Table Of ContentThe Secular State Under Siege
The Secular State
Under Siege
Religion and Politics in Europe
and America
Christian Joppke
polity
Copyright © Christian Joppke 2015
The right of Christian Joppke to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6541-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6542-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Joppke, Christian.
The secular state under siege : religion and politics in Europe and America /
Christian Joppke. – 1
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-7456-6541-2 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6542-9
(paperback) 1. Religion and politics–Europe. 2. Religion and politics–
United States. 3. Religion and state–Europe. 4. Religion and state–United
States. 5. Secularism. 6. Islam. 7. Christianity. I. Title.
BL65.P7J67 2015
322′.1094–dc23
2014025938
Typeset in 10/12 Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC
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Contents
Introduction: Religion as Structure and as Actor 1
1 Religion in Social and Political Theory 5
2 Secularization and the Long Christian Exit 42
3 Challenge to the Secular State (I): The Christian
Right in America 86
4 Challenge to the Secular State (II): Islam in
Europe 128
Conclusion: Islam and Christianity in the Secular
State 172
Notes 188
References 205
Index 222
v
Introduction
Religion as Structure and as Actor
A small book on so big a topic as “religion and politics” is no minor
undertaking. I tackle it from a historical and institutional perspective,
with a dual focus on Western Europe and North America, Christianity
and Islam. This is still vast enough, but already less than everything. A
historical-institutional perspective largely excludes behaviorism, such as
the correlating of voting patterns or partisan identification with religious
orientation, and so on, which has preoccupied much of the American
political sociology of religion.1 The regional focus on the West also
excludes, now regrettably, the rest of the world, such as the Middle East
or South-east Asia, where religious conflict may be far more dramatic
and central to political life than in the temperate zones – this part of the
world simply is beyond my competence (also linguistically).
I arrive at this topic as a long-standing student of the nation-state and
its contemporary transformation in the West, especially if related to
migration and multiculturalism. After the “challenge to the nation-state,”
to quote an earlier book of mine (Joppke 1998), now there is a “chal-
lenge to the secular state.” One part of this story is academic, and
it is astonishing to see how many fellow intellectual travelers of mine
made similar moves.2 But the other half of this story is in the real world,
where even in the secularized West “public religion” has had a mighty
1
2 INTRODUCTION
come-back, to the degree that it had ever disappeared (the first to register
this is Casanova 1994). Partially, but not exclusively, the revival of public
religion is a result of international migration and the arrival of new
religions into Western societies that challenge established arrangements
between religion and the secular state.
A historical and institutional perspective takes “religion” both as
structuring principle and as actor, as a structural force that has shaped
the modern world like perhaps no other force and as a claims-maker
within this world that religion helped bring about. On the structural
side, religion (more precisely: Christianity) has shaped modern political
life, including party systems, public institutions, and state structures and
national identities, in the most profound yet often unacknowledged ways
– Carl Schmitt (2005 [1922]) even argued famously that the lexicon of
basic political concepts (such as “sovereignty”) consists largely of secu-
larized theological concepts. No one has articulated the unmatched
structuring powers of religion in human history more succinctly than
Tocqueville: “There is hardly any human action, however private it may
be, which does not result from some very general conception men have
of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their
soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas
from being the common spring from which all else originates” (1969
[1835–40]: 442–3).
Tocqueville, of course, was the unmatched theorist of liberal democ-
racy, and he provocatively argued that in a democratic society religion
was even more important than in feudalism for bringing about trust and
cohesion in society: “[I]f [man] has no faith he must obey, and if he is free
he must believe” (p. 444). Turning Tocqueville around, however, there is
good reason to argue that liberal democracy itself, in which – pace Toc-
queville – religion no longer is the central motive force and legitimizing
principle and where society has become secularized (a key term thor-
oughly scrutinized in this book), could have arisen only in a Christian,
and no other religious, context. At the same time, there is much variation
in the relations between state and religion as the latter walked out of poli-
tics, being different in Europe (where church and state once were rival
forces) and in America (where no such rivalry ever existed). Within
Europe, religion–state relations differ in Protestant and Catholic or mixed
countries, with a whole variety of church–state regimes, all compatible
with the strictures of secularism, and with the peculiar presence of Chris-
tian Democratic parties in some countries but not in others. In short,
religion (or rather Christianity) as structuring principle of even secular
and secularizing societies needs to be acknowledged, and it will be done
in this book in broad yet comparatively refined brushstrokes.
On the other side, religion is also an actor that appears in secular
contexts with specific claims. Of particular interest here are new
