“In the summer of 2014, the police put up a checkpoint at the entrance to the [Bab al-Majles al-Islami] neighborhood. Ever since, all residents have been suffering from severe movement restrictions that interfere with their lives and harm their livelihoods.” Yoav Gross/B’Tselem February 2016, CC 4.0 International.On May 21, 2021 Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to a delicate ceasefire following Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, leaving the narrow Strip, which has been under continuous siege for 15 years, to deal with the aftermath of death and destruction. Shortly after the ceasefire went into effect, U.S. officials reverted to framing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian” crisis rather than as a site of “nationalist” or anti-colonial struggle. However, this ghettoization of Gaza and its extrapolation from broader Palestinian struggles reinforces a fragmentary colonial logic. This exposes the manifold ways in which European colonial logics and legacies of blood purity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide still underpin the anatomy of Israeli Jewish systematic Palestinian displacement and fragmentation as well as the ever consolidation of the annexationist Jewish supremacist apartheid regime.
Now, in the wake of the assault on Gaza and unrest in Israel, Israel’s Minister of Internal Security and the Police Commissioner Major General have carried out massive arrests as a part of “Operation Law and Order.” The Operation targets Palestinian-Israelis who resisted violence instigated by Jewish vigilante mobs inside the 1948 lines and who expressed solidarity with other Palestinian communities, thereby resisting their own sequestering from the anticolonial Palestinian struggle. The importation of vigilante settler violence from the West Bank, carried out with impunity on Palestinian citizens of Israel in the so-called “mixed cities” (binational cities that are only “mixed” because of the Nakba or the Catastrophe of 1948), exposed that the citizenship status of Palestinian-Israelis is not worth the paper it is written on. This is hardly a surprise considering that, in 2018, the Jewish Nation-State Law legally enshrined what was already the norm. It did so by resolving the internal contradictions between Israel’s identity as both “Jewish” and “democratic” in favor of ethnocracy and as such the Israeli regime no longer seeks to conceal its disregard of democratic norms and international law. This ethnocratic mode denotes convergences between territorial maximalist settler theology and ultranationalist racist ideologies such as the Kahanism of the Religious Zionist Party. The latter has gained six mandates in the recent election cycle, due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s maneuvering but is just one explicit expression of a broader normalization of Jewish supremacist outlooks. In collusion with the state and underwritten by settlers’ organizations, Kahanists are inciting and provoking violence in binational cities and in occupied East Jerusalem. Kahanism is fixated on connecting ideas of Jewish blood purity to ethnoreligious land hegemony, and it seeks to enact those ideas by implementing policies that Judaize space within Israel. This blood- and land-centric Judaism is rooted in the experience of Jewish modernity in Europe.
In this instance, it is worth recalling the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the public trial of Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the “Final Solution” against the Jews during World War II. Herself a stateless refugee during the war, she had two insights that can aid in analyzing this moment. First, Eichmann was not an evil mastermind, but rather an obedient bureaucrat totally immersed in an antisemitic ideology concerned with de-Judaizing Europe. To this degree, his evil actions were banal. Second, the Nazi machinery intent on dividing people marked for elimination according to an arbitrary scale of valuation enabled the ghettoization and eventual liquidation process implemented in the Nazi death factories. Not only that, the Nazi regime employed Jews in their own execution, whether through populating lists for the next shipments out of the ghettos or loading bodies into the ovens. In the end, while the Nazis stratified Jews into different categories, it did not really matter what your status was; all Jews were affected by the logic of genocide.
The dispossession of the Palestinian residents from Sheikh Jarrah and the violation of al-Aqsa by Israeli police that triggered the escalation into rocket exchanges between Hamas and Israel exposed how the eliminative specter of Eichmann, in an inverse, is haunting Jerusalem and Palestinian lives. A bureaucratic permit regime that permeates the entire space constitutes a fragmentation mechanism not unlike the Nazi’s taxonomy of different Jews. It is indeed an “ongoing Nakba” or a Nakba by other means, which occasionally explodes into massive aerial assaults and other military operations. The Nakba, a project of ethnic cleansing, was an event in time that involved the massive dispossession and displacement of Palestinians. Yet the Nakba is also ongoing through multiple mechanisms, including the bureaucracy of dispossession and of fragmentation. Indeed, Israeli government employees, police, and construction workers routinely carry out legal orders to destroy Palestinian homes inside and outside the 1948 borders and to dispossess Palestinian citizens of Israel to make room for Jews. And using an arbitrary scale of valuation, Israel has assigned different statuses and identification cards to Palestinians. In the end, fragmentation policies enable the trajectory of Judaification of the land through the construction and maintenance of “reservations” or Bantustans for Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, itself a series of mostly non-contiguous Palestinian islands interrupted by checkpoints and other military barriers, is deeply discredited as a “subcontractor” of the occupation, exemplifying Arendt’s analysis of fragmentation and cooptation of the victims themselves in their erasure.
The truth is that it does not really matter what identity card status Palestinians hold. The recent escalation exposed the links between Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel “proper” and clarified how all Palestinians are subject to the same logic of apartheid. That Israel is an apartheid state was recently determined by the evidence-based reports of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem as well as by Human Rights Watch. They show that the Israeli state is worthy of this label because Jewish supremacy underpins the entire geopolitical space from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and informs the ever-aggressive Judaizing policies that have expanded from the West Bank to the hearts of “mixed cities.” Some analysts call this the Hebronization of Israel, referring especially to al-Shuhada Street in the Palestinian city of Hebron, in which it is now only permissible for Jews to live. Over decades, Israeli government policies fragmented Palestinians, dividing them into an intricate pyramid of categories of identification. The current moment revealed with clarity the anatomy of this colonial logic. Disrupting this logic, we saw on May 18th a general strike across all of Mandatory Palestine, the first since 1936.
What the grassroots organizing in Sheikh Jarrah continues to evoke, in the aftermath of the 2021 assault on Gaza, is how a dispossession from this neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem constitutes a collective Palestinian experience of an ongoing Nakba, regardless of the illusions of autonomy created by the Oslo Accords and the discourse of a (Jewish) democracy within the 1948 lines. The Nakba is ongoing and is manifest in the expansion of the Judaization policies underwritten by settler organizations. The residents of Sheikh Jarrah showed the world the banality of evil operating in every day instances of bureaucratic decision-making, framed by all-encompassing Jewish supremacist ideology. “Operation Law and Order” offers an official show of force that intends to terrorize Palestinian-Israelis back into their apparent domesticity, back into their ghetto, fragmented from other Palestinian experiences in the West Bank and Gaza. It is as if Eichmann’s own tactics and exclusionary and eliminative ideology are alive and well, only now being used against Palestinians. The purist logics of European Christian modernity live on in the land- and blood-centric Jewish supremacist regime which, along with its Palestinian victims, has also imprisoned Judaism and Jews in a militaristic ghetto.
Rather than an aberration, the fascination with conspiracies at the heart of Trump-era White evangelical Christian nationalism is symptomatic of a distinctively modern manifestation of evangelicalism’s obsession with end-time prophecies. These form a surging and resurging current throughout late twentieth and twenty-first century evangelicalism. Confronted by an ever more rapidly changing socio-political context, and now inextricably intertwined with Republican Party politics, end-time apocalypticism and messianism have come to infuse evangelical approaches to contemporary politics and culture. Caught in the siren-song of Trump and QAnon conspiracy ideology, this fixation has leapt from the folk theology pages of popular Christian fiction and populism-inflected evangelical church pews, into voting booths, political rallies and activism, and onto the lawn of the U.S. Capitol at the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. Together, apocalypticism and messianism form a recurring dynamic, pattern, and logic that drives the latest resurrection of White evangelical nationalism—a dynamic, pattern, and logic I describe as “zombie nationalism.”
The Zombification of White Christian Nationalism
Studies of the American religious landscape produced in the second decade of the twenty first century claim that White, Christian America is rapidly ageing and diminishing in population, its institutions receding, its influence waning. If demography is destiny, the argument runs, the relevant demographic trends indicate that White Christian America is dying.
Amid these projected realities, Robert Jones warns of the emergence of a white evangelical Christian “Frankenstein’s monster” (231)—an entity stitched together from the remnant fragments of formerly hegemonic, gradually declining, cultural and institutional bodies. Though long decaying, they become reanimated and propelled by the surging currents and organizing shocks of mobilizing for political power and specific culture war causes. Frankenstein’s monster stands in as a metaphor for the kind of aggressive, concentrated culture war resurrection that White evangelicalism opted for in its political resurgence under Trump and in successive waves of Trumpism (which has outlasted the Trump presidency itself).
And yet, in contrast to Jones’s analogy of a White evangelical “Frankenstein’s monster,” the ethno-religious nationalism that animates contemporary U.S. White evangelicalism is fashioned much more in the image of the zombies of George Romero’s film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), the follow up to the his first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead(1968). Like George Romero’s zombies (and in diametric contrast to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), the latest mutation of this ethno-religious nationalism demonstrates little capacity for the kind of self-discovery, hyper-self-reflexivity, critical-reflectiveness, and desire for nurturing relationships that Harold Bloom describes as the tragic vulnerability of Victor Frankenstein’s creation.
In the Romero original, the zombies emerge slowly. They traverse the terrain with seemingly infinitesimal motions. Their power inheres in the ways they pursue their objectives in mindless, lock-step conformity, and with undeterrable resolve. So it is for the social and ideological patterns that inspirit the latest resurrection of White, evangelical Christian political resurgence. These patterns are reflected in dynamics of reanimation born of motivating commitments and beliefs that are not amenable to contrary evidence. Such recurring dynamics are fueled, moreover, by U.S. White evangelical Christians conceptualizing themselves as an increasingly marginalized remnant in a society that (putatively) originally did, and (allegedly) should still, reflect their central identity and values. It entails the self-perception of being perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered— victims of an aggressively anti-Christian “secular” society. For White evangelicals, these grievances infuse (and further propagate themselves through) pop-culture genres in evangelical Christian culture that amplify accounts of spiritual warfare, end time apocalypticism, and messianism. As Edward G. Simmons, David C. Ludden, and J. Colin Harris show, these forms of “pop-theology” (or folk theology) prime White evangelicals for forms of cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is fertile soil for conspiracy fascination that graduates into—sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant—radicalization. Many Trump-era evangelicals embrace “end-time” and messianism-inflected conspiracy theories that permeate Trump-driven Republican politics and policy-making. From this ensues a proclivity to position their political and cultural opponents on the far side of a Manichean divide and to imbue contemporary politics with cosmic urgency.
During the Trump presidency, for example, White, evangelical Christians were absorbed in ever-expanding numbers into QAnon conspiracy ideology. Some evangelical scholars sounded the alarm about this trend. They declared the active evangelical embrace of—or impassive acquiescence to— QAnon as a departure from true evangelicalism, into an altogether different, heretical religious movement. And yet, this response by evangelical elites makes denial of White evangelicalism’s relation to QAnon all too convenient and un-self-critical. Much like the basic principle of addiction recovery, denying that one even has a problem is a primary indicator that the problem is not only present, but has become, in fact, quite fundamental.
Clearly, not all evangelicals became QAnon followers—though startlingly large numbers have. Evangelical and non-evangelical analysts alike document that captivation with QAnon conspiracies has spread through the ranks of White evangelicalism like wildfire. Careful inspection through the lens of ethno-religious nationalism illuminates that many White evangelicals are primed to embrace QAnon ideology for reasons intrinsic to 20th and 21st century White evangelical culture. Indeed, ethno-religious nationalism—and the distinctive logic and dynamics of zombie nationalism— forms the connective tissue creating a symbiosis between much White evangelicalism and QAnon conspiracy ideology.
QAnon and White Evangelical Nationalism
QAnon theories, and the internet “drops” wherein “Q” would leak putative secret information about government officials and the media, emerged in the second year of Trump’s presidency. They quickly evolved into an increasingly mainstream religio-political movement promoted by Trump (via Twitter). “Q” portrays Trump as a messianic figure who is a bulwark for U.S. White evangelicals and other putatively “patriotic” populations against assaults upon American Christian culture. “Q” is a clandestine (that is, “anonymous,” hence, “QAnon”) internet presence whose viral posts and YouTube videos—frequently sprinkled with quotations from Christian scripture (e.g. 2 Chronicles 7:14) and soliciting prayer from his/her followers—purport to expose the insidious inner workings of the so-called “deep state,” and the intrinsic deceptiveness of “mainstream media.”[1] “Q” purports to reveal how Trump’s alleged struggles against these are infused with apocalyptic significance and spiritual warfare, cohere with end time biblical prophecy, and require the retrieval and defense of America’s “true” identity as a Christian nation.
QAnon flag at Virginia 2nd Amendment Rally in January 2020. Photo Credit: Anthony Crider. Via Flickr.
At its most acute, the QAnon conspiracy ideology asserts that the Democratic party is controlled by a cabal of global elite (“globalist”) and “deep state” anti-Christian and anti-Trump actors (specifically naming the Rothchilds, George Soros, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Bill Gates, and “Hollywood” figures, among others). This cabal allegedly engages in pedophilia, child sex-trafficking, ritual cannibalism of children, and worships Satan. Further, this ideology amplifies the “big lie” or Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 presidential election “in a landslide,” and that the election was stolen from him and his followers. Though seemingly so extreme as to be dismissed out of hand, in fact, White evangelicals in the U.S. embrace these claims at rates far higher than their non-evangelical, Republican counterparts.
Examined in terms of their religio-cultural structures, these conspiracy-fueled patterns of scapegoating and demonization of opponents are neither novel, nor especially unusual. They reanimate distinct features of widely circulated antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—an early 20th century Russian Czarist fabricated account of a Jewish economic and political elite allegedly controlling global politics and economics. QAnon crosses various “Protocols” tropes with the recurrent “blood libel” accusations that inspired numerous Christian pogroms against European Jews, namely, claiming that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used their blood in ritual observance. QAnon demonizes and scapegoats its targets in similar ways, and similarly inspires violence. The antisemitic contours of QAnon ideology make it especially attractive to self-avowed White supremacists and White nationalists (for example, the Proud Boys). These antisemitic contours are “plausibly deniable” for many White evangelicals in virtue of the self-averred, seemingly philosemitic, pro-Zionist policies of the Trump administration. QAnon’s ethno-nationalist elements, intermingling with its religious dimensions, create an intoxicating elixir for White evangelicals who may think of themselves as sharing nothing in common with avowed White nationalists or card-carrying White supremacists. Yet, QAnon brings the elective affinities between these groups into clear and distinct focus. Those affinities form the warp and woof of the ethno-religious nationalism that is the (sometimes camouflaged, often denied) connective tissue between them.
Trump-era White evangelicals have widely adopted various messianic interpretations of Donald Trump. Many of these feed directly into QAnon claims that Trump is an “end time” defender of U.S. Christian culture. This is the same culture previously captivated and emboldened by Franke Peretti’s best-selling spiritual warfare Christian fiction, which generated warnings from some evangelical elites against a looming obsession with “spiritual warfare.” The U.S. White evangelical culture-industrial complex amplifies these claims and dynamics exponentially. QAnon is, in effect, one part Frank Peretti spiritual warfare, one part Left Behind series apocalypticism, and one part Elders of Zion antisemitic conspiracy theory, packaged together in a tantalizing, self-involving variation on Celebrity Apprentice reality television and social media.
Apocalypse Again
End-time, apocalyptic, messianic drivers of White, evangelical Christian nationalism are not new. They form a recurrent dynamic in contemporary White U.S. evangelicalism. The best-selling, end-time prophecy publishing industry emerged in the 1970s and 80s. It was launched by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which the New York Times identified as the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. This, along with other phenomena of Christian rapture culture (for example, the A Thief in the Night film series of 1972–83), influenced the upsurge of evangelical political engagement in the 1980s. Evangelical apocalypticism surged forward again with the release of the bestselling Left Behind book and film series, and ensuing multimedia franchise, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. All of these are prior examples of the various apocalyptical entanglements that re-emerge in evangelical Christian enmeshment in QAnon conspiracy ideology.
These examples are not merely benign instances of “Christian fiction,” niche Christian nonfiction, or “Christian entertainment.” They have recurring real world implications. For example, 1970s and 80s end-time prophecy and apocaplypticism shaped White, evangelical attitudes toward U.S. national politics in the Cold War. It informed evangelicals’ views regarding the prospects of nuclear war—which many viewed as the form that biblically prophesied apocalypse might take. Hal Lindsey claimed it was the Anti-Christ that would “delude the world with promises of peace” (144). As Matthew Sutton shows (see chap. 11), throughout the 1980s Ronald Reagan catered to his White evangelical base by occasionally entertaining their apocalypticism at various points throughout his presidency. Selling upwards around 80 million copies altogether, the Left Behind series of the 90s and early aughts shaped evangelical views about the State of Israel’s end-time significance in the present, and fueled Christian Zionism. Indeed, the dispensational theology modeled in the Left Behind series spurred Trump to move the U.S Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.
QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism. It captures them through their fusion with Republican political ideology. It retrieves and synergistically reanimates—even as it mutates— earlier religious nationalist patterns. These occur, for example, in re-emergent concepts of the White Christian nation (peoplehood) as a victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering remnant, that conception’s inter-wovenness with embattled, originally Christian identity and culture (a myth of origin), and the exceptional role of the U.S. as a “chosen nation” (or “new Israel”) in God’s providential plan within world history (exceptionalism). The cyclical resurgence of these dynamics exemplifies “zombie nationalism.”
Hence, the capture of White evangelicals by the siren-song of Trump-amplified ethno-religious nationalism through QAnon conspiracy ideology is no momentary deviation from true evangelicalism. It is the culmination of more than a half-century of evangelicalism’s surging and resurging fixation upon end-times apocalypticism, and its concurrent progressive enmeshment in, and symbiosis with, Republican Party ideology. It is intrinsic—not extraneous or incidental—to White evangelical religion.
Rather than the demise prognosticated by social scientists, the case of “the end of White Christian America” is an example by which to examine how forms of religious authority and identity navigate conflicts precipitated by rapid change and relativized significance in a diversifying context, and how they vie for retrenchment through radicalization in the shifting contexts of modernity. Any hope for evangelical resistance to these trends, much less constructive transformation, will entail grappling with the very changes that appear to them to be the sources of their precarity. This entails working in registers that have emerged in U.S. society more broadly—registers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Responding intelligently and intentionally requires that White Christians, in a spirit of teachability, come to terms with past—and recurring—patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, in which they are implicated. I examine how race energizes the ethno-religious nationalist impulses of zombie nationalism in Part 2 of this series.
[1] A 2018 poll conducted by the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Research Institute found that 46% of self-identified evangelicals and 52% of those whose beliefs tag them as evangelical “strongly believes the mainstream media produces fake news”—a central tenet of QAnon. Indeed, the more active respondents were in their church, the more mistrusting of news media they were. This is one trend, along with their widespread embrace of Donald Trump, that has rendered White evangelicals especially susceptible to the central claims of QAnon theories. See Stetzer “Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst,” USA Today, Sept 4, 2020.
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others.
President Donald J. Trump walks from the White House Monday evening, June 1, 2020, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as the church of Presidents’s, that was damaged by fire during demonstrations in nearby LaFayette Square Sunday evening. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead). Public Domain.
This upsurge of laser-focused, White, evangelical voting in the 2016 and 2020 elections has sparked an emerging industry of books that point to White Christian nationalism as the driver of this phenomenon.[1] And yet, the intermingling of religion and nationalism does not merely pertain to the backlash politics and voting patterns across two elections. The Trump-infused ethno-religious nationalism of White evangelicals is but the most recent upsurge of a political and cultural current that is traceable back at least sixty years, and indeed, much further. At the same time, exclusive—or even primary—focus upon whiteness and Christianity in these developments leaves multiple drivers of the ethno-religious nationalism of White evangelicals obscured from view. Attending to the sexual politics that fuel evangelical ethno-religious nationalism is equally indispensable. By sexual politics, I refer to the ways that gender norms, operations of power related to sexual identities, and policing of sexuality all function to legitimate and perpetuate ideologies, and are used to advance political agendas. Indeed, focusing on sexual politics uniquely illuminates the elective affinities between ethnicity, religion, and nationalism in this case. As a matter of historical emergence and development, sexual politics pervade the socio-political processes by which White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism has asserted and reasserted itself across recent decades—an animating and reanimating impulse, pattern, and logic that has surged and resurged for more than a half-century in White, Christian America. I describe this persistently recurring dynamic, pattern, and logic as zombie nationalism.
Part 1 in this blog series examines the ways that contemporary White evangelicals are religiously and culturally primed to embrace ethno-religious nationalism on the one hand, and its intermingling with Trump-driven conspiracy ideology (occurring most acutely in the apocalyptic and messianic features of the QAnon conspiracy movement), on the other. It diagnoses the nature and character of the apocalyptical and messianic fixations that inflect the nationalist proclivities of White evangelicals, and which render them distinctly susceptible to the siren-song of Trumpism and QAnon. I demonstrate how these ethno-religious and nationalist patterns, dynamics, and logic are intrinsic to modern U.S. evangelical Christianity, rather than peripheral or extrinsic. Part 2 of the series explicitly assesses the ways that race is inextricably interwoven into the ethno-religious nationalism of contemporary White evangelicals in its entirety, and is a distinct driver of its recent resurrection. Finally, Part 3 takes up the role of sexual politics as a recurring motivator of White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism since the 1960s.
Together, the three pieces that follow conduct a complex exposition and dissection of zombie nationalism. They historically contextualize and explicate its religious and cultural genealogy, its motivating commitments and distinctive temptations, and finally, the recurring patterns of sexual politics that have inspirited the resurrection of the White evangelical ethnoreligious nationalism of the Trump era.
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others.
A grab from an AFPTV video shows a tree on fire near the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque complex on May 10, 2021, following renewed clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the scene. (Photo by CLAIRE GOUNON/AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images)
Religion is Both Gasoline and Fire
The apocalypse does not just happen. Sure, the case of Palestine/Israel often triggers the use of end-time script metaphors, but their deployment only obscures the anatomy of power, ideology, and oppression. The Palestinians are not the only prisoners of this oppression. Jews and Judaism too are imprisoned within the cages of a nationalistic supremacist ideology, one that needs to be distinguished from Zion as the subject of Jewish longing and messianic anticipation that is hardwired into the tradition. The apocalypse does not just happen. The illusion of cosmic catastrophe serves a political agenda and ideology.
We witness now, in 2021, yet another escalation in Jerusalem, Gaza, and across the “mixed cities” of Israel where belligerent Jewish products of religious Zionism and pre-military religious academies, along with religious Zionists bused from settlements in the West Bank and other Jewish-Israeli bystanders, target Palestinian-Israelis (their neighbors). These Palestinians trace their roots to cities like Lod, Jaffa, and Haifa going back centuries prior to the Catastrophe of 1948 (the Nakba) and the establishment of Israel. These cities are “mixed,” sometimes even celebrated as models of “coexistence,” because the events of the Nakba stopped short of a total ethnic cleansing. The sight of kippa-wearing youth roaming streets with the intentions of a murderous mob to eliminate the Palestinian presence in the cities exposes how religion, when not properly contextualized, becomes both gasoline and fire, a weapon of distraction away from ongoing realities of dispossession and elimination.
An All-Consuming Fire
In May of 2021, during the final days of the sacred month of Ramadan, images of flames billowing up from the Haram al-Sharif as a frenzied crowd of Jewish Israeli religious (mostly) youth sings Biblical revenge songs in Hebrew were spread across social media. These images may come across as an expression or anticipation of an apocalyptic drama. But what they truly expose is why playing with religion could literally be like playing with an all-consuming fire. Unlike the fire burning through the biblical image of the “burning bush,” the miraculous illumination to Moses that called him to pave a path for his people’s liberation from slavery and oppression, this metaphorical ethnoreligious nationalist fire literally threatens total erasure by consolidating a Jewish supremacist regime. Now, it is clear that this all-consuming fire does not only take the shape of “bombing Gaza back to the stone age” as Benny Ganz, the current Defense Minister, boasted about his “accomplishment” (then as the Army Chief) in 2014. The fire now “spreads” to the “mixed cities” inside Israel. This offers a moment of clarity. Respectable human rights organizations have recently confirmed with ample evidence the current Israeli regime as supremacist in its ideology by labelling it an apartheid regime. Certainly, it is hard to look at the display of Jewish ultranationalist youth singing violent Jewish songs on the plaza in front of the Western Wall where once, before 1967, the Palestinian Mughrabi Quarter had stood—that is, before it was abruptly demolished in the aftermath of the Six-Day War–and not reach the same conclusion.
— איימן עודה أيمن عودة Ayman Odeh (@AyOdeh) May 10, 2021
Twitter post by Joint List Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, of Jewish youth celebrating Jerusalem Day and singing “Yimach shemam” (may their names be erased).
National Idolatry
Of course it is hard to escape an apocalyptic foreshadowing when the hateful chants loudly invade the soundscapes and flames from the Haram al-Sharif reach the night sky. Ominous are the images of the flames emerging from this sacred site for Muslims when they are combined with the soundtrack of genocidal Hebrew words sung in front of the Wailing Wall. This wall, it must be remembered, is the last standing remnant of the Herodian Temple. The late Jewish-Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz condemned it as a site of national idolatry. Another wall, the so-called apartheid or separation wall that has walled off the territories occupied in 1967 (but swallowed further lands in pursuit of its “security” function), has reconfigured the Western Wall as not only a locus of religious piety, but also a locus of nationalist piety. The meanings behind these walls converge when the idolatry of the nation is confused with Jewish piety. Leibowitz saw this happening long before the settler lobby and the so-called “hilltop settlers” began to explicitly dictate the tone of Israeli annexationist policies.
The image of the fire and the sounds of those singing are chilling. Conversations on social media seemed to focus on who started the fire and why. This focus on the minutiae of who started the fire, and why it was started, can seem extraneous in light of the horrific nature of these videos. Still, the details are important. In reality, the fire was likely caused by Palestinian protesters at the al-Aqsa compound, who, prior to and during the month of Ramadan have been engaging in grassroots protests against the looming dispossession of families from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and resisting police brutality that has come in the wake of the protests. The Israeli government further escalated the situation when, on Laylat al Qadr, one of the holiest nights in the Muslim calendar, its security forces raided the mosque—which is a sacred space and a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty and resistance. Under the guise of security, road blocks were also set up to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel access to al-Aqsa. The confluence of sacred times and spaces (national and religious) is explosive, and those pulling triggers and making decisions targeting religious celebrations may well be lighting the fuse.
Deadly Religion
As noted above, the literal flames were probably caused by a firework lit by protesters that misfired into a tree and were shortly extinguished. The Hebrew chants, like the daily and escalating violence of religious students of pre-military (supposedly Torah-centric) academies in the “mixed cities,” however, were caused by decades of ideologically driven policies of land grabbing, impunity, the manipulation of marginalized (mostly Mizrahi) communities, and the instrumentalization of religion to promote power and ideology. The flames were accidental, and their confluence with the hateful chants was coincidental, or so apologists say. The ultranationalist religious youth seen chanting were redirected to the Western Wall to avoid having their usual “flag parade,” which is the annual marking of the “liberation” or “reunification” of Jerusalem in 1967, proceed through the Muslim Quarter. This notorious annual display of violence in occupied East Jerusalem is met with routine impunity and as such reflects a cementing collusion between settlers and the institutions of the Israeli military and state. This collusion, like the marriage of convenience between secular “security” arguments and messianic settler aspirations to reconnect to the biblical landscape of “Judea and Samaria,” is ubiquitous across the “settlement project” in the West Bank and within the “mixed cities” of 1948 where settler organizations take over Palestinian homes through a variety of methods. These include legal and bureaucratic forms of torture which they have carried out in East Jerusalem or in other places where housing is constructed exclusively for Jews at the heart of Palestinian urban spaces.
The youth did not “come out of nowhere.” Instead, they are the product of an ideology, institutions, cynical power mongering, and the manipulation of, and selective retrieval from, religious traditions.
Messianic settler ideology, anti-Palestinian racism, and the logics of modern nationalism and settler colonialism converged at the Western Wall on this evening in an all-consuming fire sung to a religious tune. This did not “just happen.” The youth did not “come out of nowhere.” Instead, they are the product of an ideology, institutions, cynical power mongering, and the manipulation of, and selective retrieval from, religious traditions. For example, the Torah is often read even within the secular education system as a land title. This amounts to “playing with religion” to advance the settler-colonial business of land seizure and the reshaping of the landscape through ethnic cleansing and the Judaizing of spaces. This is carried out in the neighborhoods of Jerusalem one house at a time, as the residents who will soon be dispossessed from Sheikh Jarrah can attest. The flames by the Haram al-Sharif caused by the Palestinian firework are the kind of accident that happens when one plays with fire. The display of ultranationalist Jewish hate and violence is the kind of religion one gets when religion, both a potential gasoline and fire, is turned into a deadly weapon.
Sacred Times, Sacred Spaces: A Predictable Script for Escalation
The seeming speed and ease of the escalation is also indicative of a cynical awareness of the explosive potential of arbitrary violations of an otherwise delicate status quo in Jerusalem around the management of sacred spaces and sacred times. The question is whose political expediency is served by the current escalation? The answer very likely points us back to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s precarious political situation. Under indictment for corruption and unable to form a coalition after a fourth round of elections in two years, despite bringing explicit anti-Palestinian racism to the Knesset in the form of coalition bargaining with political actors who openly advocate for ethnic cleansing, Netanyahu stands to benefit from a war. This is a familiar script to enhance “national unity” in the face of Hamas’ rockets. As Gaza is bombarded by massive artillery and whole families are buried under the rubble of their own homes, the Kahanists roam the streets and direct their murderous supremacist ideology against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. These are lynch mobs that operate with impunity. Yes, al-Aqsa, Jaffa, Haifa, and Akka (centers of Palestinians within the Green Line) are all interconnected in their experience of anti-Palestinian racism. This recent escalation clarifies the consistency between settler violence within and beyond the 1948 demarcations. How to trigger this escalation? When millions are under constant control and oppression, as is the case for 1967 and 1948 Palestinians, igniting a fire usually follows predictable patterns. The violation of sacred time and space, more often than not, serves as the gasoline.
Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, 8 June 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC 4.0.
To highlight the anatomy of power is not the same as saying that “real” religion or theology have nothing to do with the eruption of overt violence in May 2021. It is rather to say that religion is inextricably bound up with these forms of power, and needs to be engaged as such. An analysis of “religion” separated from power conveniently extracts it from the story of modernity and colonialism, exonerating it from the ways in which it is implicated in supremacist structures and ideologies. Violent raids of the Haram al-Sharif during Ramadan primed Hamas to fire rockets, using its unsophisticated military weapons to express an outrage against this provocation. The result is an Israeli fallback on its script of Jewish self-defense. With Israeli families now sleeping in bomb shelters (not available in Gaza), religion has operated as planned to distract from the ongoing processes of land grabbing and disregard for Palestinian lives. It remains to be seen if it will also serve to shore up a failing political career.
An Apocalyptic Optic Versus a Deadly Reality
What is the relation between al-Aqsa and Gaza? Some reacted to the viral clips of fire and chanting with self-righteous anger, claiming that it was all coincidental and simply bad optics. Absurdly, they underscore that the ultranationalist youth were at the site because they were rerouted there by the authorities. They were supposed to be in the Muslim Quarter as they are each year during the supremacist “flag parade,” not dancing in front of the Wailing Wall at the time of the accidental fire. This misses the point: this bad and viral apocalyptic “optic” has been an ongoing Palestinian reality. Just a few weeks prior, and as part of the malignant facilitation of the escalation in Jerusalem, a similar display of Jewish supremacist hate and violence likewise provoked and bullied Palestinians. The latter were already on edge due to the pending dispossession of Palestinian refugee families from their properties in Sheikh Jarrah and the arbitrary Ramadan-related restrictions (decreed by the Netanyahu regime in the form of the Jerusalem police) placed on gathering on the wide steps of the Damascus Gate as is common on the festive nights of Ramadan after the iftar meal. These explicit displays of Jewish supremacy at the heart of Palestinian spaces is not new. Nor is the overt racism of one of the groups associated with it, Lehava. The latter is notorious for its long-standing “policing” of potential or apparent miscegenation in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square. There its “troops’” patrol on a regular basis and especially after Shabbat on Saturday nights. This obsession with purity is, on the one hand, an inheritance of Meir Kahane, the Rabbi agitator from Brooklyn, and cofounder of the Jewish Defense League, who imported internalized racial antisemitism and American racial categories to the Israeli scene. Kahane was assassinated and his party outlawed, but Kahanism has endured and thanks to Netanyahu is now fully emboldened in the Knesset. It has endured because Jewish supremacy has always been, if perhaps occasionally articulated more nicely, a part of Zionism as a Jewish nationalist project. To be Jewish (and democratic) otherwise in the context of Palestine/Israel will require relinquishing this supremacist logic that privileges Jews over non-Jews. The obsession with purity of blood and with the related “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine/Israel are all inheritances of modernity and Christian Europe.
The violent raids in al-Aqsa resulted not only in a small accidental fire. It triggered an escalation into another round of assaults on Gaza and rocket fire from Hamas, refocusing attention on Jewish security and self-defense. This shift from al-Aqsa and the showdown against nonviolent protestors to Gaza and the easy deployment of orientalist rhetoric (e.g. “these barbarians use civilians as human shields”) shows how triggering apocalyptic images in sacred spaces and during sacred times distracts from the concrete analysis of the relation between al-Aqsa and Gaza: the ongoing and historical occupation and patterns of dispossession. Like most Gazans, the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah are refugees from the time of the Nakba. Israel’s effort to control the narrative prefers apocalyptic explanations that tread on (modernist) orientalist tropes. Such paradigms prevent us from connecting these dots in relation to political and historical time and space.
Al Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem. Photo Credit: MissyKel, 2006. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Hence, what appears to be an intentional escalation of tensions and explicit displays of violence during the month of Ramadan predictably provoked Hamas to fire rockets. Why? The Haram al-Sharif has been a national as well as a religious pivot for Palestinian nationalism and resistance. Its violation constitutes an assault to which Hamas was provoked to respond by firing rockets from Gaza. This move helped Israeli decision-makers revert to their familiar script of brutally “mowing the lawn” in Gaza using the claim of “self-defense.” This predictable script refocuses attention away from the international support Palestinian activists in the occupied neighborhoods of East Jerusalem garnered in advance of their looming dispossession from their homes. This settler colonial logic and the experiences of land seizure constitute the thread that links the Judaization of Jerusalem with the enduring imprisonment of Gazans in their open-air prison. These experiences cannot be reduced to vague apocalyptic optics, or mirages.
The Apocalypse Does Not Just Happen
The powerful images of an end-time Armageddon, brought about by a religious war, are blurred when other images come into focus, like the hunger for power of political opportunists such as Netanyahu. The apocalypse does not just happen. The assault on Gaza under the pretext of defending Israel against the besieged strip and its armed movement’s violent expression of resistance to the Israeli security forces’ desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque exposes the delicacy of the so called “status quo” of the religious sites in Jerusalem. These sites come loaded with symbolism and layers of histories and messianic aspirations, and are indeed deeply related to the prolonged history of the occupation of Palestinians. Playing with fire and religion in al-Aqsa exposes how religion operates within the ideology that structures the occupation that links the refugees of Sheikh Jarrah and their resistance against looming dispossession to the refugees of Gaza. This link exists despite decades of an Israeli policy of fragmentation has sought to disconnect Gaza from the West Bank and the rest of the Palestinian communities.
The “eruptions” of violent Palestinian expressions of overt resistance which also results in Jewish Israeli loss of life and suffering may also offer glimpses into the routine forms of violence represented by decades of an entrenched occupation and an apartheid regime. Religion intersects with and animates the routine violence just as much as it triggers apocalyptic fears and aspirations. Such escalations, if we are willing to look, illuminate the ongoing architecture of a supremacist ideology and reveal what happens when you play with combustible religion. The apocalypse does not just happen because of one misdirected firework. It’s up to us to look beneath to how the pyre and tinder were built.
Sultanim (Shrine on Horizon), 2014. This marker is from a holy site known locally as Sultanim Mazar located in the Yarkand prefecture. At this site there was a Qabristanliq or cemetery for local burials and family members regularly come to pray for and visit their loved ones who have passed. There was also a Khaniqah, which is an enclosed shelter for ritual activity and prayer, and there were multiple markers for important historic persons and Muslim saints. Image and description courtesy of Lisa Ross.
Over the past few years, government authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China have destroyed large swathes of the religious heritage of the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs. This campaign of demolition has proceeded in tandem with the heavy securitization of the region, mass incarcerations, and attacks on the Uyghur language and other aspects of their cultural identity. Although China has justified these moves as necessary to counter terrorism, its actions arguably amount to what UNESCO calls “strategic cultural cleansing”: the deliberate targeting of individuals and groups on the basis of their cultural, ethnic, or religious affiliation, combined with the intentional and systematic destruction of cultural heritage. This attempt to remodel the region’s cultural landscape is impelled by the strategic and economic objectives of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi Jinping’s keystone policy introduced in 2013, which aims to secure access to the region’s natural resources and transform Xinjiang into a platform to expand China’s influence and trade across Asia.
Over the past two decades, China has become a key player in the international heritage sphere, and has developed its own unique approach to heritage management. Cultural heritage is linked to political goals. It serves as a resource for political legitimacy and soft power and is used as an asset to boost local economic development. China’s leading role in inscribing the Silk Road on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2014 demonstrates how it positions itself as an international heritage leader and how closely its heritage strategy is aligned with its economic and political goals.
In Xinjiang, the management of Uyghur cultural heritage has been tightly tied to government attempts to deepen control over the region. The Xinjiang government has used Uyghur heritage as a cultural resource to develop the tourism industry. Tourism initiatives are typically led by Chinese companies, and benefits to Uyghurs have been uneven. The growth of tourism facilitates the movement of Han Chinese into the region, both as short-term visitors and permanent settlers, and provides additional justification for the repressive securitization policies which are deemed necessary to stabilize the region.
Uyghur culture, in the form of the Muqam musical repertoire and Meshrep community gatherings, is strongly represented on UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and numerous items of Uyghur religious heritage—mosques and shrines—are included on China’s own national and regional heritage lists. Although recognized heritage sites should be protected under national laws, over the past few years thousands of mosques and shrines, including protected sites, have been fully or partly demolished. China argues that government management of Uyghur culture is necessary to protect it from religious extremism. In fact—as evidenced by the large-scale destruction of sacred sites, prohibitions on Uyghur language and literature, and disruption of Uyghur communities since 2017—the biggest threats to Uyghur heritage and culture are the policies of the Chinese government itself.
Mosques, Shrines, and the Transmission of Uyghur History
Up until the 1950s, when the Xinjiang region was incorporated into the Peoples’ Republic of China, religious institutions were central to social and economic life. In the early 1950s, Kashgar region alone had 12,918 mosques. The major festival mosques were the site of mass celebrations at the festivals of Eid and Qurban. Madrasahs (religious schools) provided the main source of formal education for Uyghur boys. The most distinctive and significant aspect of religious life centered around the shrines—tombs of martyrs and saints—which were popular pilgrimage destinations and held their own festivals celebrating the saints.
The spread of Islam into this region started in the tenth century with the conversion of the rulers of the Turkic Qarakhanid dynasty and their conquest of neighboring Buddhist kingdoms. Sufi orders played an important role in the introduction of Islam. Sufi sheykhs were respected as community leaders, and venerated for their spiritual powers. Revered in life as well as in death, the shrines of these historical leaders and saints became important sites of pilgrimage. These saints and their shrines have played a crucial role in the culture and history of the region.
Most of these shrines are not major architectural monuments. Some of the most important shrines are simple mud brick constructions, distinguished visually by the huge temporary structures made up of “spirit flags” which are brought by pilgrims and attached to the shrine or tied together in tall flag mountains.
Religious Revival and “Strike Hard” Campaigns
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, and with the relaxing of controls on religious life, Uyghurs began to return to their faith, and new forms of piety began to permeate Uyghur society. These trends mirrored revival movements across post-Soviet Central Asia and Hui Muslim Chinese communities. During my visits to the region over the past twenty years, I saw many people returning to family traditions of prayer, fasting, and modest dress; sending their children to Qur’an school, saving money to go on the hajj. An important aspect of the revival was the building or reconstruction of community mosques. Local communities and individual donors raised money to build impressive structures that reflected a renewed pride in the faith, and new community confidence and prosperity.
The Keriya Grand Mosque, 2014, seen here with many visitors. The building no longer exists. Photo Courtesy of Ruth Ingram and Bitter Winter.
Already by the 1990s, the Xinjiang authorities were viewing these developments with deep suspicion. A series of “strike hard” campaigns began to target religious life. Everyday practices, such as daily prayer and fasting, veiling or growing beards, were criticized as antisocial. Activities central to Uyghur culture, including shrine pilgrimage and religious instruction of children, were designated “illegal religious activities.”
Soon after the US announcement of a “Global War on Terror,” China began to adopt the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism, drawing on internationally circulating tropes of Islamophobia to justify its actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities: actions which were increasingly taking the form of cultural cleansing. Activities previously designated “illegal religious activities” were now dubbed “religious extremism.” State media began to designate local incidences of violence as “terrorist incidents” although the specific reasons underlying local violence were more often to do with local power struggles, official corruption, and police brutality.
In May 2014, the recently appointed President Xi Jinping called for the construction of “walls made of copper and steel” to defend Xinjiang against terrorism. Uyghurs’ passports were confiscated, ties with the outside world were cut off, a tight net of surveillance tracked their every movement, and construction began on the system of mass internment camps.
The “Mosque Rectification” Campaign
Rather than targeting the small number of people who might reasonably be judged vulnerable to radicalization and violent action, the anti-religious extremism campaign in Xinjiang targeted all expressions of Islamic faith, and it removed swathes of Islamic architecture from Uyghur towns. Beginning in 2015, and greatly accelerating in 2017, the Xinjiang authorities demolished thousands of mosques under a “mosque rectification” campaign. Many were condemned on the grounds that they were unsafe structures that posed a safety threat for worshippers. Others had their distinctive architectural features, such as domes and minarets, removed. All of this formed a part of the national campaign to “Sinicize” religion, introduced under Xi Jinping to implement his vision of Chineseness as narrowly centred on Han Chinese culture, with “foreign” religious influences increasingly regarded as a threat to stability.
Recent investigations have provided extensive evidence of the demolition or modification of thousands of Uyghur mosques and several shrines (using satellite imagery to verify each site). Not only was the built heritage destroyed. Rahile Dawut, a Uyghur academic who had dedicated her life to documenting the shrines, was detained shortly before the demolitions in November 2017, one among hundreds of disappeared intellectuals and cultural leaders. She remains in an internment camp at the time of writing.
Many Uyghur cemeteries were also destroyed or relocated during this period. The extremely rapid program of removing human remains and bulldozing structures left local people (even if they were not incarcerated in the camps) scant time to reclaim the bones of their family members. Important historical shrines have been destroyed along with the cemeteries. Khotan’s Sultanim Cemetery, for example, has a history of over 1,000 years. It contained the shrine of the Four Sultans, an important pilgrimage site, and many other significant figures in Khotan’s history were buried in this cemetery. In March 2019, disinterment notices appeared around the city of Khotan, warning that the cemetery would be demolished within three days. According to satellite images, the site was completely flattened by April 2019, and part of the cemetery appeared to be in use as a parking lot.
Although the authorities have tried to justify the destruction or relocation of cemeteries by the demands of urban development, it is clear that these moves form part of the wider effort to disrupt communities and break the transmission of Uyghur culture. Such projects of development and securitization attempt to remodel the cultural landscape and to re-engineer the desires and actions of its inhabitants. In Xinjiang, this campaign of demolition came hand in hand with the heavy securitization of the region, mass incarcerations, and physical violence inflicted by state forces on Uyghur bodies in the form of enforced sterilization, and documented instances of rape and torture in the camps. Increasing numbers of independent observers and national governments have argued that China’s policies in Xinjiang amount to a deliberate act of genocide. It is important to note that the systematic destruction of cultural and religious heritage—as we have seen with the mosques, cemeteries, and shrines of the Uyghurs—has historically been deployed as a way to weaken the culture and identity of a people, part of a wider strategy of dehumanization which typically paves the way for the physical atrocities which lie at the heart of our understandings of genocide.
Rachel Harris is Professor of Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on religious and expressive culture among the Uyghurs. Her latest book Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020) was published by Indiana University Press in November 2020, and an edited volume, Ethnographies of Islam in China, came out with Hawaii University Press in January 2021. She is currently working on a Sustainable Development Project on revitalizing Uyghur cultural heritage in Kazakhstan.
Various movements prescribed for Islamic prayer. Image taken from page 168 of “Egypt : handbook for travellers : part first, lower Egypt, with the Fayum and the peninsula of Sinai” (1885). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Sohaira Siddiqui’s intellectual biography of the important fifth-/eleventh-century Ashʿarī theologian and Shāfiʿī jurist, Imām al-Ḥaramayn Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī is an impressive achievement. Taking us into the turbulent world of Abbasid-Saljukid politics in the Iraqi-Persian heartland of the faltering Abbasid caliphate, Siddiqui successfully recreates the environment in which a scholar such as al-Juwaynī constantly experienced the existential dimension of politics. While living in turbulent political times was probably not personally optimal for al-Juwaynī, it was clearly a catalyst for his fertile mind, leading him to think deeply about the relationships between and among reason, revelation, and politics. Juwaynī, as a committed Ashʾarī, believes revelation is indispensable for the maintenance of a proper moral and social order. This creates an epistemological problem, however, because reveled knowledge, unlike rational knowledge, depends on the preservation of a unique moment in the past that cannot, by definition, be recreated. If we forget the Qurʾān, it is gone forever. If we forget the Pythagorean Theorem, by contrast, we can “re-discover” it through our common human reason. In short, humanity’s ability to preserve knowledge of revelation is an urgent problem for someone like Juwaynī: if we lack an effective method for the preservation of revelation and its truths, then humanity is forever barred from living in accordance with its true ends.
In this brief post, I wish to engage with Juwaynī’s solution to the problem of preserving religious knowledge against the inevitable ravages of time: embodiment of the law’s practices in the community, both writ large. I will do so by exploring the implications of what his theory means for what religious practices can survive in the conditions of modernity, and within relevant subcommunities of the larger Muslim community, such as the jurists, and his apparent willingness to turn from the textualism of the Shāfiʿī school to the practice-oriented view of the Mālikīs. The fragility of religious knowledge is an express theme of the Qurʾān: God sends prophets to humanity, but human beings always eventually manage to forget their teachings, leading God to send another prophet, but seemingly with always the same result: forgetting, in whole or in part, divine teachings. The Qurʾān even has a term to refer to this problem: exhaustion (fatra), the seemingly inevitable tendency of divine teachings to be lost with the passage of time.
Paradoxically, however, the cycle of remembrance followed by forgetfulness comes to an end with the Prophet Muḥammad, who brings an end to the era of prophets. With the end of prophecy, preservation of religion becomes entirely a human responsibility. Objectively, their chances of success seem dim. While the Qurʾān seems to guarantee that God will preserve the Qurʾān (al-Hijr, 15:9), the Prophet Muḥammad is portrayed as predicting the disappearance of religious knowledge as an inevitable result of the passage of time.
For example, Bukhārī reported in his collection of Prophetic reports the following text on this theme (Kitāb al-ʿIlm, Bāb Kayfa yuqbaḍ al-ʿilm [The Book of Knowledge: How Knowledge is Removed]):
ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ said, ‘I heard the God’s Messenger (S) say, ‘God does not remove knowledge all at once from His servants, suddenly, but He rather removes knowledges as He removes the learned, one by one, as they die, until finally, no learned person remains, and then the people follow ignorant and foolish leaders who, when asked, reply without knowledge, going astray and leading others astray.’
The caliphate is the human institution that is charged, in the first instance, with preserving religion by securing the material and non-material means necessary to assure the preservation of Islam over time. One can see why the caliphate, were it effective, would provide an optimal solution for the preservation of Islam’s teachings over time, but unfortunately, the caliphate itself is subject to the ravages of time, and as Juwaynī sees it, it has already become decrepit and so an alternative institution or set of institutions must arise to see to religion’s preservation. Here, Juwaynī proposes his radical solution: that religion’s preservation lies not in the memorialization and preservation of sacred texts, and erudite practices of the learned in interpreting them, but rather in the embodied practices of the Muslim public. Much like the blacksmith embodies the perfection of his craft through constant and even unthinking repetition, so too, according to Siddiqui, Juwaynī believes the sharīʿa—or at least its most fundamental Qurʾānic principles—can be preserved through its embodied, even unthinking, practice, by individual members of the public.
There is a great irony in Juwaynī’s attempt to solve the problem of the disappearance of religious knowledge by placing his hopes in the embodied practices of the Muslim public. That seems to be an appeal to the fundamental concept that led the founder of the Shāfiʿī school to break with his teacher, Mālik b. Anas, ʿamal (practice). As is well-known, and has been only recently reinforced by Ahmed El Shamsy’s work on Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, the eponym of the Shāfiʿī school, al-Shāfiʾī broke with Mālik over precisely the question of the authoritativeness of the community’s embodied religious practices versus the authoritativeness of authoritative transmissions of religious doctrine and practices. Recall that Shāfiʾī objected to what he believed was the black-box nature of Mālik’s practice: while Mālik claimed that it was a trustworthy source for Prophetic teachings, he could not explain to an outside observer why it was so. For Shāfiʿī this flaw was fatal: a believer could only be bound by evidence that was verifiable, and anonymous practice was the veritable opposite of that. As an observer, one can only determine from the practice that it is a practice; one cannot determine solely from it being a practice that it is even normative for those engaging it, to say nothing of it being universally normative.
Here, Juwaynī proposes his radical solution: that religion’s preservation lies not in the memorialization and preservation of sacred texts, and erudite practices of the learned in interpreting them, but rather in the embodied practices of the Muslim public.
It is not quite clear to me how al-Juwaynī would respond to a Shāfiʾī critique of the situation he imagines to be the ultimate guarantor of the Sharīʿa against the ravages of time. It seems once we lose the ability to have a normative perspective that is abstracted away from our actual practices, we are no longer to have religious knowledge at all. It seems we are relegated to the domain of pure taqlīd (unreasoned conformity to established opinion), even if we have practical certainty that we are praying correctly, for example, or that we are fasting correctly. Indeed, all adherents of religions seem to share this feature of embodied practice: they are certain that they are performing their own rituals correctly. If so, it’s hard to see what work “practical certainty” does in preserving religion for al-Juwaynī insofar as it leads to a situation in which Muslims are no better situated in knowing religious truth than non-Muslims.
When we think about the implications of al-Juwaynī’s theory for the modern world, they appear even more bleak. One can imagine that, in the agrarian society of al-Juwaynī’s world, that a people can preserve its rituals and basic beliefs through custom given the imperceptibly slow rate of change that characterized pre-industrial societies, but post-industrial society makes even that unattainable. Accordingly, religion in the modern world, it seems to me, cannot rely simply on embodied practice. Nor does it seem conceivable that al-Juwaynī, with his commitment to reason, would give up the fight to preserve religion so easily. What seems to be lacking in Siddiqui’s reconstruction of al-Juwaynī’s strategy to rely on embodied practice as the last bulwark against the loss of revealed knowledge is the relation of embodied practice to the natural reason of the ordinary human being. But integrating quotidian practices into natural human reason seems to me to be the only way to provide them a secure foundation in modernity, when even deeply embodied customs cannot provide stability. Perhaps, then, the best that can be hoped for in conditions of modernity is the preservation of what the jurists called the foundational rules of religion (al-maʿlūm min al-dīn bi’l-ḍarūra), those elements of natural religion and natural virtue that the Qurʾān affirms as the universal constituents of piety, e.g., al-Baqara, 2:177. One might posit a certain convergence between reason and historical religion with respect to these foundational elements of religion, and perhaps only by focusing on those may it be possible to preserve religion for future generations in the conditions of modernity.
Mohammad H. Fadel is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.
Pope Francis greets a crowd in St. Peter’s square. June 6, 2014. Photo Credit: Alfredo Borba. Via Wikimedia Commons.
On April 15, 2021, over 1000 people gathered online from the US, UK, Germany, and Italy, to respond to Pope Francis’s call in Let Us Dream for the Church to “open its doors” to movements of “self-organized citizens.” Care workers, teaching assistants, and nurses engaged in dialogue with clergy, theologians, and community organizers. The gathering sought to embody the pope’s call for “a politics rooted in the people.”
This part of Let Us Dream‘s message has not received a great deal of attention. Indeed, as Austen Ivereigh (who collaborated with the pope on the book) explained to the conference, it is an aspect of Francis’s pontificate which has “largely flown under the radar.” Commentary on the book has tended to focus on particular policy pronouncements. Yet Francis is calling for a more radical reimagining of politics.
In Ivereigh’s words, Pope Francis conceives of politics as something “that is not just practiced when we vote as individuals in elections, but when we come together in and through our institutions to hold state and market to account, to build fraternity in civil society, and to give voice to ordinary people as they organize for change.” In Francis’s vision, this grassroots activity is not a peripheral or derivative form of political activity. It is the very essence of politics; in Let Us Dream he calls it “politics with a capital P” (112).
In 2012, when our research project began in East London, there was already significant anxiety in the United Kingdom and in the United States about popular disenchantment with elective politics, and about the erosion of the “intermediate institutions” which help ordinary citizens build a common life. In the intervening years, a divisive and exclusionary politics has sought to harness this disenchantment—and has further intensified the discrimination and stigmatization faced by ethnic minorities, migrants, and refugees.
The term “populism” is often used for this chauvinistic political movement. But there are other democratic and pluralistically oriented forms of populism. As Laura Grattan’s study of American populism shows, these other forms have brought diverse groups together and been a significant force for social change.
I like to use the term ‘popularism’ to express the same idea. But what matters is not the name but the vision, which is the same: it is about finding the means to guarantee a life for all people that is worthy of being called human, a life capable of cultivating virtue and forging new bonds.
There are two key respects in which “inclusive populism” and “popularism” offer a vital alternative to divisive and nativist forms of populism.
First of all, in Francis’s words, inclusive populism makes “the people . . . the protagonists.” By contrast, in divisive, nativist populisms, ordinary people take refuge in a “charismatic leader.” This distinction has parallels in Luke Bretherton’s contrast between “political” and “anti-political” populisms. In “anti-political” forms of populism, the “many” cede their power to a “one” who speaks and acts on their behalf. By contrast, political populism “embodies a conception of politics that works to reinstate plurality and inhibit totalizing monopolies (whether of the state or market) through common action and deliberation, premised on personal participation in and responsibility for tending public life” (52).
Secondly, “inclusive populism” is built around the diverse religious and civic institutions in which ordinary people gather to build a common life. Our study of community organizing in East London called into question the common assumption that religion is necessarily a force for social division—and contested the related idea that a society with citizens of different religious and metaphysical beliefs should conduct policy debates in terms which are neutral with respect to these beliefs.
Across almost a century of community organizing, both religious and secular organizers have found religious congregations to be the most resilient and powerful institutions on which to build what veteran organizer Ernesto Cortés Jr. (in an interview conducted for Inclusive Populism) calls “a graduate school to teach people how to participate in politics and shape their communities’ futures.” As Cortés explains, “Citizens are formed through the process of organizing. It requires institutions which can incubate this process by passing on the habits, practices, and norms necessary for humans with different opinions and temperaments to flourish together: to compromise, to talk to and not just about one another, to act in the light of one another’s views and needs and not just unilaterally or selfishly” (19).
In making the case for such an approach, Inclusive Populism argues that a secularizing liberalism—which fails to acknowledge its own contestable metaphysical assumptions—has contributed to our current climate of political alienation. This liberalism is epitomized by the political philosophies of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, whom for all their other differences share the assumption that there is a possibility of substantive reasoning about politics which is abstracted from our specific religious and metaphysical convictions (cf. Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of these issues).
In place of secular liberalism’s false self-image of neutrality, a truly inclusive populism requires a “negotiated pluralism” in which citizens are encouraged to bring their religious and metaphysical convictions into the public square. Our research in East London shows how citizens in some of the poorest neighborhoods of England harnessed their religious convictions to work together to discern and promote a truly common good—and in particular how they move between different “registers” of discourse (which I term mutual witness, negotiation, and apologetics) that enable them to work together constructively across deep disagreement.
As Pope Francis told our April gathering,
In recognizing the importance of spirituality in the lives of the people, we regenerate politics. That is why it is essential that faith communities meet together and fraternize in order to work ‘for and with the people.’ With my brother the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, ‘[we] declare the adoption of a culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard.’
Canon Dr. Angus Ritchie is an Anglican priest. For over twenty years, he has served in parishes in East London involved in community organizing, playing a leading role in campaigns for the Living Wage, affordable housing, and a cap on interest rates. He is the founding director of the Centre for Theology and Community. His latest book, Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2019, and was recently discussed by Pope Francis at a conference of Catholics involved in community organizing.
The populace pays allegiance to the new Abbasid Caliph, al-Ma’mun. ca. 1593. Image Credit: The San Diego Museum.
There are many possible points of departure for a discussion of this important book. In this piece, I would like to focus on al-Juwaynī’s concern for the constitutive features of the Muslim community (most importantly, certain religious knowledge), and for its continued existence, that aspect of his project where the certainty-continuity dialectic is most visible. I am especially interested in the Muslim community as a polity, that is, as a community of belief organized along necessarily political lines. In light of this interest, I ask: To what extent is this political organization dispensable to al-Juwaynī, and how does he compare to other theologians who speculated on the absence of a Caliph?
In his Irshād, al-Juwaynī explores the question of whether it is possible to appoint two Caliphs to rule over the Muslim community (326–27). He notes that previous Ashʿarī authorities (aṣḥābunā) had pronounced against this view, likening the rule of two Caliphs to the marrying off of a single woman by two marriage-guardians to two different grooms without the latters’ perceiving it: an absurdity. Al-Juwaynī concedes the point, while making an exception for the possibility of a multiplicity of Caliphs in disparate lands. This claim attracted much attention in the commentary literature. In his explanation of the text, Abū Bakr b. Maymūn al-Qurṭubī (d. 567/1172) notes that it is unlawful for two Caliphs to govern simultaneously in adjacent territories, just as a woman cannot be married to two men at the same time: given the conflict of wills, corruption (fasād) would inevitably ensue (662–63). In this curiously gendered analogy, the Umma is a bride, and the Caliph is her groom.
But there were others who held, to extend the analogy, that the Umma did not need to marry at all, or that it could contract marriages of convenience whenever the need arose. In Siddiqui’s illuminating account of the Ghiyāth al-umam, which occupies the final two chapters of her book, al-Juwaynī insists on the obligation of the Caliphate, based on revelation (sharʿ) and the precedent of the Companions (243), reiterating the Sunni consensus. In the absence of a suitably qualified candidate, he prioritizes the claim of those who possess “competence to lead independently,” or kifāya (247). In other words, what matters perhaps more than anything else is the ability to wield actual power: an occulted imām is thus no ruler at all. The purpose of the Caliphate is the flourishing of religious life, and the preservation of the latter is dependent on this-worldly concerns that only a Caliph can properly secure. In some sense, then, rule by a single such sovereign (or multiple sovereigns, in the case of disparate lands) is a constitutive feature of religious life.
Al-Juwaynī goes further, exploring what religious life might look like in the absence of any kind of Caliph. In effect, that authority devolves to the ʿulamāʾ, the guarantors of the continued transmission of Islamic knowledge, and therefore of religion. They are the “guardians of the believers (wulāt al-ʿibād)” (258), stand-ins for the Caliph. In a number of premodern Muslim societies deprived of Caliphal oversight (or its functional equivalent), this is how the ʿulamāʾ functioned, as Kathryn A. Miller has observed in her aptly titled monograph on Iberian Muslims under Christian rule, Guardians of Islam. Jurists in non-Muslim administered Aragon served as “critical intermediaries between Christian rulers, officials, laws, and Islamic legal practices” (176). In a society devoid of Muslim sovereignty, they were the leaders of the Muslim community.
In the absence of ʿulamāʾ, lay believers are left to fend for themselves. In place of the ʿulamāʾ, sanctioned interpreters of religion, there are the vestiges of religious knowledge itself or “ingrained legal practices” (al-umūr al-kullī, 263), such as ritual prayer. Once even these are forgotten, the community reverts to a state where it is no longer culpable for its actions (270–72). The “Muslim anarchists” of Patricia Crone did not, in this vein, idealize the absence of government, but they theorized in the absence of its ideal form (9). For some of them, no Caliph at all was preferable to a tyrannical one; for others, such as the idiosyncratic al-Naẓẓām, (d. between 220/835 and 230/845), the institution itself lacked an adequate legal basis. How, I want to ask, does this vision of the Muslim community diverge from al-Juwaynī’s, and what if anything does this teach us about the place of political authority and community in his thought? In the absence of properly constituted authority, some Muʿtazila held, self-help was encouraged: “trustworthy and learned leaders of households, districts, tribes and towns” could enact the canonical punishments (ḥudūd), or imāms could be elected on a temporary basis to enforce them. Al-Aṣamm (d. 200/816 or 201/817) even argued that, in practice, governors appointed by the Prophet had functioned as autonomous rulers, setting a precedent for future divisions of labor (17–18). Thus, as in al-Juwaynī, the community itself serves as the ultimate repository of religious norms, and in the absence of proper leadership, representatives of the community emerge to ensure they are upheld.
Certain fictions, if widely entertained, possess ontology. That the Caliph’s writ could hardly be said to extend beyond his palace walls mattered less than the fact that the institution itself was the source of tremendous symbolic power.
Siddiqui affirms that leadership of the community is one case where al-Juwaynī attempts to reconcile the need for certainty of religious norms with the need to guarantee continuity, before finally conceding that it is conceivable that there are situations where neither obtains. Like his student al-Ghazālī, al-Juwaynī sought to maintain the fig-leaf of the Caliphate to preserve the underlying fictive unity of the Umma. Even in later centuries, when the institution continued in diminished form under the watchful eye of the Mamluks, as Mustafa Banister has recently pointed out, “the symbolic value of the institution . . . [meant that] unrest could be stoked across all social groupings if ever the office or the man holding it was disturbed or perceived to have been insulted” (423). Certain fictions, if widely entertained, possess ontology. That the Caliph’s writ could hardly be said to extend beyond his palace walls mattered less than the fact that the institution itself was the source of tremendous symbolic power.
In her conclusion, Siddiqui contemplates whether al-Juwaynī and his project properly belong to the archives, the prey of antiquarians, or if his voice speaks to us through the mists of time. Stripped of contingent details, she holds, “we can transcend the temporal constraints binding his thought to fifth-/eleventh-century Nishapur, allowing him to contribute to the increasingly prevalent conversations regarding the future of Muslim societies” (289). This book is an antiquarian’s delight, the product of hours of toilsome philological exactitude, but it also poses fundamental questions that continue to resonate today: questions of religious authority, community, and legitimate leadership. I can only commend it to potential readers.
Omar Anchassi is an Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on Islamic law, theology, and Qurʾānic Studies.
In her formidable study of the intellectual project and life of Abū l-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085), Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni, Sohaira Siddiqui makes a number of significant interventions. Among these contributions, she urges historians to read across genres—not to disregard the conventions governing premodern scholarly production, but to throw underlying coherence into greater relief. The coherence in the Juwaynian project is by no means assumed in this book. Rather, it is demonstrated through a painstaking reading of a number of his most influential texts in the domains of legal theory and theology. The relationship of al-Juwaynī’s central concerns of certainty and continuity to his historical and social context is carefully argued. In fact, the fundaments of religion and society themselves, Siddiqui indicates, were perceived to be under threat during this period. As Omid Safi has highlighted in his Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, the early Saljuq regime considered doing away with the Abbasid Caliph altogether (39). Sectarianism had riven the legal and theological communities, fracturing them into mutually hostile Ḥanafī-Shāfiʿī and Muʿtazilī-Ashʿarī camps. Most spectacularly, this rivalry led to al-Juwaynī’s surreptitious flight from Nishapur in 446/1054, following which orders were issued for his arrest (47). This is the backdrop against which al-Juwaynī labored to guarantee a basic minimum of certainty and continuity to religious life. It is worth pausing to unpack these two themes of the Juwaynian corpus and to explore how they relate to Siddiqui’s broader argument. I offer this summary by way of preface to my own engagement with the book’s arguments in my own post. My colleagues, Mohammad Fadel, Joshua Ralston, Walid Saleh and Mariam Sheibani will each contribute pieces on their reactions to the book and its implications for the field. The author will offer a response following the publication of all the pieces.
While jurists had come to recognize and even valorize a measure of uncertainty in their discipline, theology required absolute certainty (qaṭʿ). Al-Juwaynī introduced foundational changes to Ashʿarī epistemologyl, extending the domain of certainty to include forms of knowledge acquired through habitual or customary practice: this is “practical certainty,” and is equivalent to the kind of certainty acquired through exhaustive ratiocination. Siddiqui helpfully gives the example of learning how to drive: with experience, the process becomes second nature, and our knowledge of how to carry it out practically certain (126). While different forms of knowledge are distinct in terms of the paths to their acquisition or the cognitive capacity of individual reasoners, once acquired as certain, they are functionally equivalent (127–28). Thus, the conclusions of individual jurists can possess certainty, without infringing on the validity of legal pluralism. The second major pole of al-Juwaynī’s thought, continuity, enjoys a dialectical relationship with certainty, and the two can never be invoked singly. In certain areas of his thought, such as aspects of legal theory, al-Juwaynī prioritizes continuity where certainty proves unattainable. For example, he accepts the need for qiyās al-shabah, the more dubious form of juristic analogy from resemblances between two legal cases, based on his commitment to continuity and universality in the law. Though uncertain, this technique allows the jurist to extend Divine writ to embrace all conceivable human acts, thus ensuring the law’s completeness, and the continuity of the juristic enterprise (216). But the certainty-continuity dialectic is never a zero-sum game. Even in the case of qiyās al-shabah, al-Juwaynī circumscribes the possibilities for divergence by limiting its exercise to competent legal authorities (muftī–mujtahids, 227–28). The full contours of the certainty-continuity relationship appear most clearly in al-Juwaynī’s political thought, a point I shall revisit in my own essay for this symposium.
Though al-Juwaynī made seminal contributions to a number of fields, his arguments were not always widely accepted, or have not always received the recognition they deserve in modern scholarship. For example, al-Juwaynī seems to have played an important role in preparing the ground for a comprehensive Ashʿarī response to Muslim Neoplatonism (Falsafa, 14–15), a point that still remains largely unacknowledged. This likely owes something to his most outstanding student, al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), whose own innovations are typically accepted to have outshone those of his master. In the domain of legal theory, al-Juwaynī held that the usual juristic proofs offered for the principle of ijmāʿ (consensus) were insufficient, based as they were either on ambiguous Qurʾānic verses or insufficiently attested ḥadīths (163), a view that was not popular among later generations (179–81). There was somewhat less hostility towards his position on tawātur (concurrence) in ḥadīths (156–58). Al-Juwaynī eschewed the formalist stipulation of a minimum number of transmitters for tawātur, which could only ever be arbitrary. Instead, he stressed the circumstances accompanying transmission (i.e. qarāʾin al-ṣidq), which could elevate the contents of the report to the level of certainty even in the absence of broader attestation. The sight of a baby on the lap of his or her wet-nurse accompanied by the sounds of suckling are sufficient proof of feeding, even if the witness does not observe milk flowing into the infant’s mouth (151).
The key themes of al-Juwaynī’s corpus continue to resonate today: believers of all stripes remain interested in the sources of ethical reasoning, and how clearly particular norms can be attributed to their respective traditions. Continuity raises issues of religious authority, likewise a subject of perennial importance.
Omar Anchassi is an Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on Islamic law, theology, and Qurʾānic Studies.
Signing of Concordat between the Vatican and German Reich on July 20, 1933. Signing the document are Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen and Cardinal State Secretary Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) for the Holy See. Via Wikimedia Commons.
It is an honor to respond to these wonderful reflections, which have not only restated the central conclusions of my book more succinctly than I ever could, but also suggested fruitful new ways of approaching the relationship between religion and politics in the twentieth century. In my brief response, I’d like to address three major points raised: first, how a historian can approach Catholic subjectivity and the “priority of belief”; second, the relationship between papal internationalism and rival forms of Christian internationalism in the years after World War I; and finally, the mutually constitutive relationship between religious and political movements in the course of the past century.
In his outstanding contribution, Scott Appleby emphasizes the importance of attending to Catholic subjectivity in explaining the behavior of the Vatican in the twentieth century. He underlines that the first and most important thing to remember about papal officials and Catholic faithful is the “priority of belief.” By this, he means their “widespread, bred-in-the-bone belief in the supernatural as the controlling and ordering reality.” Without attending to this intimate, epistemological, part of the story, something of the force of the moment is lost. After all, the anticommunist crusade that took off from the 1930s (a major topic explored in my book) was, as Appleby reminds us, seen in existential terms: as the face-off between good and evil. Despite the fact that the Church urged its followers away from human subjectivity and experience as the source of truth, Appleby suggests that in order to understand the history of the Church and of Catholicism, we must begin with individuals’ subjective perception of the world. His reminder is one I can no longer address in A Twentieth-Century Crusade (alas), but it will doubtless inform my future scholarship, which will rely more heavily on oral history and on grassroots and bottom-up analyses of how historical subjects make sense of the world.
As Appleby emphasizes, it is not just the subjectivity of historical actors and actresses that needs attention. Just as important, in his view, is for the scholar-historian to emerge out from behind the curtain of third-person narrative, and make explicit their own ethical and religious commitments. Building on the work of scholars like Atalia Omer, he suggests that it is the task of self-identifying religious scholars to recast themselves as “critical caretakers” of their religious traditions. By “critical caretaker,” Omer means that religious scholars (not just scholars of religion) should own their subjective involvement, and leverage the personal stake they have in the topic. This will enable them to recast their scholarship as not just a descriptive or recuperative project (aiming to rediscover the past, or tell it “as it really was”), but rather as an ethical undertaking as well. Thus, Appleby writes, “critical caretakers” will shine a bright light on the “internally plural, ethically ambiguous, and yet spiritually profound traditions” they document. As Father Murhula emphasizes in his contribution, they will not hesitate to voice their disappointment or anger at the shortcomings of their faith. It is alright to be indignant (in Father Murhula’s words) that “quite unbelievably, it took until the Second Vatican Council . . . to address the Church’s grievances and overcome its stubborn resistance to the spirit of modernity,” or express shock at “the Catholic missionaries’ failure to denounce atrocities perpetrated by colonial agents.” But stopping here would be insufficient. Instead, it is necessary to recuperate the dizzying complexity of the Catholic historical and ethical contribution to modernity—a process which will also show how lay Catholics and the Church simultaneously labored to expand human rights and social justice. Thus, “critical caretakers” can outline inspiring histories, and warn against the recurrence of past errors. While Appleby speaks quite understandably from within his own positionality as a religious scholar of religion, it seems to me that heterodox or secular scholars would similarly benefit from explicit reflection on the ethics of unearthing the past—and the ethical lessons that can be derived therefrom. We too need to come out from behind the curtain and frame the “so-what” of our story not just in terms of scholarly debates, but with careful attention to what our story can illuminate about the human condition and the possibility for a more just future.
A key issue broached in my book that combines an interest in ethical and historiographical matters is Catholic internationalism—that is, the work done by the central government of the Roman Catholic Church to compete with rival international forces. Drawing on her own important research on Woodrow Wilson, Cara Burnidge reminds us that the Vatican was not simply competing with international communism or liberalism; it was also in direct competition with other Christian internationalizing forces. Thus, she understands the “crusade” undertaken by the Vatican as one that sought to elevate the papacy as the leader of global Christianity over and against other competitors for that role. It was, in her words, a crusade to sanction Catholic authority “by whatever means had the most effective social, political, and religious impact.” This was not just a crusade against Protestantism or Orthodox Christianity writ large. Rather, Burnidge highlights how the Church’s animus against Woodrow Wilson was so intense because Wilson presented himself as a “Christianizing” force—and thus as a direct rival to the Catholic Church. Burnidge notes a number of surprising points of contact between the Wilsonian project and that of the Church, including the fact that ironically, both Wilson and the Church embraced public, secular, institutions to advance their religious aims. Indirectly, Burnidge suggests that in order to dismiss the “secularization narrative” once and for all, it is not quite enough to recuperate the history of a religious actor and show its crucial contribution to the twentieth century. Rather, one must also carefully explore how manifold religious forces were vying for attention after World War I and saw themselves locked in struggle not only against “atheistic” forces, but also, crucially, against one another.
We too need to come out from behind the curtain and frame the ‘so-what’ of our story not just in terms of scholarly debates, but with careful attention to what our story can illuminate about the human condition and the possibility for a more just future.
This gets us to the knotty question of the relationship between religion and politics, helpfully recast by both Cara Burnidge and Paul Hanebrink. Burnidge kicks off the exploration, noting that she is struck by an apparent paradox at the core of my story: that is, the decision on the part of a religious actor to embrace politics so as to better serve its religious mission. Through tools like the concordat, the Church engaged in secular politics, making legal agreements recognizable to secular nation-states. By embracing concepts like self-determination, it translated itself in secular terms and acted “according to secular norms when desired.” At the same time, however, the Church never lost sight of its status as a religious actor—or did it? Burnidge raises the important question of whether the twentieth-century Vatican should be seen as a political child of the papacy, focused on “developing its legal power and political authority” in non-religious terms, and perhaps even for non-religious aims, or rather whether the institution holds within itself two identities: one secular and political, and the other faith-based and religious. I see my book as making the latter argument, but it would be interesting to see future scholarship exploring the other explanatory framework, and testing its utility.
Hanebrink tackles the religion-politics question from a different angle: rather than presenting the two in opposition or contradiction, he investigates them as intertwined. As he notes, bookshelves overflow with scholarship on communism (and, for that matter, fascism) as “political religions,” which borrowed many of their rhetorical tropes and practices from established religions. But more needs to be theorized on how political movements deeply shaped the languages and practices of religious actors over the course of the past two hundred years. And yet, as Hanebrink explains, my book shows precisely that in numerous ways the Vatican mimicked and mirrored political movements in its own quest for legal, social, and political relevance. It is humbling to think that A Twentieth-Century Crusade—a book whose original intentions were more modest—may also show readers how religious and political forces have co-constituted and mutually reinforced one another over the course of the past century.
Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon-Morgridge Professor of European International History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She completed an MPhil in European History at the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, came out with Harvard University Press in 2019, and won the Michael Hunt Prize in International History (2020) as well as the ACHA Marraro Prize (2019). Her work has been published in the Journal of Contemporary History, Contemporary European History, French Politics, Culture, and Society, and in numerous edited volumes. She has received support for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the DAAD, among others. She is currently drafting her second book, tentatively titled Failed Globalists: European Socialists, Decolonization, and the Decline of State Welfarism, 1973-2008.
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In her formidable study of the intellectual project and life of Abū l-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085), 
