Four guided missiles packed with explosive material hurtled into the morning sky. Though the day was brilliant blue and cloudless, no one saw them coming. They were aimed at a nation that did not see itself at war. Moreover, it was a nation convinced that missiles fired in anger no longer posed a serious threat to its security. The weapons were conventional in the strict sense: they did not carry nuclear warheads.

But the weapons and the attackers who launched them were anything but conventional. The 19 hijackers who commandeered four civilian jetliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, were not sent by a state or nation. They were not motivated by any purely secular or political cause. Born of religious zeal, they sought to strike a blow against a power they believed was in thralldom and service to Satan. Motivated by faith, they wanted to strike a blow for Allah.

Religion, which was supposed to have been permanently sidelined by secularization, suddenly appeared to be at the center of world affairs. Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars. Religious believers were supposed to stay confined to one side of the boundary that sealed private faith off from global public affairs—a boundary that separated the irrational from the rational, the mystical from the purposeful. However, guided by an astonishing combination of zealous faith and coolly calculating rationality, September 11 showed that organized religious believers could act with purpose, power, and public consequence.

And we—not only America, but the whole world of professional policy-making and analysis—were unprepared. As Robert Keohane, a leading international relations scholar, had the humility to admit shortly afterward:

The attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation. They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often been fueled by religious fervor. None of them takes very seriously the human desire to dominate or to hate—both so strong in history and in classical realist thought. [emphasis added]

In his own post-9/11 analysis, however, Keohane also had the honesty to say: “Since I have few insights into religious motivations in world politics, I will leave this subject to those who are more qualified to address it.”

This edited volume picks up where Keohane left off. In the light of religion’s global resurgence, most dramatized by 9/11, it attempts a radical rethinking of the relationship between religion and world affairs, hence the title. It brings together scholars who are eminently qualified to analyze how and why religious motivations, actors, ideas, and organizations matter for contemporary world affairs. It addresses some of the reasons that theories of world politics and world affairs have been slow to address religious factors, how and why religious factors are influencing important global dynamics, and how we need to adapt our theories of world affairs to the realities and implications of this resurgence.

*  *  *

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together.

Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain.

This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn. It still structures much of our study and understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. It does so because many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions on which it was founded remain firmly lodged in the minds of international relations scholars, as Bryan Hehir describes in chapter 1 of this book. The meaning of concepts such as “secularism,” “modernity,” “power,” and “public life” is assumed without hesitation or complication. With equal confidence, a sharp boundary is drawn between these concepts and phenomena assumed to be their polar opposites: “religion,” “tradition,” “theology,” “faith,” and “private worship.”

Much classical thinking and practice in world affairs is thus a form of border patrol. It is concerned with policing and strengthening the fence between two worlds. The first world is the “secular” and “public” world in which international actors—nation-states and the multilateral organizations that bind them together—are presumed to make rational choices in the pursuit of political and economic power. The second world is the “spiritual” and “private” world in which religious actors—everything from church hierarchies to clerical councils to violent organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah—are presumed to make faith-based choices in the pursuit of nonrational or irrational goals. As with the empirical assumption about religion and economic development, the factual assumption about these two worlds is that they are two separate universes, with little to no mutual contact or interaction. As with the ethical or normative assumption about religion and political democratization, the ethical or moral assumption about these two worlds is that they should be kept as far apart as possible.

However, it is true that what could be called classical secularization theory recognized the reality and legitimacy of some traffic between these two universes. Classical secularization theory assumed the descriptive and prescriptive forms noted at the beginning: it expected the automatic decline of religion in the face of development and required the hermetic isolation of religion in the face of democracy. On one hand, the forces of development and progress would so impinge on the world of religion that religion would have little to do and less space in which to do it. Modern progress would make the security and comfort offered by religion increasingly unnecessary. Modernization, in other words, would infiltrate, occupy, and diminish the world of the spirit, fostering the “disenchantment” that Max Weber made central to his understanding of modernity. On the other hand, secularization theory held that the forces of democracy should reform and regulate religion to make it compatible with freedom—to inculcate habits of autonomy and rational reflection and encourage individuals to forge new identities as democratic citizens. On closer inspection, in other words, classical secularization theory imagined that the religious and political worlds would and should interrelate to a significant extent.

The crucial point, however, is that the secularization theorists who assigned themselves the task of managing the points of contact between the public “secular” world and the private “spiritual” world allowed—and expected—traffic to flow in only one direction.

The result of this stringent and one-way boundary maintenance has been the long-standing exclusion of religion and religious actors from the systematic study of world politics in general and international relations in particular. This has created a paradoxical situation: religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one of the least examined factors in the professional study and practice of world affairs.

For example, the lead journal for political science in the United States is the American Political Science Review (APSR). In its 100th anniversary issue, an article concluded that “prior to 1960 only a single APSR article sought to use religion as a variable to explain empirical phenomena” and that in APSR “from 1980 on, just one article in American Government put religious factors at the center of analysis; and just two in Comparative Politics.” A similar neglect marked the international relations literature. Daniel Philpott, a contributor to this book, judged that in his survey of leading journals of international relations from 1980 to 1999, “only six or so out of a total of about sixteen hundred featured religion as an important influence.” This neglect of religion in research is echoed in teaching. One of the coeditors of this volume, Alfred Stepan, teaches at one of America’s largest and oldest schools dedicated to training graduate students for international careers in government, political analysis, international organizations, the media, human rights, the private sector, and academia: the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently teaching the first general course on the role of religion in world affairs in the school’s fifty-year history.

*  *  *

Rethinking Religion and World Affairs represents a collective effort to rethink religion and world affairs by questioning the sharp empirical and ethical boundaries that have separated the two. A working group of leading scholars and policy practitioners concerned with religion in the contemporary world was convened by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, to devise strategies to transcend this state of affairs. It soon became apparent that thousands of professors never trained in religion and world affairs would be asked to design and teach new courses, media newsrooms to report on religion in greater depth, and legislators, foreign policy makers, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, and feminist and human rights groups to devise new and more appropriate approaches to religion.

Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and proceed from there. Most realist, liberal, English school, feminist, and historical-materialist approaches treat religion as either private by prior assumption or a cultural relic to be handled by anthropologists. Even constructivists, known for their attention to historical contingency and social identity, have paid scant attention to the politics of secularism and religion, focusing instead on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests and identity or looking at the social construction of states and the state system with religion left out of the picture.

This disciplinary convention fixes in advance key definitions and terms of inquiry, with some of the most vital aspects of contemporary world politics systematically excluded from consideration. The presumption that religion has been privatized and is no longer operative in modern politics or that its influence can be neatly encapsulated in anthropological studies of a particular religious tradition and its external influence on politics has led scholars of international relations to miss or misconstrue some of the most significant political developments of our time. This narrow vision is in part attributable to a rigid and dehistoricized secular/religious binary that prestructures the field of academic political science and international relations. This academic practice, in turn, mirrors and reinforces particular kinds of limits on political practice, as suggested by the Egyptian example discussed earlier. Expressed and reproduced through both forms of practice, this binary polices the borders of what counts as politics and what counts as religion and how they relate to each other. It has played a critical role in the global production of knowledge. As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed of the fluid relation between theory and practice, “there ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.”

To be clear, I do not want to suggest that the categories of the secular and the religious fluctuate so wildly that they lack any analytical, political, or metaphysical salience, depending on one’s perspective, but, rather, that from the perspective of deep pluralism that underlies my argument, these categories cannot be taken for granted in their fixity. Failing to account for the power and limitations of the category of the secular and its shifting and contested relation not only to religion but to other political phenomena cast in opposition to it risks imposing a simplistic and distorted template on world politics. A rigid secular/religious divide stabilizes particular, historically contingent, and often hegemonic definitions of both politics and religion. This makes life easier for social scientists looking for answers in the short run but is costly in a world in which the way these categories come to be defined, what they come to represent and not represent, is critical to understanding how they operate politically.

At the same time, the category of religion is no more obvious than the category of the secular. Reconsidering the fixity of the secular/religious binary opens new epistemological spaces for the identification of forms and locations of politics that fall off the radar screen of conventional secular rationalist approaches to politics and conventional religious approaches to politics. It makes room for alternative instantiations of the secular/religious divide to work their way into political theory and practice, as is occurring today in Turkey and is discussed below.

A second qualification is that not all social scientists are cut from a single mold, and the degree to which any individual, institution, party, state, or international organization unthinkingly reproduces any particular secular/religious binary varies. It would be inaccurate to suggest that everyone approaches these questions in the same way. Yet particular varieties of secularism, like varieties of religion, have had an organizing influence on the ways in which most Europeans and Americans define and relate to basic categorizations involving religion and politics. These categorizations also change over time, as Charles Taylor argues in chapter 1 of this book, with the secular coming to refer in our time to that pertaining to a self-sufficient immanent sphere. The practices, institutions, and ways of being designated as secular sustain and shape the contours of public life and the modern organization of social-scientific knowledge. These traditions do not merely reflect social reality; they help to construct it. They embody attitudes, sensibilities, and habits that facilitate closure and agreement around cultural, political, and legal settlements of the separation of church and state, the definition of religion, and what constitutes normal politics. There is in many contexts an identifiable secular “pattern of political rule,” helping to generate and sustain the category of religion and setting preconditions for particular kinds of academic and political practice.

The unthinking adoption of a rigid secular/religious binary in the social sciences has had at least three consequences for the study of world politics. First, social scientists are encouraged to define research questions, select methods, and present results that fall squarely into the “secular” half of the binary, understood as the domain of rational humanism. They are taught to avoid religion, the domain of the supernatural, superstitious, otherworldly, metaphysical, and so forth. This encourages social scientists to approach religion either not at all or as a particular, emotive (as opposed to secular, rational, and universal) dimension of politics alongside others such as gender, caste, and (at times) nation. The secular/religious binary operates such that not to be secular is to be emotional, irrational, unpredictable, and behind the march of progress. Quietly at work here is the notion that only the West, with its narrative of secularization, has found its way out of the woods, while other civilizations continue to cast about in a desperate search to answer the questions that the West resolved centuries ago. Lodged within this narrative is the assumption that the secular is the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. The secular thus comes to stand not only in an oppositional relation to religion but also as the natural counterpart to other dimensions of politics that do not fit comfortably within the categories of either rational self-interest or universalist ethics.

This suggests that the secular is a more powerful and capacious category than one might assume when it is taken to stand only in contradistinction to the religious. Loosening the hold of a fixed secular/religious binary opens up a broader field of inquiry into modern formations of authority than may be apparent at the outset. The secular grounds and secures a place for the good, rational, and universal in Western moral order, which is then opposed to series of nonrational or irrational particularisms, aberrations, or variations. Religion often, though not always, appears as one of these particularisms. It is not the only candidate: institutions and identities associated with (ethnic as opposed to civic) nationalism, race, caste, and gender all have been cast in an oppositional relation to secular rational self-interest and/or universalist ethics. This is the sense in which it is possible to glimpse the capacious power of the category of the secular above and beyond its extraordinary capacity to define and delimit the religious. I return to this below.

A second consequence of the naturalization of the secular/religious binary is that the study of religion and politics tends to focus not on secularism in relation to religion or the other categories discussed above (the binary has effectively segregated these categories) but on predefined religious traditions taken as independent objects of inquiry and the degree to which they infiltrate or influence politics. This division of labor divides inquiry into mainstream (secular) studies on the one hand and studies of religion or religion and politics on the other. A fixed understanding of religion in relation to the secular supports an understanding of the secular as that which is associated with normal, rational politics. Religion becomes a repository for a range of nonrational and nonuniversal dimensions of politics that fall outside the range of “normal” politics, including belief, culture, tradition, mood, and emotion.

A third consequence of the stabilization of the binary is that a particular (often monotheistic) definition of religion is often taken as the norm. This definition constructs an object of study and defines religious actors and institutions according to a particular set of parameters. These limitations press those trained in the traditions of European and American international-relations scholarship to read the world in a particular way, with an emphasis on European religious history and experience, and to misconstrue or miss entirely a whole spectrum of political actors, histories, and processes. Perhaps most significant among these are the intense political struggles, historical contingencies, religious ambivalences, and philosophical uncertainties surrounding the practices associated with and legitimized by claims to the secular itself.

The study of religion, secularism, and international affairs requires a suspension of (dis)belief to address these limitations and move toward new paradigms for the study of global politics. It requires suspending disbelief in the particularity of the secular (or suspending one’s belief in the universalizing potential of the secularization narrative, depending on how you look at it) and approaching the secular/religious binary not as fixed but as shifting, evolving, and elusive. This suspension of (dis)belief can be uncomfortable for those socialized in Euro-American secularisms, which are kept afloat by a high degree of certainty surrounding the stability of these categories. But I hope to show that it is worth the effort. Suspending the assumption that any secular/religious binary is fixed and universal and approaching it as an unstable, historically contingent construct that is capable of sustaining a broad discursive field that goes beyond the maintenance of a distinction between the secular and the religious allows the ground that supports this distinction to shift in intellectually fruitful directions.

And the ground is shifting. Developments in late-modern international relations, such as increasing pluralization within societies, rising global interdependence, the retreat of Christendom, the questioning of the universality of the Enlightenment, and a rise in religiously inspired forms of collective political identification, demand a destabilization of the fundamental terms and binaries (secular rational versus religious irrational, philosophical versus theological, reason versus faith) that have structured inquiry on this subject for decades. Understanding the politics of secularism requires this suspension of (dis)belief. Like their counterparts in philosophy and political theory, international relations theorists need to hone their capacity to pose research questions that do not presuppose fixed definitions of these terms or relations between them. What claims to the secular and the religious signify in different circumstances and what political effects these claims have in various settings are precisely what needs to be explored.

The indiscriminate association of the secular with good governance stabilizes an understanding of Islam as that which is not secular. It also, and perhaps even more dangerously, perpetuates the idea of the secular as the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. Secular politics comes to stand as the opposite of Muslim politics and as the natural counterpart to all other dimensions of politics that don’t fit comfortably within the categories of rational self-interest or universalist ethics. This is a powerful and capacious category. Beyond securing itself in distinction to Islam, the secular thereby comes to ground and secure a place for the good, rational, and universal, which is opposed to any number of irrational particularisms, aberrations, and variations.

This oppositional rhetoric closes down all kinds of political spaces and possibilities. And today this closure is occurring in real time, as Americans and Europeans rely upon unreflective blanket usages of the secular to organize their responses to the Egyptian crisis. It is striking the extent to which this term—and related constructs, such as secular democracy and secular leaders—serve as placeholders for all that is good, right, and universal in many Western accounts of developments in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), founded in 1928 and still officially outlawed in Egypt, is anxiously depicted in these accounts as ‘Islamist’ and represented as a potential danger that might result from the emergence of democracy in Egypt. Political positions expressed through reference to Islamic tradition, history, or politics are assimilated into the category of ‘bad’ politics and assumed to threaten normal, rational, and democratic politics. Political Islam is seen as a divergence from and/or infringement upon neutral secular public space, as a throwback to pre-modern forms of Muslim political order, or a toxic combination of the two.

Earlier work of mine on the politics of secularism described two widely held evaluative frameworks that fuel these representations of Islam, laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism. These same frameworks are now being mobilized by the media and other political actors to make sense of the crisis in Egypt, forming the backdrop out of which many Europeans and Americans understand developments on the ground. In the first, laicist reading, political Islam is portrayed as a superficial expression of deep-seated economic and political interests and/or an infringement by irrational forms of religion upon would-be secular public life in Muslim-majority societies. In the second, ‘Judeo-Christian’ secularist reading, political Islam is depicted as an undemocratic commingling of Islam and politics that stands against the modern Christian or secularized Christian separation of church and state. This second narrative posits that distinctions between religious and political authority are not only historically absent from Muslim-majority societies but are unthinkable due to fixed characteristics of the Islamic religion. In both narratives political Islam is equated with a refusal to acknowledge the privileged status of the private sphere and a transgression of modern categories of public and private. The effect of these narratives is to equate any appearance of Islamic discourse in political practice with fundamentalism and intolerance. These views of political Islam are alive and well in today’s representations of the MB and help structure Western political responses to the crisis. Fear of the rise to power of the MB in Egypt appears to be among the reasons that the Obama administration is hesitating to call for Mubarak to step down and has expressed ambivalence with regard to American support for the protesters’ legitimate objectives.

Yet we could tell a different story about religion and politics in Egypt. Today Egypt is being challenged over the fundamental structure of the field in which the secular and the religious have been defined. The structure of this field under Mubarak served to legitimize and de-legitimize certain parties, institutions, and forms of collective identification. It allowed certain kinds of political practice, such as vigorous anti-terror laws and violent repression of opponents of Mubarak’s regime, while disallowing others, such as full political participation by parties designated by that regime as ‘religious.’ These distinctions were enacted legally: revisions to Article 5 of the Egyptian constitution enacted in 2006 prohibit political activity based in any way upon religion, effectively banning the Muslim Brotherhood from formally participating in politics.

The United States has stood forcefully and famously behind this state-instituted and highly securitized secular-religious oppositional binary as a means of defending its interests in the region, defined primarily as ensuring Israeli security, pursuing the war on terror, and guaranteeing access to oil. In a 2005 speech at the American University in Cairo, Condoleeza Rice remarked: “our goal here is to encourage the Egyptian Government, within its own laws and hopefully within a process and a context that is ever more reforming, to engage with civil society, with the people of Egypt for elections that can be free and fair. But we have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and we don’t—we won’t.” According to Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher, the Bush administration further hardened this position after Rice’s visit. After Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, in which the MB gained one-fifth of the seats in parliament, U.S. pressure on the Mubarak regime decreased and then ceased entirely after Hamas’ victory. Washington remained silent as the Mubarak regime arrested hundreds of Brothers and transferred dozens to military courts.

Today the Egyptian people and a powerful anti-Mubarak coalition are overturning this entire structure of domination, upheld by Mubarak and aided and abetted by the Americans and the Europeans for decades. The future is up for grabs. Rami Khouri, the eminent Lebanese journalist, has described this momentous change as “the unraveling of the post-colonial order that the British and French created in the Arab world in the 1920s and 30s and then sustained—with American and Soviet assistance—for most of the last half century.” It is unclear whether decision-makers in the United States and Europe will recognize the potential of this moment for Egyptians and others in the region to open up and remake the political playing field along participatory and democratic lines, or whether they will cling to the familiar securitization of secular/religious politics in the name of regional security and order.

Events may impose a new worldview. As Philip Weiss observes: “the danger to America and Israel is that the Egyptian revolution will destroy this false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists by showing that Arabs are smart articulate people who can handle real democracy if they get to make it themselves.” Mohamed ElBaradei likewise describes the idea that Islamic fundamentalists are set to take over Egypt as “a myth that was sold by the Mubarak regime—that it’s either us, the ruthless dictators, or . . . the al Qaeda types.”

At the time of the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault observed that “the problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.” The ascription of threat to the MB empowers those who argue that the West aspires to global hegemony through a crusade against Islam. It emboldens Mubarak and fellow autocrats throughout the region. And it fails to address the realities of contemporary politics in states in which these movements have gained a strong and legitimate political foothold that cannot be washed away by wishful thinking in Washington, London, or Jerusalem.

Such a hostile attitude toward the MB is also unfounded. As Nathan Brown describes them, “a lot of their program is just standard reform stuff—independence of the judiciary, the end of corruption, protecting the environment. Especially when they got more political over the last 10 years or so, what they really began to push was a very general reform language that takes Islamic coloration in some areas. But an awful lot of it is consistent with other reform programs coming from reformists all over the political spectrum.” It remains to be seen whether Western decision-makers and pundits will display the political courage and intellectual creativity needed to transcend the false choice between secular dictators and “crazy Islamists” and support real democracy in the Middle East, for a change.

Yet, in order for the incoming administration of president-elect Barack Obama to make efficacious adjustments to America’s international religious freedom policy and, equally important, to gain purchase into the linkages between the global salience of religion and U.S. national security, it is imperative that the transition team look to history before trying to shape the future. Specifically, there are potential policy gains associated with the conceptual exercise of unpacking and differentiating between two formulations that are used interchangeably in social science research and public policy debates: on the one hand, “religion and U.S. foreign policy” and, on the other, “American international religious freedom policy.”

A survey of scholarly literature and public policy conferences over the past ten years reflects the tendency to conflate the aforementioned two formulations, but a careful reading of history suggests that there are significant, if oftentimes nuanced, distinctions between these two notions. These points of difference, in turn, have crucial implications for optimizing the results of America’s efforts to promote and protect religious freedom as a universal human right, as well as for minimizing the unintended consequences, both direct and indirect, of the IRFA.

What does a thorough and thoughtful reading of history teach us about the relationship between the above two formulations? Three points merit particular consideration for the scholar-practitioner preoccupied with questions of religion and modernity (and, especially, with the linkages between religious pluralism and democracy, as well as with the nexus between religion, state, and security).

Firstly, even the most cursory read of American history illuminates the centrality and continuity of religious ideas in the master narrative of America as a nation-state. Emblematic in this respect are the following: the Puritan settlement of the New World as a struggle for religious freedom; the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of divinely ordained rights as the ontological basis for citizenship; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny as a rationale for America’s enlargement of its territorial frontiers; the formulation of Wilsonian internationalism as a public service creed; the definition of the Cold War as a battle with atheistic communism; and, most recently, the G.W. Bush administration’s presentation of the War on Terror as a battle between good and evil.

Secondly, religious ideas inform the defining contours and particularities of American patriotism; religion is embedded in America’s self-definition as an exceptional nation-state. More precisely, religious ideas are inextricably woven into American nationalism (the notion of America as one nation under God), just as religious concepts and values have been a continuous touchstone for conceptualizing American statecraft (America’s role in the world). According to the conventional narrative, America’s unique founding conditions as a nation both obligate and legitimate the American state in its conduct of foreign policy. From the homiletics of the country’s Founding Fathers to the argumentation of public intellectuals such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Jean Bethke Elshtain, a discernible religious hermeneutic emerges as a legitimation principle in American statecraft over the last two centuries: the expansion in America’s continental frontiers during the 19^th century; America’s inaugural experience with empire through the war in the Philippines in 1898; the U.S. involvement in World War I and World War II; the policy of containment supported by George Kennan to John Foster Dulles through Ronald Reagan over the second half of the 20^th century; and, early in this third millennium, the doctrine of preventive war centered in the Bush 43 administration’s national security strategy.

By rendering obvious the fact that religious ideas have been a consistent leitmotif in the conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy priorities, these two lessons help to elucidate two subtle, but appreciable and critical, distinctions vis-à-vis the related construct of “American international religious freedom policy.”

The third point, then, emerges by tracing the complexities and evolution of those religious ideas and actors who have affected U.S. foreign policy. Particularly salient have been the evolving internal fractiousness of Protestant Christianity in America, coupled with the steady expansion in the overall religious heterogeneity of America.

Alfred Stepan’s concept of multivocality captures the development of pacifist versus activist tendencies within American Protestantism, a fascinating subtext in the country’s 20^th-century history, whereby debates about optimal U.S. foreign policy tactics and goals were explored via alternative religious hermeneutics and internal organizational cleavages. That these debates took place within the broader context of the widening and deepening of religious pluralization in America (as explored in Will Herbert’s seminal work and, more recently, Diana Eck’s research) helped to sharpen the focal question regarding international religious freedom as distinct from, albeit related to, religion and U.S. foreign policy.

In short, the support of both religious and secular actors for religious freedom as a universal human right laid bare a conundrum in the conceptualization of the religious dimensions of U.S. foreign policy. On the one hand, Washington’s signatory status on international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), as well as the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief (1981) underscored the conviction that all human beings enjoy equal rights of thought, conscience, and belief. Yet, this principle raised fundamental incompatibilities with a U.S. foreign policy conceptualized historically by American Protestants as part of a great Christianizing missionary project.

Finally, given the above, the history of America’s support for religious freedom as articulated in international human rights instruments must also be understood as the latest chapter in the history of America’s self-definition as a nation and the associated implications for the role of the U.S. in world affairs. In this respect, there is an important dynamic of mutual transformation at work between the two, distinctive formulations of religion and U.S. foreign policy, on the one hand, and American religious freedom policy on the other. Indeed, a conscientious examination of the origins of the IRFA—particularly as these relate to the members of the founding coalition for the legislation, as well as cleavages over the philosophy and methodology of the eventual International Religious Freedom Act—illustrates how the formalization of the U.S. foreign policy commitment to international religious freedom threw into sharp relief unresolved questions about the in/exclusivist religious dimensions of American nationalism. By illuminating the denominational and confessional contours of the current expression of American exceptionalism, the origins of the IRFA and its application largely within the context of the post-9/11 security matrix generated a critical consideration of the internal tensions within and unintended consequence of American religious freedom policy.

History is a useful guidepost, then, in moving beyond the tendency to elide the constructs of religion and U.S. foreign policy, on the one hand, and American international religious freedom policy on the other. At a moment when there is a decade of IRF policy available for serious evaluation and when the U.S. presidential elections constitute a new moment of possibilities for defining the content of American national identity, a sober and thoughtful reflection on history is the starting point for constructive steps toward the future.

In October of 1998, IRFA’s passage represented a surprising victory for its proponents. Almost two years of debate had revealed deep divisions over religious freedom legislation, and in July the New York Times had declared the legislation dead. Then, in late October, as Congress prepared to adjourn for elections, both Houses passed the law unanimously and Clinton signed it immediately, declaring IRFA “a welcome and responsible addition to our ongoing efforts.”

Analyzing in detail why the law finally passed need not occupy us here. In the end a confluence of circumstances led both legislators and the White House to accept the bill, including upcoming Congressional elections (no one wanted to be labeled “soft on religious persecution”), late concessions that made the statute’s language more palatable to the State Department, the president’s looming impeachment trial, and the single-mindedness of the act’s proponents.

More important for our purposes is that most of the fears voiced during the long debates over IRFA have proven off the mark. Clinton officials believed the statute was intended to establish a “hierarchy of human rights” that privileged religious liberty and sanctioned Christian proselytizing abroad. Supporters believed that the Clinton State Department was lax in condemning persecution of Christians. As the IRFA began to be implemented under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, much of this angst (although not all of it) dissipated.

For one thing, liberal fears of a Christian-right dominated IRF operation at the State Department were misplaced. The IRF Act privileged no religious group and sought protections for all. Both IRF ambassadors at large—the senior officials established to lead the new policy—were evangelicals, but neither pursued sectarian aims abroad (although foreign critics wrongly accused the U.S. of doing so). A bipartisan IRF Commission established by IRFA provided useful scrutiny of Department actions. Moreover, Foggy Bottom was adept at managing unwanted Congressional initiatives. Both IRF ambassadors and their staffs were placed under the human rights bureau, which ensured their functional and bureaucratic isolation from major policy discussions and decisions.

At the same time, however, the methodology adopted by the State Department proved largely acceptable to IRFA supporters, including the Christian right. As it developed during the first decade, IRF policy put religious persecution under a harsh, high-beam spotlight. The Department monitored abuses and issued a well-received annual report. Each year it publicly condemned the worst persecuting governments, and threatened economic sanctions against them. This approach scored some successes over the years, especially releases of religious prisoners.

But there were other problems. The Department’s emphasis on persecution helped ensure the continued subordination of the religious freedom initiative within the broad foreign policy of the United States. While everyone opposed persecution, it was extremely difficult for the IRF ambassador or the Commission to insist that policy makers give it top priority. Some of the worst persecutors, such as Saudi Arabia or China, provided assistance in areas vital to U.S. national interests—access to oil, counter terrorism, negotiations with North Korea, and the like. U.S. diplomacy did not ignore the religious persecution sanctioned by Riyadh or Beijing, but it simply could not afford to place it above national security imperatives. This meant that IRF advocacy was often relegated to humanitarian appeals that at best produced the release of a few prisoners.

What, then, can be said about the overall legacy of American IRF policy during its first decade? On the plus side, hundreds of human beings have been removed from harm’s way by the efforts of IRF ambassadors, their staffs and U.S. diplomats the world over. This is a record of which they and all Americans can be proud. The rescue of a single person, let alone hundreds, is a humanitarian achievement worthy of our nation. It not only benefits the victims and their families but also gives hope to those who continue to languish in prisons and in fear.

The annual IRF report has done more than anything else to institutionalize thinking about religion within a resisting American diplomatic establishment. The report has a chapter on the status of religious freedom for every country in the world and requires U.S. diplomats (most of them junior) to engage religious ideas, actors, and communities. Importantly, both IRF ambassadors have made impressive gains. During a two year tenure Robert Seiple, Clinton’s appointee, won prisoner releases and changes in bad religion laws by employing his brand of “relational diplomacy.” Within the Department he convinced Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, against huge odds, to put China on the first list of “countries of particular concern” (CPCs), i.e., the particularly severe violators of religious freedom.

Seiple’s successor, Bush appointee John Hanford, has served for six and one-half years. Hanford has achieved a great deal, including substantial increases in the IRF staff. He has employed the IRFA (which he helped author) with success. For example, he secured the designation of Vietnam as a CPC, convinced Hanoi to pass laws against persecution, and then rewarded the government by removing them from the CPC list. This action was criticized by the IRF Commission (persecution did not end in Vietnam), but it is precisely the kind of method intended by IRFA and could serve as a useful precedent for other countries.

Notwithstanding these and other laudable gains, however, there remains a fundamental flaw in U.S. international religious freedom policy. Put simply, the United States has not actually attempted to advance religious freedom in any political or cultural sense. As noted, it has mainly sought to reduce persecution. But reducing or even eliminating religious persecution is the beginning, not the end, of religious freedom. That right means more than freedom from abuse; it also means the freedom to act in ways consistent with belief. As such, it lies at the heart of human dignity and is a precondition for stable self government. But neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations have seen it that way. Neither employed IRF policy to facilitate the consolidation of democracy in key states abroad. Neither understood religious freedom as a national security imperative.

The case for broadening IRF policy is strong. First, a more comprehensive policy would address the problem of religious persecution on the front end, as it were, rather than reacting to it with condemnations and threats of punishment. That methodology has freed some, but millions suffer persecution for their religious beliefs or those of their tormentors. By encouraging the institutions of religious freedom we would attack the very structures of persecution.

Second, IRF policy could advance vital American interests by helping root fragile democracies in the Muslim world and elsewhere. The nascent democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, will remain vulnerable to collapse even if their security problems are resolved. Each could revert to authoritarian or theocratic regimes open to the kinds of Islamist radicalism that threaten vital U.S. interests. Harsh authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia ensure that both states will remain incubators and exporters of terrorism, a situation unlikely to change until they move toward some form of stable self-government.

Both history and social science indicate, however, that democracy cannot root in highly religious societies unless they embrace, in law and culture, religious freedom. For example, most Catholic nations did not become democratic until the Church sanctioned religious liberty. Today Latin American Catholics are helping democracy to consolidate by competing vigorously but peacefully with Pentecostals, and by resisting the old temptation to seek advantage through civil law and policy. The work of sociologists such as Pew Forum’s Brian Grim and Penn State’s Roger Finke strongly suggests that stable democracy requires a “bundled commodity” of fundamental freedoms that cannot function properly without religious liberty. Absent that right, societies are highly vulnerable to democracy-killing religious conflict, persecution and extremism.

In short, U.S. democracy policies are unlikely to succeed unless they develop strategies to advance religious freedom. This cannot be done by threats of economic sanctions (threats which have, in any case, been largely rhetorical during IRFA’s first decade). It can only work if governments and societies, especially powerful majority religious communities, believe it in their interests to adopt religious freedom. Persuading them will not be easy. Many have theological objections, and our current IRF policy is perceived as unilateralist, cultural imperialism, designed to undermine majority religious communities such as Afghan Sunnism, Russian Orthodoxy or Indian Hinduism. Many believe the U.S. seeks to impose a “separation of church and state” akin to the French system of laïcité, a state-enforced privatization of religion (that was also adopted in 20^th century Turkey). There is little awareness among Islamic, Russian or even Indian populations that religious communities prosper in the United States, not simply because they are equal under the law but also because they are invited into the public square to make religiously informed moral arguments about the common good.

Overcoming these problems will require significant policy changes by the next administration. It will require elevating IRF policy within both private and public diplomacy, foreign aid and U.S. democracy promotion programs. Our message must be clear: if you seek the benefits of stable democracy, including economic growth, peace, political stability and, most importantly, the flourishing of your religious community, you must take on this difficult issue of religious liberty. You must arrive at a culturally sustainable religion-state relationship that protects the equal rights of religious individuals and communities under the law.

Currently, American diplomacy lacks the imagination, language and institutional capacity to deliver such a message. It remains heavily influenced by the debunked secularization theory, according to which religion will wither as modernity advances. All the schools of foreign policy dominant in recent years—realism, liberal internationalism, neoconservatism—have sought to avoid grappling with the growth of religion in the international order. Our public diplomacy has too often trivialized America’s system of ordered liberty by trumpeting pop culture—one head of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors opined publicly that “Britney Spears represents the sounds of freedom.” Such an impoverished understanding of liberty distorts the American achievement and reinforces the fear that U.S. style democracy means moral license. Islamist radicals have exploited this fear to their benefit.

These and other problems can be overcome, however, with the right policy decisions. For example, a President and Secretary of State can mandate new training on religion and religious freedom for our diplomats, enhanced authority for the IRF ambassador at the State Department, the integration of IRF policy into the powerful regional bureaus where key policies are implemented, the creation of incentives and opportunities for diplomats in the field of religion and foreign policy, and the establishment of a Foreign Service sub-specialty for religion under existing political, economic and public diplomacy career tracks.

In sum, a broader IRF strategy will help ensure that religious freedom advocacy moves to the center of U.S. foreign policy in the 21^st century. That is its rightful place, both as a humanitarian imperative that reflects the best of American values, and as an initiative that will further vital national interests, including the security of the American people.

[Thomas F. Farr will contribute a chapter on international religious freedom to a forthcoming SSRC volume on Religion and World Affairs, being edited by Timothy Shah, Alfred Stepan, and Monica Toft.---ed.]

The central puzzle of my book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations is that of how we might begin to think about secularism, and eventually, secularisms in the plural, as forms of political authority in IR. What does this mean for IR theory and for our understanding of political Islam and the broad resurgence of religion? What kinds of politics follow from different forms of secular commitments, traditions, habits and beliefs? I argue that the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but socially and historically constructed. The failure to recognize the validity of this contestation helps to explain why IR—both in theory and in terms of actual practices of international politics—has been unable to come to terms with secularism and religion as forms of authority in world politics. Overcoming this problem—opening up the black box of secularism and digging into the complex negotiations that take place inside of it—allows for a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations involving the politics of religion. Examples include the long-standing conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and the global resurgence of religion.

I approach secularism as a series of social and historical traditions—various sets of historical practices that have developed over time. These particular traditions of secularism both rely upon and help produce unique understandings of religion, political Islam, religious resurgence, “normal” politics and so forth. None of the divisions between religion and politics embodied in these secularist traditions are stable or universal. In fact, they are unstable; and even fundamentally contested, constantly being refined and redefined. To think about secularism in this way, I find it helpful to use Craig Calhoun’s suggestion that we approach nationalism as a discourse within which political struggles are conducted. When we adopt this insight, secularism becomes “not the solution to the puzzle [of politics and religion] but the discourse within which struggles to settle the question are most commonly waged.” Secularism is to an authoritative discourse, a language in which moral and political questions are settled, legitimated and contested. It is a form of political authority.

One implication of thinking about secularism in these terms is that it becomes clear that there are many traditions or varieties of secularism—Turkish Kemalism, French laïcité, American “Judeo-Christian” secularism. Each of these varieties of secularism represents a contingent yet enduring political settlement of the relation between religion and politics. Various forms of secularism both produce and are composed of authoritative settlements of religion and politics, while simultaneously claiming to be exempt from this process of production. This is a powerful move. Secularization then may be understood to be the combined social and historical processes through which a particular settlement becomes authoritative, legitimated and embedded in and through individuals, the law, the state, and other social relations, including international relations.

The central premise of my argument is that two specific trajectories, varieties or traditions of secularism, two strategies for managing the relationship between religion and politics, have been influential in international politics: laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism. Laicism refers to a separationist narrative in which religion is expelled from politics, and Judeo-Christian secularism refers to an accommodationist narrative in which Judeo-Christian tradition is perceived to be the foundation of secular democracy. These varieties of secularism don’t map cleanly onto one country or individual or another—both are present in different variations in different times and places. Both these forms of secularism are discursive traditions, following Talal Asad, collections of practices with a history. Each defends some form of the separation of church and state, but in a different way from the other, with a different justification and with different political consequences.

In developing the figure of Judeo-Christian secularism, I ask—to what extent have our forms of secularism inherited particular religious traditions? Or, rather, to what extent does Christianity, or post-World War II, Judeo-Christian tradition, animate contemporary, lived practices of secularism? It took Charles Taylor nearly 900 pages to answer this question in A Secular Age, so let me state briefly that I regard secularism as a series of lived traditions which are indebted to religious tradition and practice in significant ways, but the nature of their debts varies significantly with the form of secularism and the historical context in which it operates. This means that secularisms must be studied within their historical, cultural, and political contexts and not in the abstract. The secularisms that I write about are indebted to Christianity in interesting and complex ways, but laicism is also indebted to French Enlightenment thought, which is deeply anti-clerical.

These trajectories of secularism cannot be fully understood without reference to European and global history. They were created though human actions and beliefs and cannot be abstracted from the historical contexts and circumstances from which they emerged. While the secular traditions that interest me emerged out of and remain indebted to both the Enlightenment critique of religion and Judeo-Christian tradition, they also have been constituted and reproduced through global relationships, including negative representations of Islam.

But this argument has several implications for IR theory. My objective has been to bring debates from sociology of religion, philosophy, and political theory into international relations to refigure a field that has virtually ignored questions of how the categories of religion and politics shape international affairs. One implication of opening up this question of the politics of secularism is that it presents an alternative to realist, liberal and constructivist accounts of international relations that work on the assumption that religion has been privatized.

I challenge the assumption that after the Westphalian settlement, religion became privatized and thereby was rendered largely irrelevant to power politics. Instead, modern forms of secular authority emerged out of a specifically Christian-dominated Westphalian moral order. The influence of this specific tradition upon the Westphalian secular settlement makes it difficult to subsume the current international order into realist and liberal frameworks that assume that religion was simply privatized.

In other words, modern forms of secularism contribute to the constitution of a particular idea and practice of state sovereignty that claims to be universal in part by defining the limits of state-centered politics with “religion” on the outside. However, this attempt to delimit the terms and boundaries of the political and to define religion as a private counterpart to politics is a historically and culturally variable claim. It is also a highly politicized one. Different varieties of secularism create and perpetuate this claim about the limits of modern politics in different ways. From this perspective, they appear not as unchanging or obvious as we may have been inclined to see them before, but as contingent, yet firmly established, political settlements. These settlements operate below the threshold of public discourse and practice of state sovereignty. They may not be on the radar, but they should be, because they represent important constitutive elements of the theory and practice of modern sovereign authority.

A second contribution of this argument to IR theory involves the domestic/international question in relation to religion and politics. There has been a lot of great work done at this intersection. My contribution is to show how shared interests, identities and understandings of religion and politics that form at the domestic and regional levels become influential at the systemic level. This is constructivist theorizing that makes domestic politics a central part of the story, counteracting the tendency in IR, identified by Ole Wæver, Rodney Hall and others to “relegate domestic-societal interaction, sources of conflict, or societal cohesiveness to the status of epiphenomena.” This is a constructivist approach to the social, cultural and religious foundations of international relations.

If you accept my argument about the nature and significance of the politics of secularism, it becomes clear that the question often thrown about among students of religion and IR—“What is religion and how does it relate to international relations theory/practice?”—misses the point. For there can be no universal definition of religion. This is (as Asad argues) “not only because its constituent elements are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” If the categories of “religion” and “politics” are themselves the products of complex cultural, historical and political negotiations, then the question that I would put front and center in this discussion is how do these categories take shape, become authoritative, and what are their political consequences in specific sets of historical circumstances?

Defining the secular and the religious is a political task. Religious beliefs and practices are interwoven with political authority in complex and changing ways that don’t necessarily align with state boundaries or conventional secularist assumptions. IR theorists need to examine the secularist assumptions about religion that are embedded in the hypotheses and the empirical tests of IR scholarship.

In recent years, studies of religious pluralism in the United States and Canada have worked with dual purposes: first, to identify the shifts in the types of religious actors active in America and to map a newly diverse religious terrain, and second to use such knowledge to promulgate practices of tolerance and respect. One of the most effective and widely-cited practitioners and proponents of such efforts is Diana Eck, director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, a multi-year endeavor to map America’s diverse religious landscape. This project was one of the first to mark out the scope of post-1965 “multi-religious America” by charting the presence of religious groups from a wide range of religious traditions in contemporary American cities, towns, and suburbs. The Pew Charitable Trust’s recent Gateway Cities Initiative sponsored similar research analyzing religious diversity among new immigrant communities in ten American cities. Ongoing research in cities in Europe, Africa, and Asia extend the model of mapping and articulating religious differences around the globe.

These projects of mapping the territories of religious diversity are frequently coupled with normative prescriptions about how modern citizens should engage religious others. Professor Eck argues that pluralism, defined as “the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference” is best understood as an “energetic engagement with diversity” achieved through a dialogue rooted in the encounter of commitments. Similarly, sociologist Robert Wuthnow worries over the lack of religious interchange between religious communities in his recent volume, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. He calls for religious leaders to teach their faithful about the theologies and the beliefs of neighbors to better foster understanding and, ultimately, integrated social life.

Recent conferences at Columbia and Toronto began by questioning the types of religiousness that are imagined within these normative projects. Each of the initiatives contains a strong tendency to identify religions as encompassing discrete and recognizable communities and traditions with explicit boundaries across which interchange or conflict occurs. And, while the normative goals of religious pluralism may be debated endlessly (and we certainly hope that such debate will continue), the conversations among scholars gathered at these conferences reflected a broader concern that the blending of descriptive and prescriptive assessments of religious pluralism is problematic. Our question then becomes: To what degree does the view of “religions” as discrete groups occupying clearly marked terrain make sense?

The impetus for these conferences grew out of conversations between my colleague Pamela Klassen at the University of Toronto and myself. We are both completing books in which interreligious interaction diverges radically from the types of dialogue exchange associated with models of “religious pluralism.” In our respective historical and ethnographic research with American Protestants and post-Protestants, we find not borders and exchange, but poaching and appropriation, confusion or lack of clarity about the origins, ownership, and authenticity of various religious ideas, practices, and identities. “Religious diversity” and “exchange” is messy business, often full of conflict and lacking clearly defined lines or boundaries. At other times it takes place via structures that unwittingly shape the possibilities for interaction in ways that demand multiple translations and recalibrations among groups and individuals.

The work of our colleagues in religion, law, anthropology, sociology and history likewise demonstrates the manifold ways in which our understandings about interreligious exchange and conflict can be expanded, sometimes in provocative ways. Institutions in our modern world inevitably privilege certain forms of religiosity and elide or occlude others under the sign of the secular. These processes make certain kinds of “pluralistic exchange” possible and others unthinkable or dangerous. As an example, a recent op-ed in the pages of The New York Times suggests one such process at work. Slavoj Zizek, noting the Chinese government’s new law that prohibits Tibetan Buddhist monks from reincarnating without its permission, finds opportunity to criticize presumably non-religious Times readers for what he imagines to be their tendency to envision religious difference as cultural difference, a translation that mutes and dampens certain truth claims in order to acknowledge, tolerate, or even celebrate difference. The structures and practices that translate the religious into the cultural and back again are one part of our inquiry into the experience, expression, and future of religious engagement.

Overall, our joint aim at the University of Toronto and Columbia conferences was to place the projects of pluralism and exchange in historical and contemporary context to better understand where we are and where we might yet go. We note (and indeed share) a growing sense of urgency among scholars and public figures to “understand” the religious pluralism that appears to be a central and incontrovertible condition of modern global realities. Yet part of that understanding involves taking stock of the ways that religious differences have been shaped in public debate, scholarly work, secular institutions, and in the daily practices and public claims of various religious actors. In this undertaking, religious pluralism loses its natural qualities, and we begin to look more closely at the religious and secular institutions that manage, celebrate, condition, and exclude various forms.

After Pluralism: Reimagining Models of Interreligious Engagement
Toronto conference (with abstracts)
Columbia conference (with abstracts)

While this standard is allegedly value-free and culturally neutral, individual political actions or specific political cultures can be determined by factors that undermine their rationality. This is how religious forms of politics, in particular, tend to be considered. The exercise of non-secular political power is often described as obeying a different logic, not commensurate with the “realist” rationality that drives or should drive international politics. The principle of self-preservation that ought to trump other considerations and that is the taken-for-granted assumption of political prudence as well as the basis of the system of international law is often seen to be lacking in these non-secular powers. The implication is that the adherence of religious regimes to international law should not be trusted, nor should they be expected to act on the basis of prudential ratiocination. Other-worldly considerations inform their political behavior and permeate their policy decisions, and their politics remains wedded to theology. It would be unwise, therefore, to project the political rationality that guides the decisions of secular nations onto such regimes, and foolish to act upon such an assumption.

Of course, a realist scholar would say that the ideology that coats a state’s foreign policy does not matter at all, be it religious or otherwise: as long as a state is a state, it will act according to the same set of determinants. This is what international relations theory is all about. But because state sovereignty is classically defined as an authority that does not recognize any higher order – potestas qui nulli subest – and because theocracies are by definition the instrument of a higher order, it is easy to argue that they are failed states in the first place.

These and other implicit assumptions are very much in the foreground of the current debate about whether or not regimes such as Iran are amenable to traditional nuclear deterrence. For deterrence presupposes a similar political rationality on both sides. The very nature of non-secular regimes, it is assumed, makes them different from the interest-maximizing state upon which the traditional concepts and theories of international politics are premised (see for instance the recent comments of James Woolsey on that matter). And it is only by assuming the secular “rationality” of the state and of its conduct that the sophisticated calculations sustaining the delicate equilibriums of the “balance of power” or “deterrence” become a plausible basis of foreign policy.

Should this rationality be found missing, then other courses of action would become advisable. This is in fact what is argued, albeit with less sophistication, by a number of so-called “experts” calling for a strike against Iran. Because religious groups or states operate on the basis of absolute claims and transcendental values, their politics are said to be driven by different parameters, incompatible with a culture of compromise and coexistence that assumes the imperfection of worldly arrangements, recognizes the limited nature of political interests, and therefore accepts to accommodate them. Usually, the word “fanatical” is never far off.

What is wrong with such claims is not just that they amount to recasting in a seemingly scientific language a form of racism that has been the historical companion to all imperialist enterprises. It is not just the crass ignorance of the concrete way politics operates in the societies under discussion, either. Rather, it is the very idea that the “science” of politics that has shaped our understanding of international affairs is substantially different from religious worldviews or political repertoires claiming a relation to some form of transcendence. The idea that “we” enjoy some kind of epistemological privilege because our understanding of world politics has somehow worked itself out of its own cultural embeddedness and acquired universal relevance by becoming secular.

Carl Schmitt has famously argued that the main concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. Not only is international relations theory no exception, but by the time it took shape as a distinct discipline (roughly, in the mid-1950s), it was decidedly not secular. For many postwar intellectual and scholars, value relativism was the reason why liberalism had proved unable to resist the rise of totalitarianism. Rearticulating politics with values that would not depend on the shifting moods of the public was seen as a pressing issue. While some developed a renewed interest in natural rights, others turned to Christian values. Christianity offered indeed a defense against value-relativism and a transcendent yet rational ground for politics. The early discussions on the possibility of developing a genuine “theory” of international relations took place within a group of scholars sharing a vision of politics largely informed by the more pessimistic strands of Christian theology.

While a full treatment of this question is impossible within the confines of this short note, a few illustrations may be suggestive: This group of scholars included Reinhold Niebuhr, who by then had moved away from his earlier liberalism and had embraced Protestant neo-orthodoxy; George Kennan, whose religious convictions informed his distrust of democratic politics and social progress; British historians Herbert Butterfield and Arnold Toynbee who sought to contrast the Whiggish interpretation of history ; it also included Kenneth Thompson, William T.R. Fox and, most importantly, Hans Morgenthau. A simple perusal of the discussions held by this group shows how its members found their collective identity in “Christian realism” and did not shy away from reclaiming the legacy of Augustine or Burke. A common view of human nature as tainted by the original sin, and hence incapable of perfect rationality, ran through their view of politics. A view of conflict as an evil rooted in the human condition and a deep suspicion of any claim at overcoming this condition through international arrangements were part and parcel of this “realist” wisdom.

For sure, this early engagement of IR theorists with the immediate theological background of their discipline was short-lived. As IR blended into the fold of mainstream social science, it progressively shed its religious roots. Yet, secularization does not mean the absence of religion, but simply its morphing into something else. Transforming the Christian realists’ assumptions about human nature into a structural characteristic of the international system, as Kenneth Waltz later did, was indeed a secularizing move, but it also contributed to turn these assumptions into principles structuring our understanding of the international arena regardless of our religious beliefs. Secularization is always double-edged.

I guess this brief excursus into the history of the discipline can help illustrate my main point here: international relations theory is no less religious and no less culturally specific than other political discourses that may be less secular. Despite its status as a social science, it mobilizes conceptions of historical time, of power, and of worldliness that are fundamentally embedded in Christian theology. Where does this leave us? In the first place, it means that the opposition between modern standards of political rationality and religious worldviews is often just a proxy masking a culturalist opposition. This, in turn, means that we, as scholars, should start by assuming that political rationalities are on an equal footing. It is not enough to look at other political rationalities as culturally codified if we do not apply the same treatment to our own political languages. This form of reflexivity is both methodologically sound and morally justified, as in both cases it rests on an ideal of fairness. This is where the history of the social sciences can contribute to de-centering our own perspectives and, hopefully, to reconnect with a tradition in which the social sciences were a privileged instrument of international dialogue.