Introduction

A great deal has been made about the role of what is often classified as ‘religion’ in international relations,Footnote 1 but few have considered the role of what is often classified as ‘politics’ in interreligious relations. This inversion provides a basis for the comparison of how interreligious relations relates to international relations within the secular binary of politics and religion in a postcolonial world. Given that both international relations and interreligious relations now constitute separate fields of study at universities, I believe that it is worth juxtaposing them in terms of the expectations and the roles that they play outside the academy. The dominant claim in public discourse is that both interreligious relations and international relations are treated as peace-building strategies in the contemporary world, where each uniquely provides a means of furthering conflict resolution and social cohesion in turbulent situations.Footnote 2 Looking critically at these concepts might seem counterintuitive at first, since most would not likely ever deem it possible to have enough peace-building strategies, even if such an analysis determines them to be less than ideal. Nonetheless, I believe that this comparison is worthwhile, since the process reveals how the underlying assumptions of social order and conflict in a secular age make it difficult for either of these approaches to accomplish the types of lasting results that they claim to provide when used as directed.

The secular frame is central to both interreligious relations and international relations, because each has its own independent connections to the secularization thesis, which we shall explore further below. One of the foundational claims of the grand narrative of secularism is that secularization served as means of establishing peace following extended periods of conflict among European rulers. This is traced back to 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia provided a resolution to the post-Reformation wars of religion, as they are often called, in reference to the end of most notably the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the Eighty Years War (1568–1648).Footnote 3 The outcomes of the Peace of Westphalia are said to have furnished a redistribution of European power structures by allowing warring parties to form new alliances that allegedly reduced the importance of religious affiliations. This narrative jointly establishes a foundation for both secular governance—by creating a politics that was supposedly detached from religion—and Christian ecumenism—by allowing religious affiliations to be privatized and hence separated from the political powers of the state. Today, this is commonly referred to as the separation of church and state, and it represents a formulation of boundaries that has provided a basis for the modern separation of religion and politics. The re-articulation of the separation of church and state, as religion and politics, has long since been extended well beyond the ecumenism of European Christianity in the postcolonial world.Footnote 4

If we view the separation of politics and religion in terms of identity formation, it allows a person to maintain separate political and religious affiliations, where political identity is regarded as independent of a depoliticized religious identity, despite their intersectional coexistence in individuals. This may sound more intuitive when we consider the notion of today’s secular, multicultural, nation-states, as opposed to early modern Europe when nations were regarded as more homogenous, but not yet separable from localized imperial or princely states. Part of the complexity here is that the impetus for the nation-state is itself traced back to the emergence of secularism, when the connection between the nation and the state was being elaborated and formalized during the same period. Within this context, a nation was considered distinguishable from other nations and was conceptually similar to notions such as ethnicity or race (among various races), as associated with an indigenous community of people with localized geographic affiliations. It is not clear to me how conceptions of a nation displaced or overlapped with tribes, whether previously or at present, but these concepts did not necessarily imply or entail statehood.Footnote 5

The secularization narrative became more complicated with imperial expansions, diversification, and increased prospects of travel, which allowed the idea of the nation-state to be expanded beyond mono-national states into multinational ones, especially under imperial rule. This is different from the contemporary world, where it likely feels normal and natural to associate a particular nation-state with a citizenry comprised of an amalgam of different peoples with distinctive ethnic backgrounds, all of whom lay claim to the same national identity. This is also why this construction is typically referred to as a multicultural nation-state.Footnote 6

The Secularism Paradox

There is a paradox that results when we connect the claims that justify the narrative of the progression of the nation-state to the narrative of secularism. The question arises of why there was ever a need for the development of both international relations and interreligious relations in the first place, if indeed secularism’s implementation in the modern nation-state was supposed to be enough to ensure peace and stability by separating religious identity from political identity among diverse populations. Surely secularism’s realization in the modern nation-state ought to have been enough to eliminate violent conflict based on religion.Footnote 7 It seems to me, however, that if we accept the foundational premise of secularism, then one would expect that the separation of church and state (or perhaps religion and politics), which is purported to have taken place across the Western world, should have been enough to prevent further conflict, as is claimed was achieved by Westphalia. Moreover, if the rise of secularism had all but ended religious violence, then it should have rendered interreligious relations all but irrelevant, certainly within a particular nation-state at least. Similarly, in looking beyond a particular nation-state, international relations ought to have remained limited to political conflicts with other secular nation-states, which had seemingly been disconnected from religion. It is clear, however, that neither of these has been the case. This paradox further suggests that the secularism narrative is more problematic than it seems. Otherwise, the logical conclusions that follow from the paradox are that: (1) secularism apparently did not prevent political conflicts between nations, which has led to the rise of international relations, or perhaps (2) that secularism did not prevent religious conflicts between religions, which has led to the rise of interreligious relations, where these conclusions are not mutually exclusive.

It is clear that much of this type of analysis depends on what is meant by religion and politics in specific situations. One would likely require the rather narrow definitions rooted in the post-Reformation European context to attempt to justify the premise that religion can be separated from politics. William Cavanaugh has argued convincingly in his book, The Myth of Religious Violence, that it is not possible to distinguish religious violence from political violence.Footnote 8 To do so overlooks the means by which modern nation-states define and redefine religion in ways that regard it as being prone to violence, which results in a process that also serves to protect secular politics from being viewed in the same light.Footnote 9 This highlights the ambiguity and arbitrariness of identifying religion or politics outside of the early modern discourse on secularism. In this discourse, secularism is presumed to be the intervention that ended religious violence by depoliticizing religion in order to separate the religious from the political. Had this actually happened, however, then there should never have been a need for the rise of interreligious relations, at least within secular nation-states, since secularism itself should have served as the solution to eliminate, or greatly reduce, religious violence. Similarly, international relations ought to have remained focused entirely on political conflicts and political violence.

As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has noted, the category of religion in international relations has been used by some to explain whatever politics cannot.Footnote 10 This is different from the simple matter of religion entering international relations when secular nation-states relate to non-secular ones. These types of paradoxes point to the inconsistencies that arise when comparing international relations with interreligious relations in light of the foundational claims of secularism. I consider this sufficient to justify further comparison.

The Comparison

If we focus momentarily on methodology, then interreligious relations and international relations both seek to provide variant forms of conflict resolution through similar, if not the same, methods, including dialogues, negotiations, and diplomacy. This means that the difference between the two is not one of methodology, but of ideology, jurisdiction, and spheres of influence. The classification of an international relation as opposed to an interreligious one is dependent on the differences between the categories of nation and religion, where the nation is presumed in secular nation-states to be fundamentally political and unaffiliated with a national religion. This, in part, is why religious nationalism presents such a problem for contemporary political theorists, irrespective of where in the world it takes place.Footnote 11 The two categories of religion and politics (by which I mean secular politics) were never intended to have been conflated after secularization. This makes it appear as though both concepts of religion and nation were refined at around the same time in the colonial period as a means of classifying others based on secularism’s ideological distinction between the religious and the political.Footnote 12 Since then, the question of state sovereignty over religion has been regarded as a universal truth among secular states, but only when religions are presumed to be organized with similar bureaucracies, which is not always appropriate.

If we look at the sites of functionality in interreligious relations in comparison to international relations, interreligious relations typically functions domestically, within the existing borders of the nation-state, whereas international relations typically functions outside of it. This, however, is not always the case and a number of counterexamples potentially exist. For example, we may consider when in 2016 Pope Francis, head of the Vatican, met with Hassan Rouhani, then president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.Footnote 13 One can ask whether this was an international relation or an interreligious relation. Given that neither country claims to be secular, the point remains in problematizing the classifications, since both international relations and interreligious relations lay claim to the ability of functioning beyond secular domains, despite the lack of secularization. One could also point to other historic examples of domestic separatist movements that happen to identify with different religions, such as in the case of the Sudanese civil wars, prior to the formation of South Sudan in 2011.Footnote 14 This is another case in which the ambiguities surrounding the claims of religious conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, are problematic. My point here is that secularization is neither a prerequisite for international relations nor interreligious relations to take place. The parties involved in these relationships may easily represent transnational interests that an ordinary nonspecialist observer might identify as both religious and political.

When carried out successfully, the assumption is that both interreligious relations and international relations allow conflicting parties to arrive at a moral consensus. Each relevant party is considered a rational actor who can dialogue with the other in order to resolve disputes, arrive at a consensus, and avoid violent conflict in the process. The construction of the resulting framework depends rather heavily on Enlightenment ideals that reinforce the implicit assumptions of liberalism. These assumptions lay the foundations for promoting pluralism in the world, even though it may no longer be appropriate to do so, considering that the context for this type of pluralism was modelled on the Christianity of post-Reformation Europe. The pluralist foundation in this framework also excludes the varieties of exclusivists of any religious tradition who view liberal ideals with a sense of skepticism, both within and beyond Christianity. This may be illustrated by the reluctance of Western countries to negotiate with groups like the Taliban, whether internationally or interreligiously. In either case, the presumption (as well as the justification) is that the relation cannot take place without previously adopting liberal ideals. This means that without a prior commitment to liberalism, these types of relations never take place, since international relations and interreligious relations inherently serve to promote liberalism among the parties involved in virtue of mere participation in the process. The participation in liberalism here inherently reproduces itself.

The very idea of pursuing relations between religious or national constituencies depends on their formulation within a bureaucratized hierarchical structure that is capable of being managed by representatives. The presence of a bureaucratized hierarchy makes it possible for individuals to speak on behalf of their constituencies, which presents a problem for interreligious relations, since religious hierarchies in non-Christian traditions are not often organized in this way. The problem of representation presumes that one can clearly define the constituencies in question and then proceed with both the internal authority to represent them and the external authority to be taken seriously by outsiders.

This mirrors the problems of identity in that identities are not singular and monolithic. Although the nation-state might appear to have achieved greater bureaucratic certainty than the world religions, both international relations and interreligious relations continue to struggle to manage effectively those that they exclude. This could be expressed by a state’s refusal to deal with nonstate actors, such as a government’s refusal to negotiate with those that they classify as ‘terrorists’, or to address the needs of refugees, or to take seriously the challenges posed by stateless peoples or separatists.Footnote 15 In interreligious relations this is apparent in the frequent exclusion of voices that fall outside the world religions paradigm, such as the Baha’i, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or even those considered to be a part of Indigenous traditions. This exclusion not only provides an indication of the underlying assumptions about how the categories of religion and nation are constituted, but also provides an indication of what these categories are expected to provide for a public sphere.Footnote 16 To put this simply, there is a power dynamic at play in terms of what is being represented and what is left out of interreligious and international relationships, even when things appear to be working as planned. This allows existing norms to predetermine whichever relations are considered legitimate.

The Redescription

This leads one to question what is actually taking place in contrast to what insiders claim is taking place. Within a nation-state, interreligious relations serves as a nation-building exercise for members of the multicultural state by promoting liberal ideals, as opposed to conservative ones, which might not necessarily share in secularism’s claim of separating religion from politics.Footnote 17 This ensures that non-Christian minorities in particular are provided with a local context and real-life examples of what depoliticized religion is supposed to look like within a pluralist society. Outside a nation-state, international relations seeks to preserve the global liberal order established under colonialism, by testing the margins of liberal influence and authority among rival nation-states whose immersion in a state of conflict stems from competition for power and control, whether over resources, ideology, or sovereignty. Although this also represents liberal ideals, it is framed in universals, such as human rights, universal needs, international (or global) development, threats to global security, self-determination, democratic values, and so forth. This makes it easy to jump between individual grou**s and universals, such as the presumed correlation between individual rights and human rights, national development and global development, national security and global security, and so forth. This framework markedly shapes the type of moral consensus that can ultimately be achieved by carefully limiting whose morality gets to be counted as legitimate through its alignment and acceptance with preexisting liberal universals. This is carried out by the establishment of international norms that are purported to have been accepted by the international community with international support from international institutions (such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, etc.). This infers that the establishment of a global or universalized standard must be met, which further reinforces the limitations on the prospects of the represented constituencies in question.

The contrast is more apparent when one looks beyond the pluralist ideal of liberalism.Footnote 18 Interreligious relations can no better accommodate exclusivists than international relations can accommodate nationalists, whether religious, ethnic, racial, or linguistic. The ideologies of interreligious relations and international relations are constructed in a way that they are intrinsically underpinned by pluralism, but since their narratives are presented within a framework of universalized liberal values their limitations and particularities are lost. There is a sense of irony here in that the terms nationalists and nationalism have so frequently come to be used in the pejorative in contemporary politics, whether as markers of bigotry or forms of anticolonial extremism. It is no longer the case that terms such as patriotism and nationalism can be considered synonymous.

This draws attention to the relationship between liberal values and secularism, since personal freedoms as they were conceived by Enlightenment thinkers were largely premised on the separation of church and state. For those who want international relations and interreligious relations to thrive beyond the West, one must consider the extent to which liberal values can exist independent of secularism. It is important to remember that it was the freedom from tyranny, both political and religious, that provided a basis for reimagining a liberal civilization. In this respect, I would agree with Peter van der Veer, who has argued that:

The modern state depends in liberal theory on the formation of a civil society, consisting of free but civilized subjects, as well as on the formation of a public sphere for the conduct of rational debate. In that theory the notions of freedom and rationality are defined in terms of secularity.Footnote 19

For much of the world, the connection between the modern civilizing process and secularism’s unique attempt at compartmentalizing and then synthesizing religious and national identity was made possible as a result of colonialism. The colonial connection to the creation and expansion of modern civilization extended beyond the economic mission of commerce and into the Christian mission of character building, which imparted the value of leading a decent Christian life. For colonial missionaries who may outwardly have been focused on formal conversion, the inward transformation of becoming a principled, upright, and moral individual was as indicative of being civilized as it was of being a good Christian.

Timothy Fitzgerald has suggested that the extent of the relationship between civilization and religion—or perhaps, more appropriately, civilization and Christianity—in the colonial context might be greater than one would suspect. Indeed, he has questioned whether the two can be distinguished at all.Footnote 20 Fitzgerald argues that the “discourses on civility and barbarity overlap with those on Religion (understood as Christian Truth) and superstition, and rationality and irrationality.” He goes on to suggest that these dichotomies become important aspects of how Christian identity has been constructed.Footnote 21 This type of construction subsequently implicates the state, since in order for colonized peoples to become civilized, and hence groomed for Christian teaching, they needed to be instructed through a process that was controlled and managed by a civilized government.Footnote 22 In this way, civilization, education, and governance become entangled within secularism’s religion and politics, as well as with each other.

To be civilized meant that non-Christians and non-Europeans needed to demonstrate the type of rational restraint and diplomacy championed by liberal education. This was embodied in the foundations of each program of study, including rhetoric and dialogue, which cut across the disciplines of the broader liberal arts curriculum. This importantly had already happened before they became prominent features of the established methodologies in both international relations and interreligious relations. The newly disciplined culture of dialogue was intended to elevate previous disputes beyond a less civilized debate. Even today, civil servants and diplomats participating in international relations are intended to discuss disagreements coolly and calmly in a way that presents observers with disinterested accounts of self-interests. Similarly, in interreligious relations, interreligious dialogue is ideologically intended to supersede interreligious debate, which has since become associated with efforts of proselytization. This is because the exclusivity of proselytization is regarded as problematic in societies aspiring to meet pluralist ideals.

The discourse in both cases takes place in the public sphere, which makes it open and accessible to observers. This opens up each dialogue to scrutiny, and perhaps even moral judgment, when audience expectations are not met. It also provides a performative display for onlookers to view. For example, within this context it may be worth noting just how much attention was garnered by the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. This was deliberately staged with great effort and planning to ensure the creation of a spectacle, as opposed to interpersonal dialogues or discussions, which could easily have taken place privately among participating members, irrespective of the legitimacy of participants as representatives. The format influenced public discourse about the religious Other that was already primed by the expectations established by the marketing of the event. John Burris has argued that, “instead of shattering illusions about the nature of the intercultural world, the Parliament [of the World’s Religions] appeared as a reflection of them.”Footnote 23 By taking place in public instead of private, there was greater social pressure to regulate and enforce established norms, which fulfilled liberal expectations of carrying out a civilized dialogue about religion.

In interreligious relations, the expectations for a successful dialogue can only be met when the religions of dialogue partners have been sufficiently depoliticized, and hence distanced from devolving into proselytization debates. Likewise, in international relations, one’s politics cannot be perceived as a reflection of one’s religion, such as would be the case if a desired moral consensus was justified exclusively by particular religious perspectives, as opposed to liberalism’s universals. The advocacy that is voiced by participants for certain positions must be tempered within the restraints of the discourse on secularism, where religion is presumed to be separable from politics and politics from religion. This provides an explanation of why religious politics and political religion do not fit well in either international relations or in interreligious relations. It does not, however, provide an explanation for why the widespread adoption in public discourse of depoliticized religion and secular politics has been perceived as such a struggle outside the West.

Religious Politics and Political Religion

The perception in public discourse of the deficiencies, or perhaps failure, of secular politics outside the West should not be taken to mean that there is a clear means of distinguishing between the secular state and the non-secular state.Footnote 24 I am referring instead to common perceptions about whichever states are furthest from the secular ideal. The emphasis on location alone might make it worth asking why the most familiar examples of the non-secular state are located outside the West. Some of the most recognizable examples today are those affiliated with Muslim majority populations, especially when one can establish direct ties to political Islam. Perhaps an argument could be made for the Vatican, but its role as a state is somewhat limited in comparison to others. Aside from these examples, there is a perception of greater ambiguity in differentiating between the secular and non-secular state, including states with questionable ties to secularism, alternative models of governance, or popular movements that support a return to traditional values, which in reality persist across nearly every major world religion. These include but are not limited to liberation theology, Israeli Zionism, Indian Hindutva, Tibetan independence, Sikh calls for Khalistan, and other less influential movements that seek to preserve, for example, Confucian moral values in contemporary China or Shinto traditions in post-Meiji Japan.Footnote 25 When taken together, these examples comparatively make the secular ideal of modern Europe seem rather isolated, if not exclusive of non-Western countries, representing those, often from the postcolonial world, with historic majorities of non-Christian populations.

It is possible that this isolation is not the result of non-Westerners who have not yet learned from Europeans how to secularize (or perhaps modernize as the case may be), but rather because the notion of separating politics from religion represents a uniquely European Christian response to uniquely European Christian problems that arose in the post-Reformation era. The attempt to universalize secularism beyond the rather specific problems that it attempted to address in seventeenth-century Europe has produced inconsistencies that do not translate well outside of European Christian norms. This is not to suggest that secularism works well within a European or historically Christian context, but only to say that the contradictions are more easily overlooked, since their historic acculturation has rendered them normative.Footnote 26 For these examples, I would include the overwhelming influence of Christian norms in the political discourse of Western democratic societies, as well as more formal associations with Christianity of historically national religions, such as those in Scandinavian countries.Footnote 27 We could also include the dual nature of the British monarch’s role as the head of the Church of England and the head of state, both of which are roles typically qualified as being symbolic. My point here is not that the symbolic nature of the roles ought to be disputed or somehow discredited, but that this type of symbolism nonetheless remains context-specific within a particular discursive power relationship that has imbued each particular symbol with its meaning. This also means that this type of symbolism does not share in the same normative interpretive meaning outside this discourse. In these particular cases, the discursive power relationship created a symbolism unique to European Christianity, which is why it is so easy for non-Westerners to view secularism inside the West as being as much of a failure as it appears to Westerners assessing secularism outside the West. This suggests to me that the success of secularism’s ability to separate church and state inside the West is questionable.

Rather than Westphalia, the state of contemporary nationalism in the current world order represents most immediately the transition from a colonial to a postcolonial world. The postcolonial world was conceived as nationalist and premised on the proliferation of nation-states. This system replaced the previous imperial structures of colonialism and was intended to ensure the social stability professed by the secularization thesis by preventing the outbreak of war in previously colonized lands following the withdrawal of colonial powers. This did not work, in part, because the imposition of new national identities that were premised on the separation of religion and politics could only ever be illustrated meaningfully through European-Christian examples and Enlightenment ideals. This is not to say that formerly colonized peoples did not try to make nation-building projects work with regionally specific formulations. From pan-Arabism to pan-Africanism, the postcolonial formations of nationalism highlight the incongruence, and perhaps failure, of attempting to impose secularism in non-Christian societies that lack the context, structures, and assumptions for interpreting its preexisting discourse as intended. This only draws further attention to the extent to which the separation of church and state was ever taking place within European Christian contexts at all.

Conclusion

In literature on international relations theory, there are now numerous examples of scholars who are attempting to account for religion in international relations.Footnote 28 The very idea of this is problematic, if not contradictory, since international relations was conceived as a relationship between nation-states that had already transcended the religious due to the secular divide of politics and religion. Religion was simply never supposed to be part of international relations theory. It might instead be more helpful in terms of analysis to incorporate international relations and interreligious relations into secularism theory, and then perhaps secularism theory into Christianity. The split between international relations and interreligious relations represents secularism’s division between religion and politics. All of this depends on being legitimized by the Christianity of the post-Reformation wars of religion that took place in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. This means that this context can only ever share a forced affinity with non-Christian and non-European traditions.

When tracing international relations and interreligious relations back through similar origin narratives of post-Reformation Europe, it is noteworthy how each share in the same structure of secularism’s promise. This promise of secularism was to deliver peace through the separation of religion and politics, where each domain could be managed and negotiated independent of the other. This provided an impetus for the separate discourses that gradually evolved into those on international relations and interreligious relations, once national and religious identities had both become formalized and normalized as universal categories. This also means that international relations and interreligious relations share the same underlying structure, reflecting opposite ends of secularism’s binary of politics and religions. The resulting construction allows them to share in a common grammar of secularism while providing seemingly different spheres of influence and management through similar, if not the same, methodologies, goals, and values, as if they are different sides of the same coin, as opposed to the different coins that many presume them to be. This is why the modern concepts of politics and religion were co-constructed within national identity and within the same context of secularization at the same time period. This eventually enabled the idea of the nation-state to develop with ethnic, geographic, and culturally specific criteria.

The most noteworthy aspect of this analysis does not necessarily revolve around the limited success of secularism in the postcolonial world, since all peoples will likely continue to attempt to develop better social systems than those that came before them, while hopefully learning from their pasts. The problem, however, is that the secularism paradox remains. If secularism had managed to prevent violence, we would never have needed interreligious relations nor international relations to address religion. As Talal Asad has argued,

“[I]f the secularization thesis seems increasingly implausible to some of us this is not simply because religion is now playing a vibrant part in the modern world of nations. In a sense what many would anachronistically call “religion” was always involved in the world of power. If the secularization thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the categories of “politics” and “religion” turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accompanied our growing understanding of the powers of the modern nation-state. The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.”Footnote 29

The implications of Asad’s suggestion regarding the entanglement of religion and politics are consequential for the assumptions we make when framing questions of their relevance. The powers of the nation-state are tied to assumptions of the autonomy of individuals that are framed in terms of political and religious difference. For this difference to be managed appropriately, and for violent conflict to be averted, international relations and interreligious relations present liberal universalism as the solution. By this, I mean to say that for each to work correctly, one must adopt the universals and ideologies of liberalism. This expectation has created a problem for a postcolonial world, where the emphasis has been placed on whether Christian-minority nations are capable of adopting the secular model to their regionally specific religious contexts. The more important question, however, might be why this adoption should ever take place, when adopting a secular worldview is intrinsically rooted in a universalism that presumes the norms of post-Reformation European Christianity. Perhaps instead we can ask whether this is even appropriate.