Religion and Identity
On the collapse of the ethnic version of the Peace of Westphalia
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been nearly 380 years since the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia began—arguably the most foundational date for the field of political theology as I understand it, namely as the study of the various failed attempts to establish a firm boundary or division of labor between politics and religion. The immediate goal was to end the so-called Thirty-Years War, but that was only the latest stage of the religious warfare that had rocked Europe for more than a century in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The settlement did more than simply mediate between the warring religious factions—it attempted an ontological change in the nature of religion and authority as such.
The Wars of Religion had thoroughly discredited religion as a foundational principle for worldly politics, and the Peace of Westphalia established the framework for the secular world order that still endures today. The highest authority would no longer be Scripture or the papacy, but the territorially-defined sovereign secular state. Previous treaty settlements had declared the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, a satisfyingly elegant Latin phrase indicating that the ruler decides the religion of his realm—including through the imposition of a new religion, under the ius reformandi or right to reform. Westphalia denied that power to rulers within the sphere of the fractious Holy Roman Empire (now known as “Germany”), instead setting up a process for ascertaining what the religion of a given territory objectively was and then forbidding rulers from tampering any further. As a result, many European countries and German regions have some form of established state church corresponding with whatever the dominant religion happened to be in the 1600s.
The next logical step—haltingly and only ever partially achieved over the following centuries—was to make religion a matter of total indifference to the state. Since the state represented the public sphere, that meant that religion should be regarded as a purely private matter, something one did at home or in self-chosen groups. As philosophical proponents of religious tolerance emphasized, this would be to the mutual benefit of religion and the state. Religious faith must after all be sincere, so the attempt to coerce anyone into following a given religion will not only be futile but will cast religion into disrepute by requiring widespread hypocrisy. Meanwhile, the political sphere will benefit from the reduction of petty factionalism and from the requirement that all participants in political debate must rely on widely shared secular principles of reason.
It sounds like a great idea. In fact, I would wager that for most residents of secular Western countries, it sounds like basic common sense. And I’ll be up front and say that I prefer it to any actual-existing alternative—especially as an ex-evangelical who is horrified and shamed by the chaos and destruction my former sect has caused through its political interventions.
But it has never fully worked, and that’s in part because it is conceptually incoherent. Religion, as it has always been understood in the Western world, is not a purely personal reality. It is inherently communal and inherently normative. That means that religion necessarily has “political implications,” not just in the sense of how large groups of people should live, but in the sense of who is in a position to adjudicate what those norms are and whether they are being followed.
A claim to religious authority is always tendentially a claim to political authority. That might be okay in liberal-democratic terms if that authority is one that is freely submitted to and if any attempts to influence politics are couched in acceptably secular terms. Yet religion has rarely been viewed as a purely voluntary thing. You don’t put a baby through a membership ritual, much less perform surgery on its genitals, for an optional club made up of like-minded individuals. Even in religious groups that don’t have initiation rituals for infants, the assumption is that children will follow the religion of their parents. Freely choosing to go against one’s religious upbringing is hugely disruptive and costly, in social terms and sometimes in economic terms.
Sects that have self-consciously attempted to conform to the post-Westphalian vision of what a “religion” should be in the secular world enjoyed different levels of success in different times and places, but the clear overall tendency is toward decline and irrelevance. The danger of such sects is that their preaching becomes, in the words of the Catholic theologian J.B. Metz, “an unnecessary religious paraphrase of modern processes in the world.” Why bother going to this boring ceremony week after week when you can simply listen to NPR at home?
This is, to be fair, part of a broader trend of decline in religion belief and practice in the Western world—a decline that some theorists of post-Westphalian religious tolerance, in their more unguarded moments, admitted to be their ultimate goal. The process of weaning humanity off of religion has not gone according to plan, though, as the remaining believers are freely choosing the religions that don’t want religion to be a free choice. The binding aspects of religion—to cite one of the multiple possible etymologies of the word—appear to be a feature not a bug in the eyes of practitioners. In secular terms, religion shouldn’t make a difference, but why would anyone choose to practice religion if it didn’t make a difference?
I bring up this ancient history because I detect an analogy between the political dyamics of religion and those of identity more generally—in particular ethnic identity, which is the most politically consequential form of identity categorization. One can see a similar two-step process. The first, analogous to Westphalia’s mutation of cuius regio, eius religio, is the assumption that every sovereign political unit should have a defined ethnic identity that can be “read off” the population as a kind of objective fact. The second is the notion that ethnic identity should ideally be a matter of political indifference, a private affair for individuals and families. There are even analogies to “state churches,” in the form of official state recognition for certain ethnic identities, though these are normally minority ones that are just large enough to be disruptive.
In this reading, the Civil Rights Act would be the equivalent in America (the Western country with the most persistent and disruptive ethnic strife) of the Peace of Westphalia, and something like the much-derided “colorblind racism” of the ’80s and ’90s, where everyone ostensibly pretended not to “see race” for public purposes, would be the logical endstate of the secularization process—one where ethnic difference has simply faded away as a meaningful category. That settlement has broken down, not only because the ideal was not followed in good faith (they never are), but because it was also conceptually incoherent. Ethnic identity cannot be a purely individual thing. It is inherently about larger groups—in fact, almost by definition an ethnic group has to be large enough to be at least potentially politically relevant. Nor is it a purely individual choice! I was fortunate enough to be able to leave the religion of my upbringing, but there is absolutely nothing I individually could ever do that would make my ethnicity other than “white”—though a reshuffling of ethnic or “racial” categories as a whole might lead me to think of myself, and/or others to think of me, differently.
This analogy is of course not simply fortuitous. There are deep links between ethnic and religious identities. In certain times and places, they were virtually synonymous, and even today they tend to “travel together.” There are a lot of interesting things to ponder about how they became separated, and I strongly recommend that anyone who is curious about that should read Daniel Boyarin’s book Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity. What’s relevant for our purposes here is that both religion and ethnicity tend to become a “problem” for the territorially-sovereign secular nation-state in similar ways. Accordingly, similar “solutions” suggest themselves—namely, shunting each into the purely private sphere in the hopes that it will wither away. But that doesn’t work because neither is an individual matter of free choice and neither seems set to wither away of its own accord any time soon, in part because those who find them important actively reject the post-Westphalian solution. Their identity must make a difference in order to be meaningful, including in the public sphere. Indeed, they often experience the expectation that they should keep that identity to themselves as a form of discrimination or oppression.
Why not just let a million flowers bloom, then? Well, there’s only one problem: mass death. When political contestation is defined in narrowly religious and/or identitarian terms, it becomes a zero-sum struggle that tends toward violence and war. The benefit of the secular sphere of reasons is that it focuses politics on things that can be talked through. You can’t talk through being Irish or English, or Catholic or Protestant (to use a very recent example where the two classifications overlapped heavily). Your group is either in charge or it’s not, and any attempt to share power becomes, yet again, a zero-sum division of subunits that your group is either in charge of or not. Sooner or later, the thought occurs to someone: what if the other group was just gone? That’s when people start killing and dying—which is supposedly what we signed on to the Social Contract to prevent.
Obviously the secular solution is not going to be fully neutral. For example, either abortion is going to be legal or it’s not. The secular sphere of reasons overwhelmingly favors the former, which is contrary to the teaching of the most passionately-subscribed religions. And on the ethnic level, even the most even-handed distribution of privileges and offices in the U.S. is going to result in white people holding a strong plurality of the privileges and offices simply because they are the biggest single population group—and the natural decline in that proportion as white people dip below 50% of the population is going to look, to an ethnically-minded white person (namely, a fucking racist), like a loss of status for their group. So even in the ideal case where everyone is acting in good faith, the secular state of affairs is always vulnerable to being “read” in unfavorable religious or ethnic terms. And in practice, it has almost always fallen far short of that ideal.
What I wonder, though, is what the alternative is? Secularism is hypocritical and incoherent and unstable, and that’s bad. But it’s also all that we could expect, because secularism is a political settlement. It’s the end result of a negotiation—a kludge, not a philosophical doctrine. It doesn’t “work,” because nothing works. But it is more functional than the “honest” alternative of letting politics devolve into an openly zero-sum struggle among identities. A hypocritical and always partial “neutrality” may not be satisfying, but every alternative is worse. Not only does the “honest” solution have a tendency toward mass death, but the ideal end-state of any ethnic or religious group that is in a position to actually win the struggle is a world that is more uniform and less free. Ironically, anyone who wants to enjoy the benefits of ethnic and religious diversity should therefore embrace the political strategy that aims at their (impossible) withering away.
Characterizing secular detente as a compromise, as the last of an exhausting and bloody series of crappier alternatives, is an insight that seems both essential to pass onto posterity and also very difficult to pass on. The inheritors of any given tradition — often, and perhaps especially, those who are predisposed to see themselves as guarantors of its continuance — tend to throw away such genealogical insights as one discards manufacturer's original packaging. "We have unboxed secular, liberal-democratic Capitalism. It's ours now. The instructions came with a raft of warnings in the opening pages, blah blah, something about war, whatever." The observable, everyday aspects of the actual-existing arrangements become regarded as self-evident, as ends in themselves. Detached from the historical context which produced them, important sense-making criteria are lost.
There is a proverb among veteran software developers and technology nerds, a first-line of defense against incoming newb support questions: RTFM; Read The Fucking Manual. Passing on knowledge of how present arrangements arose is arguably more important than whatever policies and procedures constitute those arrangements.
Your conclusion reminds me of Ordinary Vices. Shklar ranks the vices, and in particular places cruelty above hypocrisy, specifically because of an analysis like this. You can't have politics without hypocrisy, and politics is better than the alternative (e.g. wanton cruelty).