had a religious or ritual basis: deity temples, Daoist and Buddhist temples, lineage organizations, and Catholic and Protestant churches. So, I discovered the importance of religion and ritual once I was in the field; I did not set out looking for them.

NS: Has the Chinese government interfered at all? Have they made it difficult to carry out your research?

MY: Yes, I’m afraid I have met with a lot of government interference in my fieldwork, for a variety of reasons. First, this being an area that does not have a major university, I didn’t know any local Chinese academics who could vouch for me to the authorities. Second, on a few occasions, I was hauled into the Public Security office—the police station—because my activities were not in keeping with my visa. I was questioned, made to write a confession, and modestly fined. Third, local officials wanted me to focus on studying the prosperous economy, of which they are rightly proud. They were ashamed of their cultural “backwardness,” ashamed that their people are still so “superstitious” and spend so much of their hard-earned money on their gods, ancestors, and ghosts. The officials discouraged me from studying popular religion because, first of all, they did not want their superiors to find out that so much religious activity is occurring under their watch. But they were also embarrassed about foreigners finding out how “backward” they still are. Religion is still a sensitive topic. Some local officials even warned people not to tell me too much, and sometimes I was not allowed to witness or videotape certain rituals.

NS: But you did manage to shoot enough footage to make a documentary there.

MY: Yes, Public and Private Realms in Wenzhou, China.

NS: Has working in the medium of film affected how you approach your scholarship?

MY: As an academic, filmmaking forces one to express ideas and feelings through means other than just words. Sound and sight become important. Visual description added another dimension to my thinking, and I think that in my writings henceforth I will pay more attention to conveying the context, the mood, the ethos, and the physical backdrop of my subjects. Film is also a much better medium than print for discussing things with movement or detailed visual features, like festivals, rituals, dance, and religious worship. Being a filmmaker has made me fully appreciate that, in today’s world, a religious movement cannot survive for long without disseminating its messages through the electronic media: television, film, websites, Internet discussions, and so forth.

NS: How did the Chinese government and society come to this point where religion has become such an embarrassment?

MY: The Maoist regime was vociferous in its anti-imperialist discourse and many of its political policies and activities were anti-colonial and anti-Western. However, seldom discussed is how much of nineteenth-century Western social evolutionism and Orientalist discourse Maoism absorbed and propagated. This discourse says that all societies in the world follow a single developmental progression through evolutionary stages, and that religion must be eliminated in order for a society to be modern and advanced. It is this social evolutionist thinking that has done so much harm to China’s indigenous religious traditions, such as Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, as well as those of ethnic minorities.

NS: What role did religion play in Chinese society before Mao?

ML: The dispersed aristocratic states of ancient times were unified in 221 BCE, and thereafter the centralized empire held sway down to modern times, interrupted only occasionally by periods of disunity. China experienced a commercial revolution in the tenth and eleventh centuries, almost a thousand years before European capitalism, and religious life flourished alongside commercialism. When it stifled religious life in the twentieth century, China lost a key arena for the promotion of local autonomy and self-government, grassroots culture and local initiative, leaving unchecked the centralized, authoritarian state. In Chinese popular religion, tutelary deities are icons of local communities, protectors of local solidarities. Such local institutions as lineage organizations, temple societies, Confucian private schools, and Buddhist and Daoist temples and monasteries used to provide key sites for local voluntary organizations, charities, and self-government. In its attacks on traditional religiosity, Maoist China was inspired by the French Revolution. But China’s institutional religions, Buddhism and Daoism, were never as strong as Christianity in Europe and could never stand against the state as had Christianity. Ironically, it was Maoism that continued what the Western missionaries could only dream of: the destruction of “heathenism,” “idolatry,” and “superstition.”

NS: How do we need to think about secularization as it’s come about in China, as opposed to in the West?

MY: I agree with Talal Asad when he suggests that we should be studying the varieties of secularism. We must remind ourselves that the Western path to secularism is not the only path, and that other historical experiences may give rise to different sorts of secularism. China’s case is distinct from the Western path to secularism in three ways. First, there is a long premodern tradition of secular agnosticism in Confucian thought. Second, modern Chinese secularism was propelled by the colonial situation, a threat to nationhood posed by both Western and Japanese imperialisms. Third, there was Marxist discourse and the Soviet influence.

NS: To what extent can Confucianism—with its emphasis on worldly responsibilities and the social order—be thought of as a premodern form of secularism?

MY: There is much debate both in China and among Western scholars as to whether Confucianism is a religion or a philosophy. This whole issue comes about because twentieth-century China adopted the new term “religion” from the West, with Protestantism as its normative example. Confucianism obviously does not fit into the Western definition of religion, since it didn’t possess its own separate institutional or clerical organization, embedded as it was in the imperial state and grassroots culture alike. Yes, one could say that Confucianism was in some ways a form of premodern secularism, because it was much more focused on the ethical and political issues of temporal life than it was on the afterlife. But it didn’t have an elaborate anti-religious discourse like modern Darwinian or Marxist secularism. It could be described as agnostic or indifferent to many forms of the supernatural—such as gods, goddesses, ghosts, and demons—though it did ritually pay homage to other kinds of transcendent powers. And Confucianism’s practices of self-cultivation and self-discipline certainly resemble those of many religious traditions and were thought to merge practitioners with larger cosmic patterns.

NS: Can you say more about the other sources of Chinese secularism: the colonial experience and Marxism?

MY: Colonialism, I believe, was what gave the secular movement an intense urgency, and it explains the turn to the radical and systemic destruction of religious culture rather than more gradual religious reforms. The absorption of Western colonial discourse also led to such things as the adoption of the Reformation’s distinction between “religion”—the more valorized term—and “superstition,” which greatly hurt Daoism and popular religion in China. The urgency and catch-up mentality also explains why Soviet-style, state-led secularization seemed the natural answer. The centralized promotion of scientific atheism was coordinated and uniformly applied across the country, speeding up the process of modernization. Thus, modern Chinese secularism was not a gradual outgrowth of economic development, but a concerted and conscious effort, imposed from above on grassroots society to wrench it out of “backwardness” and to attain “revolution,” or “progress.”

NS: And this process continues today?

MY: Yes, though in different forms. The two primary purveyors of secularism today are the state in its didactic role and the consumer media.

NS: So the new consumerist culture is adopting the secularist mantle of Maoism?

MY: Not entirely. As the Chinese Communist Party turns its attention to trade and economic development, it has relaxed its stranglehold on religiosity and muted its Communist teachings. There has also been a bursting of the Communist ideological bubble, and thus the search for Truth has been taken up elsewhere. Since the state no longer controls all the wealth, and the private sector is able to retain a surplus, ordinary people now have extra personal wealth to give as donations for building or restoring sites of worship, organizing religious festivals, supporting religious clergy or ritual masters, and organizing religious charities. The new stresses and insecurities in a society where the state no longer guarantees jobs, pensions, housing, and medical care might also be favorable conditions for the return of religion. Indeed, a major reason for religious adherence in China is the experience of illness or a close call with death.

NS: Is religion, perhaps in Weberian fashion, actually helping to foster the emergence of capitalism in Chinese culture and economy?

MY: When you say “capitalism,” you need to distinguish between the capitalism that came from the West and the capitalism that derives from China’s own tradition of premodern commercialism and handicraft industries. Both are at work in China’s market economy today. The former introduced Christianity, and it can be seen in the investments of large multinational corporations that operate through the mediation of Chinese state officials. Then there is the small-scale capitalism that derives from China’s own late-imperial history of commercialism, and which I am studying in Wenzhou. This kind of capitalism is inextricably intertwined with Chinese popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism, so it is hard to distinguish between the religious stimulation of the economy and the economic stimulation of religion. In fact, I am developing an argument that in this kind of capitalism, religion checks the excesses of the profit-driven economy and motivates the redistribution of wealth. It’s a kind of indigenous capitalism that modern Chinese have lost sight of in the rush to believe that everything superior comes from the West.

NS: Has religion actually succeeded in placing restraints on the excesses of emerging markets?

MY: Unfortunately, since government policy has left religious organizations so weak, they haven’t been able to check the greed that capitalism encourages. Instead, they are being deeply penetrated by capitalism. Take the example of the Shaolin Buddhist temple in Henan Province, the one where Jet Li played a kungfu master in the film Shaolin Temple. This temple has stirred much controversy with its MBA-bearing monks who spend more time jetting around promoting tourism, building luxury hotels, and taking in their earnings from foreign kungfu students than meditating or attending to the spiritual needs of their congregation.

NS: Do you approach the work of shedding light on religiosity as a constructive contribution to the development of Chinese society?

MY: Although I am basically a secular person, I have seen the social consequences of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” in China. Beset by colonialism, war, and impoverishment, twentieth-century Chinese were too quick to reject their cultural traditions rather than reform them, and they abandoned a rich repertoire of wisdom and teachings accumulated over centuries and millennia. Modern Chinese did not have the luxury of time to think through and debate what was to become of religion, so precipitous action was taken, which did lasting damage. In rural Wenzhou, I have seen many positive dimensions of religious life, contrary to the way that Communist discourse has painted it. These people are not backward or resistant to modernization; they are at the forefront of creating a different kind of modernity, one with many bridges to connect them to their past.

NS: To what extent are Chinese scholars working in China also studying religion as you are—that is, not only as an artifact of the past, but as something alive and active in contemporary Chinese society?

MY: There is a growing number of Chinese scholars engaged in the study of religious cultures. In the 1980s and ’90s, their work was primarily textual and focused on the historical past of Chinese religious traditions. This was a safe way to deal with a still sensitive topic and to stay out of trouble. Now a new generation of social scientists is looking at the present through fieldwork. Their biggest task is to persuade the government, its many bureaucrats and local officials, and society at large, to think of religion as a promising way to deal with the present and future. They have even started to challenge the Marxist position that religion serves the ruling class and will necessarily disappear.

NS: To what extent do scholars have the freedom to do so publicly?

MY: Actually, there is now almost no constraint on what can be said out loud, but print publication is another matter. Internet discussions, meanwhile, stand in-between what can be said and what can be printed.

NS: So the study of religion in China has become a medium of dissent?

MY: Yes. These scholars are implicitly trying to correct for a century of activist state intervention and prohibition. Intellectuals have been at the forefront of religious revival, and many academic conferences on Buddhism, Daoism, and popular deity cults have laid the groundwork for religious organizations and activities to proceed. Academics serve as advisors or consultants to religious organizations; they are a bridge between religious communities and officialdom. They have called on the state to recognize the vast “underground” Christian communities—about 70 percent of all Christians in China—who refuse to join the state churches. A few are even starting to point out that the decades of hostility towards indigenous religions may be responsible for the dramatic growth of Christianity in the past three decades.  Scholars have also tackled the new problems of the over-commercialization of religion, in which local state tourism and real estate agencies seize upon it to drum up business, riding roughshod over Buddhist or Daoist monks’ ability to run their temples in their own way. Of course, this is still a small segment of the Chinese intelligentsia, and the vast majority still dismiss religion.

NS:  Has the state’s attitude towards religion changed in recent years as well?

MY:  Yes, it has indeed. There is great historical irony in the fact that the Chinese government is now becoming more involved in building up certain religious traditions. The central government funds a program to train religious leaders of all five officially recognized religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam) at People’s University, teaching them their own religious history and doctrines. It supported the First and Second World Buddhist Forums, which were held in 2006 and 2009 in China. Local governments help fund large-scale religious events to bolster tourism, pilgrimage, and local business, and they have recognized that religious charities help provide social welfare and lower crime. The state wants to use religious culture to foster social stability while encouraging a kind of “healthy” religious development that it finds acceptable. The irony is sometimes painful; just the other day while doing fieldwork in Wenzhou, a local Daoist priest told me how his father was hounded by young Communist zealots during the Cultural Revolution and risked his life to conceal precious hand-copied Daoist liturgies from destruction. But now he, the son, has been named a valuable person of Chinese “intangible cultural heritage”—borrowing the language of UNESCO—for his Daoist knowledge.

NS: Are Christian missionary activities from the West affecting how people in Wenzhou think about religion? Does this seem to you a further example of colonialism at work?

MY: My sense is that Christian missionization by Westerners plays a very minor role today. It is illegal for foreign nationals to proselytize in China. And in large cities, Chinese nationals even find it difficult to mingle with foreigners and attend church services presided over by foreign clergy. Of course, there are Western Mormons and Christians who disguise themselves as English teachers, but there may be more South Korean and Chinese Christian missionaries from overseas active in China. The vast majority of Chinese Christians were converted by other Chinese. They have relied on memories of Christian teachings transmitted by Western missionaries before 1949; that’s why some of the Christian iconography sometimes looks so dated, especially in rural areas. This also means that Christianity in China can look and feel quite different from how it does in the West. Since underground churches are targets of sporadic state persecution, many of them in rural areas have come to resemble the secret societies and millenarian movements of the late-imperial past. They may even be more Chinese than Christian.

NS: How are all these changes in the present impacting how Chinese—both scholars and laypeople—think about their past?

MY: The discipline of history has a very long tradition in China, going back to ancient times, perhaps beginning with the very invention of writing in China. Chinese are very skilled in historical thought and research; so, since the travesty of history writing during the Cultural Revolution ended, there has been, in the post-Mao period, much good historical reflection. In the past decade, an old term has been resuscitated from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “national learning,” or guoxue. This refers to learning from classical writings, from ancient schools of thought such as Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Legalism, and others. “National learning” has been grabbing the interest of many different kinds of people, from businessmen eager to learn ancient strategies of management, to mothers who wish to teach traditional culture and wisdom to their children, to the nouveau riche who now find that material wealth cannot provide everything they desire and long for spiritual harmony. Historical novels set in a past dynasty have reached such popularity on the Internet that they are then published in print. As Chinese people come into contact with the outside world through travel, migration, or media, they increasingly face the question of identity and how to define a unique Chineseness. This usually propels them back to China’s past.

NS: Do you think history’s lessons will be useful ones for them?

MY: Yes, I do. I know a Chinese economist, for instance, who actively reads and studies Chinese history, including historical novels, as he works to come up with suggestions for economic reform today. He even wants to revive the imperial examination system to avoid the rampant official corruption. This is an extremely valuable and important development, since the Chinese really cannot adapt ideologies and discourses developed elsewhere to their own social and economic development. They need to understand their own history better in order to tailor social innovations to deep habits of Chinese thought and practice. Doing otherwise was a mistake made too often in China throughout the twentieth century, with terrible consequences.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: Jean Comaroff, tell us about the role of religion in your work.

JC: For me, as a scholar, religion has always been an exercise for a left hand. I started out working on these issues because I was interested in the relationship between politics and religion and the uneasy ways in which anthropologists at the time separated them. I was interested not least because, if you went to Africa in the 1960s to study religion, religion was assumed to be a matter of “tradition.” Already I felt that this term, in its then unproblematic usage, was less than helpful.

When I got to my field site, in rural northwest South Africa, the religious lingua franca was Christianity, African Christianity, which was inseparable from anything else you might call spiritual, religious, or moral life. I was Jewish in my upbringing, but the kind of Christianity I encountered was profoundly unlike the Christianity I had known about growing up in white South Africa, or when I subsequently lived in England.

There was concern among my advisors at the London School of Economics [LSE] because Christianity was regarded as a topic for comparative religion or sociology, not for anthropology. There was no anthropology of Christianity at that time, so it was really quite a struggle at that point to find relevant interlocutors.

At the same time, it was obvious that Christianity had long been a key dimension of local history. In South Africa, Christianity was inseparable from the whole logic of the way colonialism had been made and was then being unmade.

DKK: So was that the initial appeal of working on religion as an anthropologist for you?

JC: I grew up in South Africa under the apartheid regime and the universities were very depleted by the time we got there—they’d been segregated. In the universities, there was plenty social protest, but no access to intellectual radicalism, no Marx on the shelves. South African universities were an environment dominated by a larger story. In particular, the ethical problem of having the privilege of an education, by virtue of being white, bore in on us very heavily.

At that stage, there was already a lot of government repression of politics with a big “P.” Yet already there were forms of religious communal life stepping into the void, as it were. The churches, particularly some of the mainline, former mission churches—the Anglican Church, some Methodist congregations, many of the independent African churches—were places where people could aggregate to raise issues of social justice. By the time the 1960s rolled around, you needed special permits for meetings of more than 12 people; only religious gatherings and funerals were exempted, which was why funerals became such amazing politico-ritual sites.

Many of the churches stepped up. There was the sort of impetus you would find in Christian base communities in Latin America soon after: an effort to re-interrogate the message of Christianity from the point of view of the meek and the oppressed. This, of course, had deep roots. The founding of the African National Congress in South Africa in 1912-13 came out of the African Independent Churches, whose leaders had taken the Bible—which had entered the community as a colonizing, civilizing text—and read another message out of it. So they “liberated the message from the messenger,” and made of this a struggle for human dignity. This was a way of saying, “let us make this text live up to its promises, because there’s a dramatic contradiction between what we were promised when we were ushered into the global fraternity of the church, and what we have experienced as citizens of this racially segregated society.”

In the mid-1960s, when I was at university and studied a number of disciplines, I found anthropology especially interesting because it was relevant to these sorts of issues in Africa. Most other fields at the time —psychology, English literature—did not have one read a single writer from the Global South. You read Conrad on Africa, but you didn’t read African writers. That was soon going to change dramatically. In the mid-1960′s, anthropology was uniquely relevant in acknowledging the value of non-Eurocentric knowledge and life-ways.

The fine scholar who taught us anthropology, Monica Wilson, was a missionary’s daughter. She herself had been involved in quite explicit criticism of the government through her academic work, through documenting the implications of poverty in the countryside. She had made anthropology into a kind of vocation—to use the Weberian term—one that came from where she had grown up, on a mission station in the Eastern Cape.

Somewhere in our readings, which were largely about African traditional rituals, witchcraft, and kinship, there was something about “separatist” churches—African movements that had broken away from the mission churches in the name of another kind of religiosity. These churches had become communal sites for a kind of moral reconstruction in the countryside. Some were more overtly political, some weren’t. But they were amazingly inventive in terms of their ritual practices. The book Bantu Prophets in South Africa, by a very perspicacious Swedish missionary named Bengt Sundkler, explored the way that the prophetic, millennial possibility within the Christian tradition was being acted upon in the South African countryside. The acuity of this insight grabbed my attention and it never left me.

DKK: That’s fascinating. Even in this brief, rich background you’ve just given, you’ve brought up a number of the themes that we’re addressing in the forum: namely, questions about tradition, questions about authority, questions about inheritance, and questions about sovereignty. I want to come back to each of these. For the meantime let’s stay a little bit longer on the question of tradition. In describing your experience with African Christianity, you depict it as both constitutive of who you became and also as an object of study. It would be helpful if you could talk a bit about the difficult relationship in which you know and are embedded in traditions and cultures of inheritance, while at the same time these traditions and cultures also become the object of your intellectual work.

JC: What was so instructive about growing up in apartheid South Africa was that God was on everybody’s side. We had something called “Christian national education” when I was growing up, which was really apartheid as religious pedagogy. Of course, it was a cynical mode of maintaining power for a minority, an experiment in social engineering.

There was always a dimension of the enterprise that was highly theological, especially among national religious leaders who argued for a certain kind of Calvinist tradition. They tried to reconcile a rather literal sense of the Salvation of the Elect with the forms of modern “democracy,” which was ironic, because it came from descendants of radical Protestants, many of whom had come to South Africa as Huguenots in 1688, and who as followers of Calvin suffered severe persecution in Catholic France. In the context of the Cape Colony they had developed a mode of reading the Bible and an understanding of Protestantism that remained separate from some of the liberalizing tendencies that accompanied the impact of industrialization, and the rise of a class-based society and secular liberal democracy in Europe. I did meet people who sincerely thought that they could make it work in a relatively humane way, even though the more the system became entrenched, and its contradictions became apparent, the more people became invested in simply maintaining it against all odds, and terrible things were done in its name. So there was that specific tradition, and it had a great influence on apartheid theology.

My family, at least on my father’s side, was Jewish. They had run from the pogroms in Eastern Europe and had come to Africa. My mother was from a lapsed Lutheran family that had also known political exclusion in their native Bavaria. In my parents’ generation, there was a kind of accommodation to the fact that, while most had run from systems of ethnic-political-racial persecution in Europe, by the mid 20th century in South Africa, they were seeing forming around them just such a system: one being validated in theological terms and in terms of fidelity to “tradition.” Afrikaners often saw themselves as the more faithful keepers of a Calvinist “tradition” that had been watered down in secular Europe. But there was also another kind of African Christian “tradition”—a tradition in the sense that it stemmed from a particular kind of teaching of theology, and sought to perpetuate itself as such.

Most of the missionaries who came to southern Africa in the nineteenth century were not elites from the established churches. They were people often from working class communities in the north of England and Scotland. David Livingstone, after all, had been a mill worker, and had educated himself to become a doctor. So they were part of a dissenting strain, and there again you have tradition, but a reinterpreted, reformed tradition. This turns on the key question of where authority is located. This was a crucial matter in the non-European mission field, which required the adaptation of “tradition” to local circumstances. What accommodations pose no threat to established authority? At what point does one question that authority? Where does one draw the line and say: “This is a sovereign truth about which I/We can’t compromise?”

This is an especially salient issue within Protestantism, of course. The whole point about the Protestant tradition is that Providence has given you not only the means, but the obligation to constantly test sovereign truths against the world, against experience, and thus to bring it up to date, to make it speak truth to the world in which you live. This was how the liberal humanist tradition emerged within Protestantism in Europe. When the nineteenth century missionaries had come to South Africa, all of that gets left in Europe.

In Africa, they become the representatives of authoritative tradition in the church, declaring: “There can be no polygamy, there can be no ‘traditional’ ritual.” “Tradition” now gains special ideological meaning as that which is heathen, unenlightened. One has to put all that superstition behind one, leave the extended family, and become an individual believer, one who reads the text and takes a self-willed decision to convert. Now the missionaries represent orthodox, uncompromising authority. And it is Africans who struggle with this question: “How do we make that truth relevant to our lives? Are we indeed purely sinful, purely evil, and living in darkness? And how do we reconcile the fact that the church into which we’ve been brought doesn’t actually live up to formal tenets of its own tradition?”

And so it is that missionization is always a process of reform, some of it explicit, but a lot of it not explicit. Because in making real a “tradition,” in making it live in the world, in putting things into practice, in translating it (in every sense of the word translation), you’re also reforming that tradition, whether it’s an actual declaration of reform, or through the pragmatic re-vision of its components, which renders it almost the same, but not quite, to quote Homi Bhabha. So the key analytical question was: Is Africa becoming Christianized or was Christianity becoming Africanized? And what was at stake in that process? And the whole matter of what constituted a “tradition” was a complicated methodological problem, for both would-be theorists and their subjects were continually confusing ideological and analytical uses of the term.

Making claims in relation to “tradition” can be very powerful: Africans would oppose laws instituted by the apartheid government, for instance, by saying: “Look, everything I’ve been taught about justice, about equity, about any kind of sovereign truth in the Christian tradition is belied by what I see here. And on the authority of that commitment and conviction I protest.” But at the same time, they would resist certain other things that were done in the name of tradition, the Calvinist tradition, for instance.

This slipperiness of the term “tradition” weighed very heavily on me when I started my own research. There was a very strong sense in which both classic anthropology and our everyday colonial culture in South Africa accepted an overarching distinction between modernity and tradition. In colonial society, tradition was primitive, indigenous, something that had to be cast off. The missionaries sometimes referred to traditional African society as a state of “primitive communism,” from which the autonomous, self-determining subject had to be set free. Anthropologists reversed the signs, seeing traditional societies as valuable in and for their difference, even if ultimately doomed by the process of modernization. But anthropologists shared the basic idea of “tradition” as pertaining to an unchanging world, outside of history—not as a living tradition, one that would have acknowledged that African societies might have internal reform, or understood that “customary law” might evolve with social conditions, and so on. Tradition and modernity constituted a kind of Manichean divide—one that was integral to the ideological apparatus of modernity itself, especially as a rationale for colonization and “civilization” (and more recently, for “development”).

Beginning in the late 1960′s, many of us social scientists felt that such a concept of tradition had no place in social analysis. It was ideology parading as theory. We felt we had to show by every means that those putatively static “traditions” were live and that, in fact, they had been produced by modernity, that the very word “tradition” in this sense didn’t exist in African languages until called into being by a discourse of inter-dependent colonizing dualisms. As a discipline, anthropology was itself invested, not always willingly or wittingly, in the preservation of that idea of tradition, and even though they valued it positively, anthropologists were adding a certain kind of ontological legitimacy to the colonizing project because of that. What is more, in subsequent efforts to counter that effect, there has been a move to disestablish the status of “tradition” altogether. All tradition comes to be seen as “invented,” which throws out the baby with the bath water. We have tended to lose the recognition of how authoritative bodies of precept and practice are actually maintained and reformed over time in colonial societies and elsewhere.

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One of the core themes of Christian Moderns is an effort to denaturalize the privilege often accorded to a particular idea of agency in contemporary academic discourse and its neighbors. As many others have pointed out, this privilege has made it hard for us to take seriously people whose views of agency differ from our own, from which follows a host of political consequences. I am not a moral philosopher and my goal is not to establish a normative claim about what agency really ought to be. But as Philip Gorski’s comments make clear, there does tend to be an underlying ethical impulse to anthropology, and it does place a high value on self-consciousness. To the extent that Christian Moderns itself is, as Gorski says, “captive” to this value, it fails to escape its own implicit normativity. I accept this much: my own work does not aspire to a transcendental position. It has a genealogy, and as the book tries to make its case, it consciously and, no doubt unconsciously, presupposes certain epistemic values of the world within which it speaks. To acknowledge this openly is, I think, in accord with the style of critique that insists, for instance, that secularism is a discipline and liberalism a tradition. This is also consistent with a certain kind of pluralism: to admit that this tradition doesn’t supersede or encompass all others is to find, rather, that it takes its place amidst them. If there’s a paradox here, it’s in subjecting oneself to critical self-scrutiny, the universal pretensions of which rest on local justifications.

Gorski is certainly right to point out that there are competing semiotic ideologies, rival visions of moral agency, and multiple turning points within Euro-American history. Christian Moderns shouldn’t be taken as making the excessively strong claim that there is only a single possible semiotic ideology in such a complex world. So the book shouldn’t be reduced to a new version of “the West versus the rest.” Nor does it pretend that the moral narrative of modernity is sufficient in itself. Quite the contrary: the notion that history might be accounted for within a totalizing and unilinear narrative is itself a characteristic ideological feature of the moral narrative of modernity. Moreover, not all possible historical narratives eventuate in modernity. In that respect, those who turn to Thomist and Aristotelian traditions seem to me not so much to be working within liberal secularism, as Gorski puts it, as trying to establish counter-traditions to it. I would draw one point of contrast between historical-ethnographic work and the philosophical and theological texts he invokes. Those texts work within genre constraints that usually impose demands for consistency and coherence on their arguments that are quite distinct from the quite different kinds of demands (pragmatic, economic, political, emotional, cognitive, and so forth) imposed by the contingencies of social existence. Communities exist with degrees of logical and even moral contradiction that few purely theoretical formulations would permit.

Michael Warner pushes the argument of Christian Moderns in extremely valuable directions. First, by stressing the spatial dimensions of evangelical discourse, he productively generalizes the case beyond that of colonialism per se. The addressivity that is built into the pragmatic structure of proselytization is a fundamental basis for the modularity that facilitates both self-expanding publics and self-cultivating subjects. This observation situates the specifically evangelical project in the context of other mediated publics and “counter-publics,” to use Warner’s own term. Thus Warner helps draw together two threads of the story by suggesting how the mutual production of subjectivities and communities works. One outcome, he notes, is the denominationalist imaginary, in which we are surrounded by “others who believe otherwise.” This is certainly true, but it’s worth stressing something that I think Warner leaves only implicit. As is well known, colonialism inspired a host of typologies of human bodies, minds, moral and social orders, which usually involved varying degrees of invidious comparison. But the evangelical project is supposed to view that world of otherness through the lens of possible conversion. Therefore, those “others” who surround us are, at least in principle, if not always in practice, potentially “us.” (As Stephen Berkwitz suggests in his post, conversions may destabilize the relations of similarity and difference that colonial projects had to negotiate.)

Warner then raises the question of ethical agency. I fully agree with his two points about purification: that it cannot account for the whole story and that it inevitably results in new hybrid forms of subjectivity. (Perhaps the neo-traditionalisms that Gorski mentions might be considered in this light.) However, when he says that new hybrids are equally modern, I think he shifts the definition of “modern” away from its initial formulation in the book. If one defines modernity not as an objective description of the world at a distinct chronological moment, but rather in terms of a historical consciousness formed in relation to a certain moral narrative projected onto linear time, then those hybrids are by definition external to that ideological formation. They may, to be sure, point us to the existence of alternatives, such as counter-modernities. But I would resist calling them alternative modernities as some people do (though, it should be noted, Warner does not), for to do so would shake the idea of modernity loose from those totalizing claims that I take to be among the defining features of the narrative of moral progress. Not everything new should be called “modern.” If, as Warner proposes, the key is not purification but, rather, “the creation of modular, extractable, translatable forms”, then we might ask not just what produces those forms but also what gives them their normative weight. Purification, then, would be one way of describing both a key feature of that process of creation and the normativity that underwrites it. And one might say, with Warner, that the category of purification may ultimately be most useful not as an explanation but, rather, as a way of bringing together apparently disparate phenomena, and thence undertake a closer analysis of the forms, their metapragmatic presuppositions, and their conditions of circulation.

Stephen Berkwitz correctly notes that my attention to nineteenth and twentieth century Protestantism comes at the expense of very different themes apparent in the Catholic missions of several centuries earlier. Of course the Calvinists of whom I write were quite aware of the latter, against whom they explicitly defined their own ideology of moral progress. (In fact, one could also mention another omission, eastern Orthodoxy, which produced both its own iconology and iconoclasm, as well as its own mission strategies in the Russian east. And there are, in addition, the various Pentecostal and other evangelical missions that are thriving today.) But my goal is not to account for all colonialisms or all missions. Berkwitz has identified a crucial difference between two distinct periods of European colonialism, one dimension of which is the role played by kinds of missionary enterprise that differed markedly in their doctrines, organizational structures, financial bases, and relations to states. Indeed, states themselves were quite different sorts of things in these two historical periods. I justify my focus on Protestants working during the high imperial age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the angle of approach mentioned above. Furthermore, history makes a difference in how that negotiation of similarity and difference described by Berkwitz could be carried out. This negotiation was a persistent feature of colonial encounters, and could be especially destabilizing in projects intended to transform subjectivities. By the late nineteenth century, the newly emerging anthropological sense of the concept of “culture” was available as one way of sorting out differences among people, and thus of defining “religion.” The peculiar relevance of this historical moment, in contrast to the first wave of imperial expansion, lies in the way that effort continues to shape our discussions today.

Berkwitz also rightly observes there is inevitably a political dimension to the hierarchies that missions and other colonial regimes of truth produce.  If I fail to elaborate on this theme, it’s not only because that has been the predominant focus of most previous anthropological discussions of missions, but also because that focus often takes so much for granted in its own political common sense, its own grasp of the players and their stakes. In choosing what to emphasize in Christian Moderns, I was trying to reflect on that very common sense, and hoping to elude the teleological narratives to which it can unwittingly give rise.

Like Gorski, Danilyn Rutherford hones in on the ways in which I seem to have been unable to entirely escape the very habits and assumptions on which I am trying to reflect. In her exemplary close-reading of the text, she shows how persistent the vocabulary of belief can be. So let me grant that the word “belief” may cast too broad a net. Perhaps we could speak of metabelief to identify the ideological privilege that certain traditions accord to the giving of assent to propositions, which is then taken to define a religion (thus Asad). But it seems this narrow definition tends to expand into a more general psychologism, by which a postulated inner state is required for any explanation of practices, which are themselves therefore seen to derive from it. As a general account of mind, this is peculiarly intentionalistic and self-objectifying. As an account of religion, it’s empirically dubious (for instance, it tends to ignore the bored pupil in confirmation class in favor of the pious and passionate) and politically suspect (it makes some people judges of the interior states of others).

But as Rutherford shows, it may be impossible to eliminate talk of assumptions, thoughts, and presuppositions altogether from our account of people’s actions. Thus, we need more complex and nuanced accounts of the relations between thought, imputed thought, unconscious presuppositions, and action. These accounts should remain suspicious of the inclination to grant primacy to interiority. Indeed, as Rutherford wisely suggests, careful attention to linguistic pragmatics and other aspects of signification will confound any effort to draw a clear distinction between inner and outer. My inclination is dialectical, that is, to say that tacit understandings help produce material practices, to which people respond with new understandings. This means we have to link the varieties of belief to the different material modalities they imply. We can displace to primacy of belief from our accounts and sort out its varieties.  By attending to the materiality of words, objects, and practices, if we don’t eliminate the inner/outer distinction altogether, we should at least put them into more dynamic play with one another. Practices may be only one dialectical moment of a process of objectification that will also include beliefs, but it is the moment that gives religions both their sociality and their historicity.