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Theorizing Modernities article

Prophetic Dialectic


Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of prophetic agency requires that we attend to any would-be prophet’s “temperament, concern, character, and individuality” (The Prophet, xxii). His point is that the prophet is no passive conduit. And Cathleen Kaveny proves well aware that, in a line or two, Heschel here confronts us with the fact that “prophetic indictment” is no instance of Hegel’s “night when all cows are black.” The prophet is always and already a responsible agent, however much he might invoke (or however listeners might impute) a higher and/or divinely sanctioned, exceptional mission. The prophet and her message are both earthbound, however much they might force her recipients to glance toward a declared higher good or cause, more just conditions, or to awaken to injustices and forms of evil that permeate the ground on which both prophet and his audiences stand. By Heschel’s lights, any message of indictment cries out to be parsed, weighed, and measured for its validity, its moral implications, and with some suspicion toward any putative exceptional status of the prophet (Jim Jones and David Koresh declared themselves prophets with messages bearing social and political implications). Prophetic indictment stands to be examined in virtue of the consistencies and tensions it generates among the values and ideals with which it is interwoven in the tradition itself (e.g. Martin King persistently tested instances of righteous anger and nonviolent militance for their consistency with the law of love). It might also be examined by standards external to the specific context, tradition, or “revealed” status from which the prophet may make his or her categorical denunciation (King likewise appealed to human rights norms to guide his later activism).

In my view, Heschel’s insight here problematizes the characterization of prophetic indictment as a likely conversation stopping deliverance from an ostensibly coercive moral authority. Heschel imputes no de facto power to the prophet to stand in unassailable judgment over her interlocutors. Inflected by Heschel’s account, as I see it, prophetic indictment is intrinsically accountable to moral deliberation, and to critical analysis. On this account, prophetic discourse in modern democratic contexts will be, at its best and perhaps of necessity, mixed discourse. To her credit, Kaveny carefully reflects upon precisely such possibilities of “mixed discourse.” I agree, and want to develop that possibility further.

Kaveny gives us exemplary models of prophetic indictment in Abraham Lincoln and Martin King. I find her cases for both compelling. It is crucial to keep in mind that neither emerged from a vacuum, and neither was essentially exceptional. Both also evolved in important ways. King cannot be held up as an unalloyed specimen. I think this fact does not compromise his example as a prophetic actor so much as it forces us to think more expansively of prophetic discourse.

Kaveny rightly points out that King’s work of prophetic indictment administered a kind of moral chemotherapy to specific communities, laws, cultural contexts, and forms of deliberation that were being eaten alive by the cancers of Jim Crow. And yet, the structural and cultural forms of violence King encountered in the final years of his life altered the way he conceived of, and exemplified, prophetic discourse. The realities of Chicago’s South Side—where desegregated lunch counters, toilets, and buses did very little to change the workaday realities of black, brown, and destitute people of all colors—forced King to recognize the unexceptional and necessary character of the prophetic indictment that would need to be administered there. He recognized that structural and cultural forms of violence in the North ran deeper, and operated even more insidiously, than the more visible Jim Crow laws of the South. They were not isolable like malignant tumors. They were dispersed manifestations of persistent poverty, marginalization, humiliation and internalized forms of self-abnegation. They could not be resolved by changing laws or altering the legal status of citizens.

These forms of structural violence produced (and, in fact, continue to produce today) conditions of moral crisis, and indeed, human catastrophe. But they are also highly routinized modes of crisis, and as oxymoronic as it might sound, normalized catastrophe. They are (tragically) not exceptional conditions urgently calling forth an exceptional mode of discourse (i.e. chemo-therapeutic). Rather, King increasingly found that they would require sustained prophetic vigilance—a kind of medicine that might treat a chronic sickness of Sisyphean misery, persistent vulnerability, and often, bare survival. As a result, King’s prophetic relentlessness did not abate in the wake of the glories of his “I Have a Dream” speech (1963), his Nobel Peace Prize (1964), and great victories of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (1964/5). Indeed, it only increased and radicalized, even as it evolved. King was pushed in this direction, in part, through the deliberative give-and-take with the Black Power movement, and its uses of Frantz Fanon’s socio-theoretical analysis in particular (see Louis Lomax, “When ‘Nonviolence’ Meets ‘Black Power’”).

King’s mode of analysis and action in his later years suggests to me that prophetic indictment is not entirely exceptional in the way that the medical analogy of chemotherapy is. Nor is it essentially a counter-point to deliberation. In fact, some element of prophetic analysis will be necessary against the persisting realities of structural violence, and the cultural artifacts and understandings that cloak, camouflage, and conceal structural violence—which make it seem unavoidable, or “at least not wrong.” As King’s realization of this point increased, as with most prophets, he increasingly came to be treated as one without honor. Allies who had been eager to integrate lunch counters and public parks and to guarantee voting rights widely abandoned King when he turned his vocal resistance to the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism around the world, and began fighting for humane housing, quality education, guaranteed employment and livable incomes for all (e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Two Americas,” Stanford University, 1967; Where Do We Go From Here?, 1968). King’s negativity rating skyrocketed by the Gallup poll of August 1966 (66% unfavorable overall; 72% unfavorable rating among white respondents). In comparable polls, such a high negativity rating has been surpassed only by that of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

I wonder if so many of us today would be inclined to hold King up as an exemplary social critic and activist if we were working in the context of his final years. I wonder if we would valorize his legacy if we did not view it through the lens of five decades of hagiographic reconstruction (what Cornel West refers to as “the Santa Claus-ification of Martin Luther King, Jr.”). We might even ask if King himself would have been invited to the 50th Anniversary celebration of his “I Have a Dream” speech, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 2013. That was headlined by luminaries like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Michael Dyson, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, and President Obama. Were he there, and spoke in any way consistently with the writings and speeches from his final years, we can surmise that King would have spoken of the illegality and immorality of U.S. drone strikes around the globe, the absence of accountability for Wall Street criminality, the New Jim Crow and prison-industrial complex, the progressive impoverishment of the U.S. middle class, and degrees of economic inequality suffered by poor and working people (disproportionately people of color) that recall the Gilded Age in the U.S. (but that are actually far more insidious).

King’s journey as prophet demonstrates that prophetic discourse must also entail socio-critical analysis, observational criticism, moral judgment, and deliberative accountability. In my view, it indicates that, in modern democratic contexts, virtuous prophetic discourse must be essentially mixed discourse. Genuine rhetoric of prophetic indictment will always be caught up in what Martin King (and many others) demonstrates to be a broader and extended prophetic dialectic. The push and pull, resisting and succumbing, entails moral judgment, deliberative considerations, and reflection (expansively construed), but also the journey and progress of the prophet him or herself. Such a dialectical dimension comes as no surprise. Lincoln’s exemplary prophetic intervention had required Frederick Douglas, Harriet Beecher Stowe—and indeed a social movement inflected by public interventions ranging from William Lloyd Garrison’s categorical denunciations, to the more measured (but no less categorical and indicting) leaves of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, among many others—to press, and push, and hold him accountable.

Any difference with Kaveny that my point might suggest is a matter of emphasis, rather than kind. I think that modern prophetic discourse, at its best, is intrinsically mixed discourse. This is only partially a mixture of indictment and deliberation. For I also think that indictment is but one of the rhetorical elements of which prophetic intervention must consist. Any would-be prophet in democratic public life must strive not to be simply a virtuous oncologist, but a virtuous pharmacologist. Such an account expands the purview of prophetic analysis and intervention exponentially. The prophet would verge upon imprudence and intemperance in those moments when he or she swerves toward purposes as extreme, absolute, and putatively pure as those that call for the last resort of chemotherapy. But if that’s the case, then a univocal analogy to chemotherapy—while apt—also risks becoming overly constraining. A prophetic toxicology (where the poisons of chemotherapy are deployed toward an overall good) and pharmacology (in which the full range of medicinal substances are blended, re-mixed, and applied as the circumstances require) weave together and intermingle. In my view, this is essential rather than exceptional.

As I read the tradition of prophetic discourse in American public life, it not only aids moral and political health by attacking an identifiable and isolable malignant growth through rhetorical indictment. Rather, part of prophetic virtue consists in the practical wisdom in the form of dialectical integration and deployment of the different moral, rhetorical, socio-analytical, and activist elements that are necessary in a given circumstance and point in time. It is precisely through such prophetic dialectic that Martin King fits Jeffrey Stout’s description of the virtuous prophetic social critic as “virtue in motion” (speaking of Michael Walzer’s prophetic model). We know such social critics not by whether or not the stand here or there (say, either the deliberative or the prophetic), but rather, “by the character of their movement from here to there” (e.g. their growth and evolution; their facility in the mixing of discourses for their prophetic purposes; navigating the dialectical push and pull). As Stout puts it, we identify exemplary prophetic social critics in virtue of their demonstrating “enough wisdom to recognize the temptations of each critical posture they assume and the ability to change position, courageously but temperately, as justice requires.”

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Jason Springs
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. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Indictment and Deliberation in Late Modernity


Few writings today about law and moral theology rival Cathleen Kaveny’s mastery of both. In this she resembles John T. Noonan Jr., to whom she dedicates Prophecy without Contempt. Noonan has made a career of carrying out historical inquiry on matters of great religious, ethical, and legal importance, and in so doing he has shed light on our own, often contentious, theological and political debates. Kaveny, in my view, is up to something similar. In Prophecy without Contempt, Kaveny traces the history of the jeremiad in the U.S. to help us locate the limits of prophetic indictment in political debate. On her account, the rhetorical form of the jeremiad has been separated from the original covenantal context within which it developed. Rather than recalling members of the community to faithful adherence to its covenant with God, the jeremiad gradually became a means of denouncing others with whom one disagrees on morally and politically controversial matters. One of the problems with this development, according to Kaveny, is that prophetic indictment of the kind expressed by the jeremiad is strong medicine. She refers to it as moral chemotherapy. Its overuse destroys the body politic and blocks appeal to our normal modes of practical deliberation. Prophetic indictment ought to be used sparingly, and Kaveny develops criteria to help guide our use. This is a welcome contribution at a moment when thoughtful political deliberation is on the decline, derailed by our overheated culture wars. Much of what Kaveny has to say is illuminating and persuasive. In what follows, I want to identify some issues relating to one of the central distinctions of the book: prophetic indictment versus practical deliberation.

At various moments throughout the argument, the two strategies appear to be mutually exclusive. One either engages in prophetic indictment or practical deliberation. If one attempts to use both, prophetic indictment, like a strong spice, inevitably overpowers the whole so that the outcome is more indictment than deliberation. What’s more, these strategies can congeal into identities. Prophets engage in prophetic indictment, deliberators in practical deliberation. Often prophets and deliberators have difficulty understanding and talking to one another, says Kaveny. I wonder, however, if these strategies and identities can be so cleanly distinguished and if they are necessarily at odds. Take, for example, Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Kaveny rightly holds King up as an exemplar of rhetorical and political excellence. But doesn’t King make use of both strategies? On my reading, King’s prophetic indictment is the result of a process of practical deliberation. Evidence of injustice was gathered, negotiations were had, and when negotiations failed the civil rights protesters prepared themselves for non-violent direct action. Direct action created tension in order to make visible injustices that normally lay hidden from view, though often in plain sight for those with eyes to see. In jail for his civil disobedience, King’s letter was a response to a group of white Protestant ministers opposed to his tactics, though they professed to be for his cause. The letter provided an account of his and others’ deliberations.

It seems to me that King’s example demonstrates the possibility of prophetic indictment and practical deliberation working together. I don’t think Kaveny would disagree. At other moments in her argument, she appears to assume as much. She tells us that prophetic indictment can awaken us from our moral slumber in ways that actually contribute to our practical deliberations. This possibility is also implicit in her application of just war criteria to prophetic indictment, what Kaveny calls ‘just prophecy theory.’ Whereas just war criteria are a means of evaluating the justice of the use of force by one nation against another, when applied to prophetic discourse the criteria aid the kind of moral deliberation, characteristic of the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, Kaveny commends in chapter 6. Indeed, Prophecy without Contempt is itself moral deliberation about prophetic indictment, with the aim of influencing the deliberations of would-be prophets as they participate in politics.

Kaveny’s argument thus relies on a tighter connection between the two categories than she acknowledges. This is important because, in drawing too sharp a distinction between these categories, Kaveny can be misread as unmooring prophetic indictment from deliberation. I don’t think that is the proper interpretation of her argument. The problem occurs, however, when communicative strategies become identities, so that those who indict become prophets and those who deliberate become deliberators. Because Prophecy without Contempt is a work of moral deliberation and Kaveny, at times, appears to identify as a deliberator, the deliberators seem to come out ahead. Allowing these modes of communication to congeal into mutually exclusive identities also has the unintended effect of disconnecting prophets from their practical deliberations, as would be the case with King. The opposition of indictment and deliberation, of prophet and deliberator, probably made much more sense in the original covenantal context of the jeremiad. If one takes oneself to be speaking for God, as colonial preachers did, then it’s understandable if one were led to believe that human deliberation played no role in the process. In such contexts, indictment and deliberation operated separately. But as the basis of our national community began to secularize and shift from a covenant with God to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, deliberation played a more prominent role. Kaveny narrates this story of secularization and shifting sources but doesn’t spell out how this affected the competing modes of discourse that figure so centrally to her story. Do the different bases of values and norms entail differing relations with indictment and deliberation? One would think so. Perhaps Kaveny can clarify for us how the secularized covenant alters the balance between prophecy and deliberation.

If this is all so, then perhaps Kaveny should have loosened up the sharp dualism between prophetic indictment and practical deliberation. She’s right to worry about the disingenuous use of one strategy under the guise of the other. She’s also right to highlight the dangers and harms caused by over-reliance on prophetic indictment. Chemotherapy for a cold would be foolish and, potentially, deadly. Prophecy should be used selectively. Kaveny forces us to think more critically about these issues, and for that we’re all in her debt. But I don’t think indictment and deliberation are as opposed as they sometime appear to be in the book. At their best, they inform and support each other. Prophetic indictment can shake us from our conformity. It can help us see what we could not see before. Practical deliberation with its distinction-drawing and weighing of considerations can help us provide reasons for the judgments to which we arrive. These two have often worked together in our most successful movements for “liberty and justice for all,” whether abolition, women’s suffrage, or civil rights, to name a few.

 

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Gustavo Maya
Gustavo Maya is a doctoral student in the Religion, Ethics, and Politics subfield. His research interests include theological and philosophical analyses of ethics, politics, and law, religion and law, social criticism, modern religious thought, and Latino/Chicano studies. One of the overarching goals of his work is to bring the history of Christian thought to bear on American democratic life, its promise and perils, possibilities and pitfalls. A point of intersection between Christianity and democracy that he is particularly interested in is how conceptions of freedom and justice have been mobilized to overcome domination and inequality within the church and broader society.
Theorizing Modernities article

Loss, Lament and Prophetic Modernities


In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny has written a book for our times—a keen study of the role of the jeremiad in American political culture, both historical and contemporary. The rhetoric of jeremiad, which Kaveny terms “prophetic indictment,” overlaps the fields of law and religion and is also a notable contribution to interdisciplinary fields of philosophical, theological, political, and social ethics. Kaveny’s task in the book is to carve out a normative realm of discourse in which citizens can condemn, but not contemn. (ix-x) She argues that “a full grasp of the nature, function, and limits of religious discourse in the American public square requires coming to terms with the rhetoric of prophetic indictment.”(2) In this brief set of reflections, I would like to highlight the importance of Kaveny’s argument for a cosmopolitan modernity that balances lamentation with justice, irony with hope, and a commitment to the humanity and human rights of all. This domestic and global version of cosmopolitanism is a chastened cosmopolitanism, premised on what Kaveny aptly recommends as a “suitably chastened form of prophetic rhetoric” (375). As such, prophetic discourse grapples with some of the losses that accompany the modern age.

In focusing her contemporary discussion on the issues of abortion and torture in the 2004 presidential election, Kaveny’s studiously avoids the more recently contentious issue of same-sex marriage, which she suspects “includes discourse about purity and taboo, and not only morality.” (7) At a recent Religious Freedom Annual Review conference, held at Brigham Young University, however, the issue of same-sex marriage was the focus of much attention. The previous year’s conference had taken place just days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In the year since that decision, there had been ample time for both processing and polarization. It was a context ripe for both prophetic indictment and defense of religious freedom and religion in the public sphere.

BYU, of course, is the premier higher educational institution of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a uniquely American religion that has experienced historical persecution for its early beliefs supporting polygamy and which stands firmly for traditional marriage and against same-sex marriage today. At issue throughout the conference was the question of how the LDS Church and other conservative Christian religions opposed to same-sex marriage can continue to exist in and engage the American body politic. A key undercurrent of fear was that opposition to same-sex marriage might result in loss of tax-exempt status, government grants, professional licenses and accreditation, and even the ability of church members to participate in groups like the Boy Scouts and other private associations without risking their standing and livelihood in the public sphere. These fears are not just of the suppression of private belief, but of the loss of the civic standing of religiously identified people and institutions in the public sphere.

The conference’s opening keynote speech, delivered by LDS Church Elder Lance Wickman, focused notably on the need to balance religious priorities with practical compromise. In an era of rampant political polarization and government shutdowns that seem to give proof to Alasdair McIntyre’s lamentation of “incommensurable values,” (23) “compromise” has become something of a dirty word. And yet Kaveny, in her discussion of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, notes the very difficult, but pragmatic, compromises that Lincoln made to preserve the nation’s unity. (382)

Elder Wickman cited a New York Times article noting constitutional law theorist Eugene Volokh’s comment in a law and religion blog that conservative Christians’ could be “very reasonably fearful . . that within a generation or so [their] religious beliefs would be treated the same way as racist religious beliefs are.” Citing a litany of legal effects that this could have under the Constitution, Elder Wickman at the same time argued that Americans have come to rely too much on the Constitution and law to do the work of citizenship. This work, he said, would require working through democratic channels and with fellow citizens of other beliefs to achieve the sustainable compromises necessary for peace. Indeed, one such compromise has already been enacted in the “Utah Compromise” law that aims at protecting religious freedom to oppose homosexuality and same-sex relationships both privately and publicly, while also protecting gays and lesbians and others from discrimination their public lives. The law is young and not without controversy, but it may prove to be a model for other states.

Later in the day, discussing religious liberty in our polarized age, American constitutional law scholar Thomas Berg recounted a number of arguments made by liberals against religious freedom claims by conservative Christians. At one point, Berg noted this sense of persecution in conservative Christian communities could lead to alienation and withdrawal from public life out of a “cynical skepticism.” Against this end, Berg called upon religious and political liberals to take account of the views and sensibilities of the other side. Kaveny, in her analysis of the rhetoric of prophetic indictment, expresses concerns about postures of cynicism and retreat. (347) Indeed, she cautions against the adoption of any “cynical strategy” that “undermines the very ground to which the prophet purports to appeal: the common aims and values that bind together his or her political or religious community.”(331) Discussing the criterion of proportionality in her proposed ethic of “just prophecy,” Kaveny argues of dueling prophetic debates, “Each group of prophets feeds off the other’s energy, justifying its own commitment with reference to the dangerous ambitions of its opposition.”(347) Kaveny’s repeated remonstrance against the “oracles against the nations” genre of prophetic rhetoric (esp. 352ff) seems especially appropriate in these “culture wars.” Kaveny seems to fear less that the extremes of the conservative Christians and secular liberal sides will retreat than she does that “the very ferocity of the combat may encourage the ‘muddled middle,’ to steer far away from the battleground in order to avoid becoming collateral damage in the culture war.” (348) Both bitter retreat by one side and the inability for the center to hold would seem to be equally bad outcomes and a loss for our public life.

In fact, loss may be one of the defining features of modernity implicated in these prophetic discourses. In an earlier reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, a foundational text for the Contending Modernities project, I was struck by a pervasive sense of loss running throughout the book’s characterization of the secular. Political compromise, done rightly, entails loss for both sides, in that no side can claim a privileged position and both must give something up in order to achieve peace. But there are other losses in modernity that have come through legacies of colonialism, racism, political and economic underdevelopment, and growing inequality that also plague our contemporary world. Many of these seem to be taking place in parts of the Muslim world, currently experiencing the losses that come with migration, diaspora, environmental stresses from climate change, and rising levels of religious and political extremism—all against a storied past of literary, intellectual, artistic, scientific, and economic achievement that seems to be retreating ever more into the mist of time in light of today’s conflicts.

It is in this context that I read Kaveny’s analysis of prophecy and prophetic indictment comparatively across American Christianity and global Islam. Specifically, I remembered a conference in Kosovo where I had occasion to discuss with another Contending Modernities commentator, Usama Hasan, whether Islam had any tradition of prophetic theodicy. Hasan directed me to the work of the Pakistani poet and statesman Muhammad Iqbal, whose writings I am just beginning to explore—particularly his poems Complaint and Answer, constructed as a prophetic indictment by the poet in a prophetic dialogue with Allah over the state of Islam and modernity and the sense that God had let Muslims down. My question was: Some call for a Muslim Martin Luther, but could it be that what is really needed is an Islamic Job? Or maybe a Jeremiah or a Jonah, with a hint of irony, following Kaveny’s rich account (406 ff). That is, someone not so much to incite revolution, as to take up questions of suffering and justice and to instigate a rigorous examination through prophetic indictment of the state of global Islam, which seems as fractured and polarized as American Christianity in confronting modernity.

Toward the end of her analysis, Kaveny proposes a number of terms that seem to be criteria or virtues necessary for a prophetic ethic going forward—an ethic possibly as necessary for Muslims around the world as it is for Christians in America. Foremost among these are: irony, humility, charity, justice, mercy, forgiveness, compromise, a healthy tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, and, above all, hope. But what also seems clear, in a cosmopolitan world in which we are ever more aware of and linked to those who are different from us, is that both loss and lamentation accompany the at times necessary rhetoric of prophetic indictment Kaveny aptly describes as a brutal form of “moral chemotherapy.” The lingering question from Kaveny’s account may be whether prophetic indictment—supplementing recognition of loss with lamentation’s call for justice can be not only a chastening therapy, but also a healing salve for the fractures and polarities of modernity in prophetic discourses that condemn and critique without contempt.

 

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M. Christian Green
M. Christian Green is a scholar, teacher, researcher, writer, and editor working in the fields of law, religion, ethics, human rights, and global affairs.  Green is currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, a general co-editor and the book review editor for the Journal of Law and Religion, and editor and publications manager for the African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies. She blogs at Cakewalks and Climbingwalls.
Global Currents article

Fighting Transphobia: Analyzing the Pakistani Fatwa on Transgender Marriage


The human is a vulnerable category. Constantly policed and regulated by state and non-state actors, this category shelters some human bodies but not others. Disrespect and discrimination based on bodily reality are symptoms of social evils and phobias, ranging from racism to transphobia. While local context matters, globalizing impulses and virtual media reify these evils and phobias across national boundaries. Dislike of and discrimination against transgender persons is an international disaster besetting local contexts. Transphobia is alive in North Carolina with its absurd bathroom laws as it is in Pakistan with its systematic stigmatization of transgender bodies. The heartbreaking story of Alisha illustrates my point about Pakistan, my country of birth.

Who was Alisha? Alisha was an energetic social activist whose gender was illegible in her local context of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. The lack of recognition did not keep her from struggling for the rights of sexual minorities, including the struggle to gain legal provisions for transgender persons. But for Alisha this struggle came at a mortal cost. In May of 2016 she was gunned down by a local gang known for harassing and exploiting the transgender (hijra) community. She later died of multiple gunshot wounds in a hospital that was unable to provide her urgent care. The hospital staff delayed her treatment because of confusion about her gender identity. They debated whether her body was to be admitted into the male or the female ward. The fact that human bodies in general move across maleness and femaleness totally escaped them.

This incident reveals the vulnerability of transgender bodies in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The tragedy makes one wonder: does Islam condemn or condone such discrimination and disgust? Does Muslim legal teaching care for all bodies? Do Muslim theologians show compassion for all persons?

These questions were met with answers shortly after Alisha’s death. The replies came in the form of a press statement released by a group of Pakistani clerics, namely, Tanzim-i Ittihad-i Ummat (Organization for the Unity of Muslims). The statement endorsed a single Muslim jurist’s legal opinion (fatwa) that contended certain rights, including the right to marriage, extended to transgendered persons within Islamic law. About fifty additional local jurists and theologians signed the fatwa. This statement caught the attention of the international news and social media, where sometimes it was framed as a positive, even a progressive, development. But the media framing hardly paid attention to the substance of this fatwa. It is important to understand what the fifty or so Pakistani clerics signed off on before condemning, condoning, or remaining indifferent to their juro-moral position.

Let us list and then examine the various points communicated by the aforementioned press statement and the attendant fatwa:

  1. According to Islamic law, marriage is permissible between a hijra (khwajasara) with bodily signs of maleness and a hijra (khwajasara) with bodily signs of femaleness.
  2. Ordinary men and women, too, are permitted to marry khwajasaras with unambiguous signs of a single sex.
  3. It is absolutely impermissible for any man or woman to marry hijras (khwajasaras) with bodily signs of both sexes (the khuntha mushkil in Islamic legal terminology).
  4. Islamic law grants inheritance rights to hijras and Parents who disown their hijra children, or those parents who throw them out of their houses, will incur God’s anger and chastisement. Moreover, the local government should also take action against such parents.
  5. Islamic law strictly prohibits the following behavior with respect to hijras and khwajasaras: taunting them, insulting them, mocking them, and debasing them. These behaviors are prohibited because they amount to denigrating God’s creation.
  6. Muslims should perform the funeral prayers for deceased hijras and khwajasaras, just as these prayers are to be performed for ordinary Muslims.
  7. Hijras and khwajasaras are forewarned to observe the divine commandments and to abstain from all evil [lewd] acts.

These seven points sum up the fatwa’s juro-moral position. In general, articulating and disseminating these norms is certainly a step in the right direction. The signatories of the original fatwa issued by Mufti Imran Hanafi Qadiri answered the call of justice with reference to a beleaguered and marginalized community. They extended a gesture of inclusion toward hijras and khwajasaras.

When read symptomatically, the above list of moral directives identifies certain social practices that are especially associated with transphobia in Pakistan: kinship, injurious behavior, rituals of death and mourning, and sexual conduct. These are the places—the home, the street, the graveyard, and the brothel—where members of the hijra community viscerally experience the brunt of a hyper-masculinist and heteronormative social order. By condemning discrimination against transgender bodies in these social arenas, the signatories of this fatwa censured transphobia. They in fact took a positive step.

Yet, this fatwa also bears the mark of the same logic of heteronormativity that authorizes transphobia. The fatwa evaluates transgender bodies using the rubric of male and female bodily signs. It circumscribes the fluidity of the body within the gender binary. While it offers provisional social recognition that becomes available through the institution of marriage to hijra bodies leaning heavily toward maleness or femaleness, the fatwa fails to extend this social recognition to bodies that refuse the gender binary altogether. The fatwa hardly moves beyond the epistemological hysteria of the medieval jurists (from whose legal lexicon it cites the term, khuntha mushkil, or “problematically intersexed”).

But there is hope, even if melancholic. To start with, Muslim jurists and theologians might benefit by studying the complexity of human bodies writ large. This does not necessarily involve reading books by Judith Butler or Susan Stryker. It instead entails cultivating a flexible and creative mode of engagement with local knowledge traditions where Muslim jurists and theologians will encounter both reifications and disruptions of the gender binary. A courageous engagement with tradition—an engagement that sometimes retains, sometimes reconfigures, and sometimes renounces the tradition—is needed in order to make sense of and to appreciate shifting embodiments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the contemporary world.

The turn to the body within Muslim juro-moral thought would necessitate questioning attitudes and assumptions about maleness and femaleness, and how these cultural constructions color a society’s ideas about biology and nature, and therefore of law and ethics. It would also involve moving beyond medieval legal jargon, especially the category of the khuntha mushkil, and listening to how people identify themselves and how they relate to their bodies. These additional steps can make fatwa-authoring organizations more effective allies in fighting transphobia.

 

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons – a Hijra protest in Islamabad, Pakistan in May, 2008.

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Ali Altaf Mian
Ali Altaf Mian is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Seattle University. His fields of research include South Asian Islam, the history of Muslim legal thought and practice, gender and sexuality in contemporary Islam, Sufism and comparative mysticism, continental philosophy, comparative religion, and theory and method in the study of religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Foundations for Democracy in Islamic Traditions


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What do we mean when we ask about the potential of “Islam” to contribute to democracy? Islam must not be essentialized nor personalized; Islam is a religion consisting of different discursive traditions, traditions which have changed and continue changing elastically within their own varied historical, political, and social contexts. There are, of course, common foundations of the Islamic religion that all Muslims share; there are the main tenets of belief (and practice, since 4 of the 5 pillars of Islam concern practice), there are common references to a corpus of religious scriptures–most prominently, but not exclusively, the Qur’an. However, the readings, the interpretations, and the understandings of these foundations come to us as a complex set of dense, rich, and interesting–albeit divergent–readings, interpretations, and implementations that have developed in the course of fourteen centuries over wide regional and cultural spaces.

So when asking the questions about the foundations for democracy in the Islamic tradition, one could not expect the same answer to be given by a contemporary Muslim (which is itself not a unitary category of identity) and, for example, by a scholar from 11th-century Bagdad (if the latter understood the question at all). This might seem an obvious and redundant remark, but it is important to point out, given that much of current Islamic theology across the Muslim world, at least that conducted in the traditional way, is operating within the same epistemological paradigms as those used by scholars in the classical ages.

When considering foundations for democracy in Islamic traditions and thought, we always have to bear in mind the multi-referential contexts and conditions in which these Islamic traditions and thought are situated. Let me first point out some difficulties and tensions when it comes to the current contexts of Islamic thought on democracy. I am explicitly referring to thought that references Islamic traditions as its primary framework, or at least as one important framework among others.

The contexts of current Islamic thought are characterized by one important structural feature of modernity: the condition that Austrian sociologist Helga Nowotny in her work on social experience of time has described as the “synchrony of inequality”[1]. Nowotny’s phrase seeks to convey that the contraction of the spatial and temporal distances through technological innovations of modernity (transportation, communication channels, etc.) has not led to more equality or even to synchronicity in social developments, but rather to the existence of different social times within the same historical timeframe. For example, it is very possible that religious Muslims in the domain of the IS justify enslavement of girls and women on the grounds of religion, while at the same time, only a few hours by flight away, a group of young religious Muslims discusses the issue of gay marriage or LGBT rights. Both Muslim discourses are coeval, but they are substantially different in their outlook and their premises. The transfer and interlocking of these discourses and their actors might be difficult to achieve. Similar developments can surely be observed within other religious traditions as well. The social context in which religious thought is developing is crucial for shaping the outlook of that thought, the religious interpretation of the world, the religious justification and appropriation (or lack thereof) of democracy, and the values that are connected with or attributed to democracy.

Current Islamic theological thought is also characterized by one important tension between the “historicizing” approach (still a minority) and the “universalist” approach. Without going into too much detail, this tension often translates into the tension between a dynamic and a static understanding of religious normativity. Most Muslims are probably oscillating somewhere between these two approaches, while the current traditionalist Islamic theology mostly leans to the second view, with some concessions to the role of the context (usually taken as a point of refuge for such parts of the Scripture which cannot be harmonized with today’s generally accepted ethics, but not as a departure point of a new, re-thought hermeneutics). Both perspectives–the historical-critical and the universalist–have produced their own ways of legitimizing democracy, with different degrees of scholarly soundness. A view which has determined the timeless validity of a particular wording from a religious tradition, while at the same time a view that holds a static-dogmatic notion of religious ethics will, however, have more problems justifying and appropriating new developments and new civilizational paradigms–such as democracy.

One of the solutions, and indeed a very popular solution, is to anachronistically project today’s terminology and values in the historical past. For example, shūra, as the administrative principle of consultation in the affairs of the early Islamic community, is thus often understood not as a potential that can be further developed and unfolded into the principle of democratic consensus, but directly as “democracy.” Similarly, tolerance toward the religious practices of other religious communities throughout the history of Islam is being anachronistically interpreted as “religious freedom” in the sense of today’s international conventions, and so forth.

In my view, rather than looking for wording in the religious scriptures that could be somehow adjusted to today’s terminology and postulates of social and political theories, it makes more sense to assess the direction in which the Qur’anic provisions point, and then explore the ways they can be made concrete given the social and global realities of today’s world. In other words, this entails approaching the Qur’an as the oral revelation (a speech act) that conveyed specific meanings to specific audiences (listeners, not readers) and made references to their specific contexts.

In this light, the Qur’an interacted with the dynamics of the living community over more than 20 years guiding the community towards a more just and human society, but also is a revelation that favors specific interventions and guidance over explicit formulations of timeless laws at certain points. The universal dimension of the Qur’an lies not in its single formulations and wordings, but in the direction in which it orients us. In other words, to use an image borrowed from my Frankfurt colleague, the Turkish-German theologian Ömer Özsoy, who has developed an important historical hermeneutical approach to the exegesis of the Qur’an: If the Qur’an, in terms of guidance, is a finger pointing in a specific direction, one of the common mistakes both Muslims and non-Muslims make is to look at the finger only, but not in the direction at which it is pointing. I would add to that: You can see the direction only if you see where the finger is situated (context), and if you are aware of your own position vis-a-vis the sign (positionality).

It might be painful, but we have to accept that the Qur’an does not speak in today’s terms, terminology, and values, including concepts such as democracy, human rights, and freedom. At the same time, the Qur’an’s universal value is reflected in its positioning against injustice and oppression, its demanding more humane relationships among humans, and its reminding the believers that they cannot exert power over their fellow human beings by claiming to do so in the name of God. These themes commonly occur throughout the Qur’an, designating clearly the direction the Revelation was pointing. Again, what is considered to be just or unjust, to be oppression or liberation–these values are contingent. Indeed, in the course of Islamic history, they have been understood and put into effect in many different ways–including both Islamic approaches that have appropriated and advocated democracy and those that have not.

An understanding of the Qur’anic ethical dimensions as orienting us in a certain direction can only be fully developed against the background of the relationship between the Qur’an and history (with history understood as the spatial and temporal frame within which humans act in the world). The Qur’anic self-understanding as the last revelation of God is thus not to be interpreted as the ultimate superiority of Islam towards all other religions, but as an invitation for human agency in history. With no further interference from God in the form of further revelations, human beings are free and called upon to act in the world, to shape their societies and the earth according to reason and the guidance they received through the Revelation. The directions are there–Qur’anic revelations having established them in their address to specific audiences in Mecca and Medina–but it is up to humans to take further steps in those directions, and to unfold the ethical message of the Qur’an as history advances. To quote Özsoy again: “These are steps that humans shall follow with further steps on their own, and messages upon which they should build their history” [2].

New questions, problems, and developments arise out of the unfolding of history, out of the living circumstances of individuals or societies. Human agency in shaping historical processes, as well as humans’ responsibility in and for this world (stewardship), are genuinely Islamic concepts and values, and they play an important role in every political theory of democracy.

Another important element: despite the claims of modern political Islam, there is no particular political system preferred by the Qur’an. This void leaves many options. Indeed, it leaves options for any system or form of political rule–and this has been precisely the case through the history of Muslim societies: a wide range of different forms of rule. Notwithstanding the central role of the Caliph for the symbolic unity of the religious community, the flexibility of Muslim states in incorporating other political and administrative traditions, in accordance with the requirements of the expanding and increasingly complex societies, bears witness to this plurality.

The history of political rule in Muslim contexts is thus characterized by flexibility and potential adaptation to the requirements of the time, and this applies across many fields. Muslim intellectuals, politicians, scholars, and laymen all thought in the categories of their own time. The “Islamic state,” as a concept that is often talked about today, is a political construct of modernity, a result of different attempts by Muslim intellectuals to cope with the project of modernity, with secularization, with colonialism. It is also a concept that owes as much to the Hegelian understanding of history and of Hegel’s notion of the state as the culmination of the historical process, and to European Romantic notions of organic history, as it does to specific interpretations of the religious texts of Islam. In this context, it is certainly worth looking into and re-evaluating the classical debates on the scope of Prophetic authority in the building of a political order.

Contrary to popular and more fundamentalist understandings of the role of Prophet Muhammad as a mandatory example in all spheres of life, the Islamic intellectual tradition features debate around the precise spheres in which the Prophet is to be followed as an absolute authority. These have historically been distinguished between the area of the transmission of the revelation (regarded as mandatory) and those spheres of action such as legislation, jurisdiction, or political leadership in which the example of the Prophet was not considered to be mandatory (mostly by the scholars of the Malikite school of legal thought). Some modern Muslim intellectuals have re-read these debates in the light of the separation of powers in the modern state. Such a comparison is naturally difficult to sustain, but such classical debates and views, while usually not well-known among Muslims, could be taken as a point of departure for further elaborations of the justification of political authority.

Another point that I would like to mention in this context is the notion of consensus. I am not viewing consensus as being restricted to the notion of ijmāʻ (i.e. the consensus of the community of legal scholars), but rather as arising from the fact that legal norms–as a result of interpretative work of scholars–had to be made rationally plausible to Muslim communities if they were to catch on and become accepted. It is of great interest to ask how this element of Islamic intellectual and social history can be successfully brought into relation with the notions of public reason as one of the core elements of today’s democratic societies.

Another concept to mention is the so-called goals of Sharī’a or the legal system, known as the maqāṣid al-sharī’a in Arabic. This is a concept that is today widely discussed in the context of Islamic law, and that is definitely, despite all methodological shortcomings and deficiencies within the debate, worth further elaboration. By this I certainly do not mean the introduction of the Sharī’a, but a new reflection of Islamic legal hermeneutics according to which the individual regulations of a legal system have the intention of serving specific superordinate goals and values. According to some classical Islamic scholars, these goals include: the protection of life, the protection of religion/faith, the protection of progeny/lineage, the protection of intellect, and the protection of property [3]. Muslim scholars such as al-Ghazālī or Shāṭibī, who contributed significantly to this concept, formulated their theories on the “goals of law” as theoretical frameworks that answer how any given society can maintain itself and survive. So, when talking about maqāṣid, we are dealing with a sort of theoretical framework for a societal values system that emerged in the Islamic context, and whose relationship to the concept of human rights and democratic values remains a subject of dynamic debate among today’s Muslim scholars. These discussions are ongoing, but nonetheless interesting to observe.

One final point that I would like to mention, a problem rather, is the absolute centrality of the formal-juristic discourse in defining and coding Islamicity today. Other discourses, firmly rooted in Islamic tradition as well–ethical discourses, philosophical discourses, humanist approaches in the medium of literature for example–have become absolutely marginalized. This process started long ago, but it achieved a special status in the era of modernity. With the emergence and the spread in the 20th century of political Islam in the form of social movements (such as the Muslim Brotherhood), a social order run by the interpretative framework of Islamic jurisprudence emerged as the central element in the imaginations of Islamic polity, as well as the defining element of religious identity. Today, we can observe a further evolution of this development: the halal/haram discourse has become one of the central defining features of Islamic belonging, or not-belonging, particularly among young generations of Muslims living in minority contexts in Western countries. What is still lacking, though a huge desideratum, is a systematization of social ethics that will build the foundation for the mobilization of Islamic resources with the goal of actively shaping a democratic order. It is a desideratum, because this kind of social ethics needs to be extracted from various disciplines, systematized and transferred into our times. It is not an easy task, but it is not an impossible task.

Reflections on the Conference and My Personal Takeaways

Altogether, the conference was a successful combination of diverse scholarly perspectives highlighting different aspects and forms of relationships between religion and democracy, and different areas of (and needs for) action, academic and otherwise.

At the same time, the conference highlighted the shifting, increasing role of religious agency not only in the academic sphere, but also in the context of political decision-making. This is most evident in two respects: a) the potential of religions to strengthen the ethical perspective of political decision-making processes, and thus contributing to the containment (and humanization) of purely interest-led Realpolitik; b) the involvement of religious actors (at home and abroad) in the formulation and implementation of political strategies coping with the current domestic and foreign policy challenges of globalization: migrations, immigration, and conflict resolution. Consequences of this shift for the future understanding and outlook of secularism in the European and the US contexts will be very interesting to observe. Also, if the productive potentials of religions in supporting and strengthening the peaceful coexistence and cooperation between different social groups in pluralist democratic societies (or sharpening the consciousness for the necessity of such societal forms) is to be operationalized, we must seriously reflect on several questions: Which religions, which dimensions of religion, and which interpretative frameworks of religions are being referred to? How do we tackle the issue of religious authority-building and hierarchicalization in these processes?

By their very self-definition, religions imply a sense of community-building that is, at least at an ontological level, characterized by demarcation and distinct identity-building. How can we assure that these features do not lead to societal disintegration, the tendencies of which are already observable with the increased political presence of the religious right-wing formations in all European countries, not to mention the networks and groups advocating a violent political form of Islam? Against this background, the importance of religious dialogue cannot be overstated, but it is not enough. Besides still being predominantly a form of intellectual exchange–something that needs to be expanded into active encounters on the level of popular religion–the need for a more inclusive approach to a dialogue on societal values, including the myriad decidedly secularist positions, seems very urgent. In this sense, while understandable that the conference focused on two particular religious traditions, Catholicism and Islam, the discussions might have benefited from a more inclusive approach involving other religious traditions and positions.

Also, a closer approach to scrutinizing the current relationships between religion and democracy in different contexts might have pointed out more clearly the current possibilities, as well as the difficulties, of the religion-democracy nexus. This includes accounting for the various conditions–legal, institutional, societal, educational–under which different religions are currently developing their positions towards democracy and pluralism (differences that inevitably result in varied accentuations of problems and areas of action) as well as the persistent differences between the democratic societies of the West with regard to the relationship between state and religion. The effects and consequences that these different conditions of particular institutionalized relations have on the understanding of the role and potential of religion in the processes of democratization might have become more visible through, for example, direct comparisons. Such questions might benefit from stronger transnational networking and academic exchange between related projects.

Another interesting point, surely worth further exploration, is the relationship and interaction between the facticity of religious agency and the normativity of religious discourses. One of the scholarly desiderata seems to be a comprehensive identification of religious agency in the grass-roots processes of democratization, including the different roles of religious actors and the spheres in which they are acting, as well as the precise nature of the attribution “religious.” In this respect, it might be important to ask whether new understandings of democracy (or, for that matter, religion) are generated by these activities.

 

[1] Nowotny, Helga. “Eigenzeit: Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefiihls.” (1987 [Rev ed. 2016]).
[2] Ömer Özsoy, „Das Unbehagen in der Koranexegese. Den Koran in anderen Zeiten zum Sprechen bringen“, [‘The Uneasiness of the Qur’anic Exegesis: Letting the Qur’an Speak in Different Times’], Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Islamisch-Theologische Studien 1 (2015): 64.

[3] See for example al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā min ʻilm uṣūl al-fiqh. Ed. Ḥamza b. Zuhayr Ḥāfiz. Medina, n.d.; al-Shāṭibī, al-Muwāfaqāt fī uṣūl al-fiqh. Ed. Abū l-Faḍl al-Dimyāṭī Aḥmad b. ʻAlī. Cairo 2011.

 

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Armina Omerika
Armina Omerika is Assistant Professor for Intellectual History of Islam at the University of Frankfurt. She studied Islamic Studies, Film and Television Studies, and English Studies (M.A 2002) at Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany and John Moores University, Liverpool. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies (Bochum 2009) on the history of Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th Century and the networks of Young Muslims. Since 2005 she has been teaching and researching History and Islamic Studies at universities in Germany, the US, and Switzerland. She has received scholarships from the Volkswagen Foundation and the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation and was a member of the plenum chamber of the German Islam Conference. Her fields of research include theories of history and Muslim historiography; intellectual history of Islam in Europe; social and religious history of Islam in Southeastern Europe; the relationship between Islam, nationalism, and transnationalism; and the history of Islam-related scholarship in Southeastern Europe.
Theorizing Modernities article

Jan-Werner Müller: “Illiberal Democracy” as a Misnomer


 

Summary Prepared by Dania Straughan

In the inaugural address of the “Making Democracy One’s Own” conference in Rome on May 30th, 2016, Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University recounted the divergent strategies taken by 19th and 20th European Catholics in making their respective political systems “their own.” “Democracy is a form of institutionalized uncertainty,” Müller noted. While this uncertainty can help to ensure that one group does not permanently subjugate another within a democratic system, it renders democracy by design “a political system where we are not supposed to know the outcomes.” Despite the salutary effect of democratic uncertainty, according to Müller, democracy “does not have substantive value commitments, and democracy, if left without value commitments, deteriorates into relativism.” Religious actors are faced, then, with the problem of how to make democracy “safe for religion.”

Müller presented Catholic approaches to making democracy “safe,” and cautioned that there is a world of difference between strategies that can strengthen pluralism and those that seek to explicitly dismantle political uncertainty. In the former category, scholars such as Carl Schmitt and Jacques Maritain argued that a properly religious demos will ensure acceptable democratic outcomes. Such outcomes were seen as possible even in religiously plural societies, where just a few “prophetic shock minorities…could reinvigorate a religious understanding of the polity without forcing everyone into a particular religion.” Another approach is epitomized by Joseph de Maistre, who was skeptical of the demos and promoted an external check on democracy through the Papacy, an institution he saw as secured by its divine mission from the inevitable failings of worldly sovereignties. Lastly, Christian Democratic parties held the line for their values – though they were, it must be noted, late to fully endorse democracy, given conflict over equating the Catholic Church with other political parties. These actors would not consider themselves liberal, yet they accepted and even promoted democracy without supporting certain liberal philosophical commitments, such as materialism and individualism.

Since the 1990s, however, the term “illiberal democracy” has been applied to another type of nominally Christian European regime: one that holds elections but otherwise undermines rights that are constitutive of democracy, such as freedom of speech and of assembly. Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, two notorious examples, use populist identity politics to “shut down uncertainty,” advancing their policies as the only proper way to live. All other policies or preferences are viewed as traitorous. Müller maintained that these regimes are nothing but “fake” or “Potemkin” democracies, and Müller insists we do a dangerous disservice to pluralism and the role of pro-democratic yet illiberal actors by confusing illiberal “philosophical commitments that underlie democracy” with truly anti-democratic politics.

Photo credit: Tor Birk Trads.

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Dania Straughan
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Theorizing Modernities article

Reflections on Rome: Keeping Particularities In


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In addressing the question of religion, democracy, and pluralism, the “Making Democracy One’s Own” conference highlighted the challenges that different universalist assumptions still present for our thinking about ‘religion’ and ‘humanism.’ Reflecting on the Rome conversations, I therefore want to argue that keeping particularities in—focusing on the historical and cultural embeddedness of religious and ethical traditions—is critical if we, following Michael Driessen, agree that making democracy one’s own involves making pluralism one’s own.

Religion: In her comments, Atalia Omer describes, among others, debates among those conference participants who affirmed the notion of “authentic” religiosity and, on the other hand, those who (building on the insights of religious studies) emphasized the embedded and embodied character of all religious traditions. The two sides of this debate reflect the two sides of most religious traditions: the side organized around theological and ethical values that are universal in their claims and aspirations, and the other that is lived and therefore particularist in character. The latter arises from the continuous work of interpretation of individuals and communities when they relate their traditions to concrete historical contexts and specific religious and non-religious others.

While the study of universal dimensions of religious traditions is indispensable for understanding these traditions’ histories, it is also necessary to problematize the view that theological and ethical universals are constitutive of the authentic, tolerant, and peacemaking character of religions. For one, histories of religious traditions show that the universal ethical dimensions of religious traditions often end up justifying conquests and crusades rather than peaceful encounters with others. Even more importantly for our purposes, centering our exchanges on universal aspects of religions hinders the achievement of the goal of the Contending Modernities initiative: to change the conversation about religion, democracy, and pluralism. By insisting on the universal claims rather than on the particular instantiations of religious traditions, this approach forecloses the analytic and normative perspectives needed to understand what making democracy and pluralism one’s own actually entails.

Such understanding, however, is possible if we consider the phenomenology of particularist religious identities. My proposition might seem counter-intuitive: particularism concerns itself with emphasizing and sustaining differences among the members of religious groups, and it often appears as an obstacle for social harmony or even a source of conflict. For all these reasons scholars generally deem particularist religious identities as intolerant, unmodern, and contrary to democratic pluralism. Indeed, some of the conference participants in Rome expressed such views. Our perspective changes, however, if we consider the particularist expressions of religious traditions within the framework of pluralism as defined by deep differences and contestations rather than by harmony and consensus. With this understanding of pluralism, we begin to see that in certain contexts and under certain conditions particularist religious identities are not a problem but a resource for developing models of citizenship in pluralistic democracies. The Polish collectivistic Catholicism expressed in Solidarity, the collectivistic Catholicisms articulated in the narratives of Bosnian Franciscans, the encounters between collectivistic Catholicisms and the Muslim community in Croatia—these are some instances in which lived, particularist religious identities sustained differences among groups but also remained open to religious and non-religious others for cultural, historical, and theological reasons.

Understanding religious traditions as lived thus helps change the conversations about religion, democracy, and pluralism in at least two ways. First, it highlights the complex and changing nature of interreligious encounters as they inform the models of democratic pluralism—pluralism that is not imposed as an ideal but emerges from concrete historical experiences. Second, exploring religious particularisms enriches our normative view of pluralism by grounding it firmly in differences rather than in the desire to circumvent those differences by moving toward (imagined) shared universals.

Humanism: The conference participants highlighted different aspects of humanism as religious or secular orientations, with two interventions as particularly relevant in this regard. In the context of post-conflict democracies, Zilka Spahić Šiljak spoke powerfully about the role of Bosnian-Herzegovinian women in the processes of peacebuilding. Elaborating on the interviews she had with Bosnian women peace activists, Spahić Šiljak proposed that their work is informed by humanistic values and a desire to push aside religious and national identities since these are seen as an obstacle for reconciliation and just peace in Bosnian and Herzegovinian society. Second, responding to Jan-Werner Müller’s remarks, Michael Driessen suggested that the new political vision which Müller articulates might not be “a specifically Christian project” but “a new form of Religious Humanism” that goes beyond Christian humanistic foundations.

Spahić Šiljak and Driessen’s comments underscored that, despite the power and influence of the post-modern and post-colonial critiques of humanism, humanistic ethical dispositions remain important for how individuals imagine and reimagine their cultural and political communities, perhaps especially when these have been strained by conflict or the potential for conflict. Yet, the general direction of conference conversations about humanism also signaled the need to reiterate post-modern and post-colonial scholars’ evaluation of unqualified, unrestrained universalistic conceptualizations of humanism. As these critics show, most traditional humanisms—from Christian, to Confucian, to Renaissance, to Marxist humanisms—have been organized around universalisms. However, these humanisms have remained unaware of the particularist sources of their universalisms, and have ultimately denied (and sometimes aspired to abolish) other identities. In other words, the intellectual and social histories of humanisms show how they can slip all too easily and all too comfortably into a drive against differences and, thus, against pluralism.

Directly tackling such legacies, the scholars who reaffirm the value of humanism for our age argue for a reflexive understanding of the humanist agenda, and for a humanism whose hopeful drive toward the ideals of justice, equality, and human flourishing is chastened by the plurality of human experiences. For scholars such as Edward Said, for example, what is needed is a humanism that is both universal and historical in character.

Conceptualizing humanism this way has normative as well as analytic repercussions: it requires broadening and deepening the interpretative frameworks we use in order to understand the historical and cultural grounding of humanistic positions. The new and chastened approach to humanism thus pushes us to delve deeper into both the sources and manifestations of humanistic claims, and to raise multiple and comparative questions: What are the goals of humanism expressed by a Bosnian Catholic woman engaged in peacebuilding in her society? Are they the same as, for instance, the goals of a British Muslim or British secular humanist when he is involved in grassroots democratic projects in the city of Manchester? What are the moral spaces that all of these activists have in common? What are the differences among them, in the historical framing of their projects and in the ontological justifications of their humanist dispositions?

Consideration of what humanists might share, in other words, always needs to be paired with attention to the differences among them. Disregarding this diversity reintroduces un-reflexive universalist assumptions and neglects an important insight of humanism’s critics, according to which particularisms have always been, and still are, the foundation of humanist agendas.

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Slavica Jakelić
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.

Jakelić 's writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, The Hedgehog Review, The Review of Faith &International Affairs, Studies in Religion, Sciences Religieuses, and Commonweal. She co-edited three volumes: The Future of the Study of Religion, Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, and The Hedgehog Review’s issue "After Secularization." Jakelić is the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2010) and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.
 
Global Currents article

“Modern War” in Catholic Peacebuilding Discourse


 

In her post on the April 2016 Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference sponsored by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Lisa Cahill argues that this event may be a useful starting point for interreligious cooperation between Catholics, Muslims, and other religious communities in the development of a shared orientation toward and practice of peacebuilding. In this response, I want to consider the ways in which this event and the responses it engendered also reveal the existence and effects of contending understandings and experiences of modernity within the Catholic community—and even within those parts of that community who support the conclusions drawn by the conference’s participants.

As Cahill points out, Catholic interpretations of the just war tradition have been moving in the direction of greater restrictions on the use of armed force and greater emphasis on peacebuilding for decades now. Among the details of just war teaching that have reflected this move are stronger emphases on criteria (such as last resort, possibility of success, and overall proportionality) that might lead to a judgment that war is unjustified even in some cases where a just cause exists (see, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2309). More broadly, the Vatican has either declined to endorse or openly rejected most recent proposals to use force. These moves have led James Turner Johnson to describe the contemporary Catholic position as one of “functional pacifism” that inaccurately labels itself just war reasoning (see, e.g., The War to Oust Saddam Hussein [2005]). The statement issued at the conclusion of this most recent conference goes a step further by calling for the rejection of even the label: “we call on the Church we love to . . . no longer use or teach ‘just war theory.’”

An understanding of the modern world, and modern war, as uniquely violent and harmful has had a significant impact in motivating these developments in recent Church teaching. This trend goes back at least to Vatican II, following which Paul VI described relevant characteristics of “the modern world” in Gaudiem et spes. In that document, he argued that there is a “unique hazard of modern warfare,” namely, the development of weapons powerful enough to result in the indiscriminate destruction of cities and their populations; as a result, he argued that war ought to be avoided and eventually outlawed. This same characterization of modern warfare was cited in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statements The Challenge of Peace (1983) and The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace (1993); as the bishops put it in the latter document, “serious questions still remain about whether modern war in all its savagery can meet the hard tests set by the just-war tradition.” In other words, these statements suggest that characteristics of modern warfare may possibly have rendered just war reasoning, the predominant Catholic approach to these questions for hundreds of years, obsolete.

This characterization of modernity as unique enough to require significant change in humans’ moral response to war is also evident in the letter Pope Francis wrote to the 2016 gathering, which referenced “the unique and terrible ‘world war in instalments’ which, directly or indirectly, a large part of humankind is presently undergoing.” The conference statement similarly describes a contemporary “context of normalized and systemic violence” marked by “tremendous suffering, widespread trauma and fear linked to militarization, economic injustice, climate change, and a myriad of other specific forms of violence.” Importantly, this portrayal of modernity is informed by people’s lived experiences. The conference featured many testimonies from persons around the world who had successfully responded to modern violence with nonviolent resistance or other peacebuilding practices. As Cahill points out, it also prominently included the voices of persons who had lived through war, which likely contributed to a more complete awareness of what modern war is like for those most vulnerable to the harms it causes.

There is, however, in this document and in Church teaching more generally, simultaneously a line of argument emphasizing the sameness of the modern world with what has come before. In the conference statement, this alternative description of modern war as no different from premodern war is also used to support a turn away from just war reasoning. The document refers to Jesus’s “own times, rife with structural violence,” to make the case that contemporary Christians ought to employ “active nonviolence” to challenge injustice in the same way Jesus did. This part of the document suggests not merely that just war reasoning is outdated, but instead that it was never consistent with Jesus’s teaching: “Clearly, the Word of God, the witness of Jesus, should never be used to justify violence, injustice or war.” On this understanding of modernity as morally unchanged from the rest of history, just war reasoning always represents a betrayal of the timeless doctrine of “Gospel nonviolence.”

This apparent paradox in the reasoning provided to support the document’s conclusion is not unusual in contemporary Catholic approaches to morality and war. Cahill notes the similar tension between recent popes’ disinclination to endorse particular wars and their continued commitment to at least a theoretical possibility of just wars of defense or humanitarian intervention. These pro-intervention positions also reflect contending conceptions of modernity. In a U.N. address in support of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, Benedict XVI argued that R2P is merely a new name for an ancient idea based on universal principles. On the other hand, a statement coauthored by Vatican U.N. representative Archbishop Silvano Tomasi suggested that his potential support for military action to protect religious minorities from ISIS resulted from a worsening crisis utterly unique in the long history of the Middle East.

It is unlikely that these deep tensions will be fully resolved, even if the conference’s call for an encyclical on peace is answered. However, as Cahill’s closing suggestion that Catholics focus on peacebuilding as a shared goal of both sides of this debate implies, tension can be productive. Certainly, there are resources even within the just war tradition itself on which those interested in promoting the development of peacebuilding practices might draw. In addition to the practice of including more participants from areas and groups historically excluded from Church conferences and conversations, the maintenance of these competing views of the moral status of modernity may thus be a means of facilitating dialogue and new development within the Catholic community itself.

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Rosemary Kellison
Rosemary Kellison is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at University of West Georgia. Her recent book Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique (Cambridge University Press, 2019) presents a feminist immanent critique of just war reasoning focused on the issue of responsibility for harm to noncombatants.
Global Currents article

Just Peace and Just War Must Go Together


Media reports of the April 2016 conference in Rome on “Nonviolence and Just Peace” began to appear as I was preparing for an extended stay in the United Kingdom.  On leave from my regular duties in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, I planned to spend Trinity term at Oxford as a visiting fellow of Christ Church College and a participant in the Changing Character of War Programme.

As it happens, lodging during my time in Oxford was provided by the Jesuit community located at Campion Hall, just across the street from Christ Church.  Not a Jesuit myself—nor for that matter, a Roman Catholic—I found that my new colleagues knew about and were interested in my work on jihad and just war.  And thus it seemed natural that, along with conversations regarding Brexit and the American presidential campaign, we would talk about the conference on nonviolence and its recommendations, not least the idea that the Catholic Church ought “no longer use or teach `just war theory’.”

In these brief remarks, I will not try to summarize these discussions or to represent the variety of opinions expressed. These conversations are worth noting, however, because they reinforced for me two convictions: first, that there is a great deal to be said regarding the role of nonviolent modes of addressing human conflict, a topic often neglected by interpreters of the just war tradition; and second, that severing the notions of just peace and just war, for example by setting aside the vocabulary of jus ad bellum and jus in bello is a mistake.  Indeed, I think we should combine these, and thus affirm that the notions of just peace and just war go together.

This is of course the claim of classic and contemporary interpreters of both just war and jihad traditions.  For people like Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, questions about the rightness of military action take place in the context of notions of statecraft, in which those charged with protecting the common good seek to implement policies that are both wise and just.  The point is to build or protect institutions designed to foster peace.  Similarly, Muslim scholars like the great al-Shaybani (d. 804) or al-Mawardi (d. 1058) responded to questions about armed force in conjunction with a positive political project.  As for modern accounts, John Courtney Murray and Paul Ramsey alike resisted the idea that just war thinking could be separated from an account of peace, while Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s recent treatise on The Jurisprudence of Jihad makes a similar point regarding Muslim tradition.

That said, I think it is fair to suggest that much of the discourse about just war and jihad proceeds in ways that ignore or elide the importance of nonviolent approaches to conflict.  Some years ago, Abdulaziz Sachedina made the point that those claiming the mantle of jihad ought to consider whether, in a given case, the cause of peace and justice might be better served by nonviolent rather than military means. Similarly, when one thinks about just war reasoning, the criteria—the aim of peace, reasonable hope of success, overall proportionality, and last resort—require those making decisions to make a conscientious assessment regarding the propriety of military action in a given case.  To put it another way, the question to be answered has to do with whether or not there are nonviolent approaches better suited to the dynamics of a particular circumstance.

In the practice of politics, good judgment is paramount.  As policymakers and as citizens, we find ourselves in constant need of that practical wisdom that Christian and Muslim thinkers alike describe in terms of the virtue of prudence—a kind of capacity by which human beings are able to navigate the complexities of conflict, all the while keeping their vision fixed on the goals of justice and peace.   No single approach serves in all cases.  For that matter, one could say that in many circumstances, a combination of means proves necessary, as when diplomatic initiatives are reinforced by military force, as well as by actions taken at the level of civil society.  Where things go wrong, as in any number of contemporary cases, errors of judgment often seem to involve an inflated sense of the efficacy of armed force, and a corresponding lack of understanding that ultimately, most conflicts require a political solution.  The conflicts in Syria and in Iraq can serve as an example.  With most attention focused on military action designed to reign in Daesh (the Islamic State), we ought not lose sight of the political crisis of which this is a symptom, as are other jihadist groups.  The unavoidable question looming on the horizon is how to build institutions capable of providing people in the region with security and a sense of belonging. In other words, how might variously situated actors encourage modes of governance that may be considered legitimate, in that they serve the common good rather than the good of small and elite populations.

In the service of finding an answer, there can be no doubt that interpreters of the just war and jihad traditions, as others, stand in need of a sustained engagement with advocates of non-military modes of conflict transformation.  Until and unless we are willing to rule out armed force altogether, however, the vocabulary of just war and jihad traditions also remains necessary.  For my part, it makes sense to affirm the claim of classic and contemporary accounts of the old traditions, and to say that notions of just peace and just war are not mutually exclusive, but rather travel as a pair.

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John Kelsay
John Kelsay is Distinguished Research Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy at The Florida State University. Kelsay focuses on religious ethics, particularly in relation to the Islamic and Christian traditions. His current work deals with religion and politics. Professor Kelsay serves as editor of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as Director of FSU’s Center for Humanities and Society.
Global Currents article

From Just War to Just Peace?


Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, Catholic social teaching (CST) has aimed to communicate its normative ideals of human dignity and the common good to and within the modern, secular nation-state, and its pluralistic citizenry. As A. Rashied Omar has noted on this blog (here and here), Pope Francis goes further in explicitly seeking alliances across religious traditions, and even an interreligious spirituality, for the good of the earth, global society, and especially the poor. Francis ends his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si’, with two prayers, one for Christians and one for all believers in a Creator God. The first-ever encyclical to be issued with a You Tube video illustrating its key themes in affecting visual, musical, and poetic images, Laudato Si actually begins to instantiate cross-cultural action for change.

The exclusion of religion from the public sphere—in the interest of subduing religious nationalism and violence—is often regarded as a hallmark of modernity. Yet Omar sees in the writings and example of Pope Francis a call for Muslims and Catholics to engage in “deeper encounter and embrace in the theological, social, and spiritual realms.” Together, he believes, Islam and Christianity, with other indigenous and world religions, can uncover the roots of violence and make political progress toward “a truly humanistic and compassionate world.”

In April, 2016, the Catholic Church took another step toward this goal, with a conference in Rome on “Nonviolence and Just Peace,” co-sponsored by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Nine members of the Council were present at the meeting, including its head, Cardinal Peter Turkson. The stated aim of the conference was to displace just war theory by advocating a just peace framework for transforming conflicts by nonviolent means. At the theoretical level, the just peace framework would subject conflict resolution to criteria such as human security and the common good, and positive peace defined not merely by the absence of violence, but through the presence of restorative justice, rule of law, and participatory decision-making, both horizontally and vertically. At the practical level, just peace would involve conflict-transforming practices such as direct nonviolent action, diplomatic initiatives, interreligious political organization in civil society, unarmed civilian peacekeeping, public rituals of repentance, and initiatives of reconciliation.

These proposals reflect the conviction of Catholic activist organizations such as the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, sponsored by Notre Dame and the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Relief Services, as well as of the Congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace, that religion and religious traditions can counter violent extremism; build solidarity against ideological, ethnic, and religious divisions; and inspire theologies, politics, and practices of just peace.

A high proportion of participants in the Rome conference were from areas undergoing violent conflict and social devastation: Gulu in Northern Uganda, Iraq, South Sudan, Colombia, Mexico, Croatia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Palestine. Several expressed vehement objections to the very concept of a “just war,” saying that war only aids and abets the perpetration of more violence, giving those who have the might to cause violence the tools to rationalize it as also morally right. Many of these participants shared stories and personal experiences of situations in which courageous, faith-based action had successfully mitigated violence and mediated peace agreements.

The concluding document of the conference (which represents a general consensus of attendees, and does not have the official endorsement of the Pope or Vatican) urged that priority be given to the Catholic commitment to nonviolence, to the promotion of just peace theory, and—much more controversially—to the elimination and prohibition of any Catholic validation of just war theory whatsoever, whether in pastoral documents, scholarship, or teaching. This includes humanitarian intervention. In the United States, unfortunately, this last provision has led to a disproportionate focus by media and theologians on the merits (or lack thereof) of just war theory. Rather, in my view, the focus should be on active, widespread, interreligious, grassroots-to-global peacebuilding as a political agenda of the Catholic Church in which others are invited to join.

In fact, just war theory has been in decline among popes and in teaching documents since the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis have all repeated virtually verbatim Paul VI’s declaration, “No more war! War never again!” While all these popes reserve a place for humanitarian intervention, they have been extremely reluctant to concede that any actual and specific use of force is or was justified. To the contrary, they insist that violence is not an instrument of justice. Catholic social teaching and social ethics is clearly moving further from just war theory as traditionally understood, and closer to pacifism. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, limited and rare uses of violent force have not been absolutely repudiated. In his message to the Rome conference, Pope Francis called for the revitalization of tools of active nonviolence and the transformation of violence through peacemaking initiatives, but also cited Gaudium et spes to the effect that governments have a right to legitimate defense.

Attention should be centered on the many accounts of successful peacebuilding strategies provided at the conference, by the Catholic Peacebuilding Network and other faith-based organizations, and by the USIP and the United Nations. Social scientists Maria Stephan and Erika Chenoweth argue that nonviolent resistance is twice as successful as armed revolt, producing resolutions that are much less likely to devolve into renewed violence (Why Civil Resistance Works, 2011). Whether or not one approves rare and stringently specified uses of violent force to protect democratic institutions and human security, all Catholics, and counterparts in other traditions, should prioritize practical initiatives to transform conflicts and expand just peace.

Jesus’ gospel of compassion, inclusion, forgiveness, reconciliation, and grateful love of God and neighbor is about creating communities of love, justice and solidarity in which violence is not even conceivable because the joy and peace of divine presence inspire and transform all relationships. Ecclesial and political action in this spirit—peacebuilding—should unite all Christians, define the social ethics of the Roman Catholic Church, and serve as a unifying force for interreligious progress toward a more peaceful world.

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Lisa Sowle Cahill
Lisa Sowle Cahill is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., Professor of Theology and Ethics at Boston College. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her works include Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2013), Theological Bioethics: Justice, Participation, and Change (Georgetown, 2005), Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 1996); and Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Fortress, 1994, now being revised). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Religious Ethics and the international journal Concilium.