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In Spectres of Marx, Derrida observes, “We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not” (15). The inheritance that Derrida is speaking of is, of course, Marxism and the fear of Marxism, both of which cast a long shadow over much of Europe and the broader so-called “West.” Yet I think Derrida’s remarks could just as easily and pertinently apply to “religion.” Following Derrida’s example, in this short essay I want to suggest that religion is the ghost that haunts global politics in both our theoretical musings and in our policy and practice. In various forms and modalities, “religion” sits, if not at the heart, then at least very close to the center, of multiple contemporary socio-political challenges, from the conflicts raging in West Asia and their repercussions around the world, to rising polarization and the crisis of democracy. Religious actors, along with our biases and assumptions about “religion,” are present and deeply influential, yet often unseen, unacknowledged, unconscious, and/or invisible. I explore the different forms that the religion ghost takes, both visible and not so visible, and consider the implications of this haunting in our scholarship and in policy and practice.
What is Religion? What are Ghosts?
Let me first say a word about the word “religion.” I have to admit that I am dissatisfied with it. But I know that amongst scholars in the critical study of religion and politics, I am certainly not alone in this dissatisfaction. We use this word to refer to a vast array of diverse and even contradictory phenomena. Symbols like crucifixes that in one context are referred to as “religion” are called “culture” in another, often with no clear explanation of where the line between the two is (precisely because there is no clear line). Some phenomena that we refer to as “political”—such as nationalism, for example—could just as easily be defined as “religion” by some measures, and vice versa. I persist in using the word for the same reason that I suspect many of us do—because it’s what we have, because it is to some degree recognizable, even if imperfect, and because I have not yet found a succinct and adequate alternative.
Nonetheless, I want to reiterate the observations that Talal Asad has made across his substantial body of work—that religion, as a transhistorical and universal reality, does not exist. “Religion,” as it is commonly understood in the twenty-first century, is an invention of colonial empire, and it is this colonial history that has in part rendered this category of “religion” as a spectre that haunts modern global politics. Because what exists is not “religion” in the sense of clearly defined, definable, and identifiable phenomena, but rather assumptions about what “religion” is and what it does—or what it should be and what it should do. These assumptions are by and large the product of the Christian-saturated European context out of which the modern category of “religion” emerged. Such assumptions haunt the contemporary global political imaginary when we hear the word “religion.”
‘Religion’ . . . is an invention of colonial empire, and it is this colonial history that has in part rendered this category of “religion” as a spectre that haunts modern global politics.
What, then, are the forms that this haunting takes? To answer this question, it is first helpful to reflect on the nature and form of ghosts themselves. What are ghosts? Like religion, we find that ghosts are many things, depending on where one looks, when one looks, and who is doing the looking. Ghosts, as Grafton Tanner notes, disrupt binary models of thought. They are both there and not there, present and absent at the same time. Ghosts may be shadows of the past, as in Charles Dickens’s story of A Christmas Carol. Ghosts may reflect the spirit or essence of a time or an age. Ghosts may be transparent—and thus incomplete and partial—echoes of material reality, containing some truth but also leaving much out. They may be foreboding omens of unknown futures. They may be the result of violence and trauma, as with the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s famous play. And so above everything, whatever else they may be, ghosts are uncertain.
Three Versions of the Religion Ghost
The most obvious way in which religion haunts contemporary politics is through its uncertain and indefinable nature. All manifestations of ghosts are different and signify different things, and so it is with religion. What the word or category of “religion” means is never the same from one place and time or even one individual to another. This is the first and most fundamental feature of the religion ghost that we as scholar mediators need to communicate: Don’t expect the religion ghost to look the same or mean the same thing every time you encounter it.
Being indefinable, indeterminate, and unfixed is not, however, the same thing as being entirely invisible or unknowable. Avery Gordon reminds us that haunting “refers us to what’s living and breathing in the place hidden from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas. To show what’s there in the blind field, to bring it to life on its own terms (and not merely to bring it to light)” (3).
But it is not merely in the uncertain shapeshifting form that “religion” haunts our current age, though that I think is the primary albeit invisible or unacknowledged modality. The second, and perhaps most visible manifestation of the religion ghost is evident in assumptions that it is dangerous, malevolent, unpredictable, vengeful, violent. A less common version of the religion ghost is a peaceful, soothing, edifying, and uplifting presence, the mirror image of its vengeful counterpart, its Janus-faced nature, as José Casanova has described it. This is the white angel and the red devil that perch on the opposite shoulders of the hapless human in films and cartoons. There is also, I would suggest, an adjacent third image of the religion ghost here, as the victim, the oppressed, and downtrodden truth speaker, silenced by secular modernity.
These spectres are of the transparent, incomplete, and partial kind. They contain some remnants of truth, but they obscure at least as much as they reveal about what religion is and what it does. They are oversimplified representations of historical actors and processes and of the relationship that exists amongst the categories of religion, politics, and power. These distortions continue to haunt the popular imagination and to be deployed by political leaders, influencers, and corporate and media bodies when it suits their purposes.
In these binary versions of the religion ghost story, different traditions occupy different roles. Sometimes—often in Europe, Australia, the US, Canada, and other so-called “Western” countries—Islam is the malevolent and vengeful ghost, Christianity the peaceful and/or victim ghost. In other contexts, however, or even just depending on who is telling the story, it is Christianity that is evil and violent, and Islam, or secular reason, that is the victim. A third variation of this story, prominent in the public spheres of several countries on the African continent, has secular humanism, atheism, and African traditional religions as the vengeful ghosts that have wreaked havoc on innocent, unsuspecting Muslim and Christian communities.
We learn something crucial from these caricatures, namely that it is not the ghosts themselves that have power and influence. Rather the power lies with those who tell the stories and therefore who decides which ghosts are friendly and which are menacing. The other thing we learn is that ghosts and haunting are intimately connected to trauma and violence.
The power lies with those who tell the stories and therefore who decides which ghosts are friendly and which are menacing.
Much violence—physical, emotional, psychological, structural—has been carried out in the name of the spirits and gods of the things we call “religion.” That kind of trauma leaves an indelible mark on the landscapes and communities that remain. The population transfers that occurred in the early 20th century; the pogroms and expulsions, culminating in the Shoah, experienced by Jewish people over millennia; the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing apartheid; genocides carried out against Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, and the US; the slavery into which millions of men, women, and children across Africa were forced. These traumas and many others continue to echo through the generations. It is in these echoes that the spectres of religion are most present, and at the same time least visible in contemporary global politics, and where our most urgent work, as scholars of religion and global politics, lies. Our aim should be to render the religion ghost visible in the histories of these traumas and their ongoing legacies.
Religion’s Entanglements
The label “religion” has been deployed throughout history to either legitimate or undermine the claims to political recognition and equality of people all over the world. Through these historical events and processes, religion has been and continues to be entangled with our racial, national, ethnic, and sexual identities, in ways that, true to any haunting presence, we are not always entirely conscious of. This is perhaps most evident in the way that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment has become almost synonymous across Euro-American contexts in recent years. But this is not entirely new. Anya Topolski’s analysis of the religion-race nexus makes clear that for quite some time the label “religion” has been a significant part of how we differentiate between people groups and construct hierarchies based on that differentiation. As she points out, Christianity was for a long time considered the only “religion.” All other belief traditions and the people groups associated with those traditions were inferior and unworthy of the label. This created a template where religion offered the primary means of categorizing people, but it also married religious identity with other markers of differentiation, including skin color, culture, and geographic origins—markers of differentiation that would eventually become more explicit. As Christianity lost its position of privilege, a categorization system of peoples based on language emerged to replace the religious classifications. These categories included, amongst others, Semitic and Aryan. The term “race” emerged during roughly the same period. Initially, “Semite” incorporated Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew speakers. Yet it was European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were the primary targets of racism against “Semitic” peoples. Consequently, the term Semite eventually came to represent an identity that was less about language and more about race and religion. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, religion and race were markers of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian identity that were deeply entangled within the European political imagination.
At the same time as these categories were developing and cementing, nationalism also emerged as a key political and ideological force. Through its marriage to the administrative structures of the state, nationalism became the primary mode of political belonging. But nationalism did not replace religion and race as the main ways people were categorized and differentiated from one another. Rather, nationalism took over these aspects as key markers of identity, using them to determine who does and does not belong to the nation-state. Maria Birnbaum’s remarkable new book Before Recognition shows how this logic continued and was expanded through colonial empire, specifically in British India and British Mandate Palestine and the subsequent formation of the states of Pakistan and Israel. As she demonstrates, both states emerged premised on a fundamental question: Who is a Muslim and who is a Jew? And yet in the process of state formation, both identities were imbued with fundamentally different characteristics, one as “religious” and the other as “political.” A striking example of this is the argument deployed by British civil servants against the involvement of the All-India Muslim League in conferences discussing the future of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Allowing the All-India Muslim League to attend the conferences, they argued, would introduce the “religious factor” and was therefore open to serious objection. The implication was that while Muslims are “religious” and may therefore derail serious political discussions and negotiations, being Jewish was “not religious,” and therefore denoted a politically mature enough identity to explore discussions of future statehood. Labelling a people group as “religious,” as opposed to ethnic, or national, was a convenient shortcut for delegitimating certain political actors, effectively maintaining the religio-racial hierarchies Topolski argues had been established centuries earlier.
Reckoning with Ghosts and Paths Forward
These ghosts of religion past, if you will, are at the heart of the multiple political crises we are witnessing today. The religio-racial hierarchies that position white Christianity at the pinnacle of “civilization” and black and brown Muslim others at the bottom—and other religio-racial identities in between based on how adjacent they are to either identity—are present alongside the spectres of authoritarianism that are haunting Europe and North America, a ghost that we thought had well and truly been laid to rest. The continual conflict and unrest in Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding region bear witness to the collective traumas that these religio-racial hierarchies have at least in part facilitated. And the same can be said of the civil and political unrest within and between India and Pakistan. The same logics of legitimation and exclusion premised on religio-racial hierarchized identities are visible in how successive governments in these states and others have approached the position, status, and treatment of minority communities within their borders.[1] As long as our global public policy and diplomacy continue to sideline religion, or only address transparent caricatured remnants of its totality, the violence and trauma will continue.
The continual conflict and unrest in Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding region bear witness to the collective traumas that these religio-racial hierarchies have at least in part facilitated.
We cannot truly reckon with the traumas of the past when we do not fully recognize the extent of the damage those traumas have caused. And one of the most insidious and yet hardest to name and confront is the violence that has been done to ancient cultures and civilizations, which have been forced to package their cosmologies in labels and practices that fit into the European Christian binaries of “secular” or “religion” and conform to the logic of the nation-state, which is also at its heart predicated on a binary logic of “us” and “them,” “in” or “out,” “citizen” or “non-citizen,” “majority” or “minority.” Breaking away from these binary ways of understanding the world could potentially contribute to healing and freeing peoples who have been burdened with the task of translating their worldviews for colonizers and empires, confining them to specific legal and political categories to render them legible to those in power. Yet it could also open new spaces for creativity, connection and healing, that might just help us to move beyond the harmful legacies left by the religion ghosts.[2]
[1] Just some of the excellent research on this is exemplified by the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Wendy Brown on the political inclusion of Jews and women in 19th century Europe, Marion Maddox on the treatment of indigenous spiritualities under secular-Christian European-inspired law in Australia, Lori Beaman on the legal and political deployment of categories of culture and religion in Europe and Canada, Saba Mahmood on the Coptic Chrisitan minority communities in Egypt, Matthew Nelson on the Ahmadiyyah minority in contemporary Pakistan; Radhika Mongia on Indian minorities, migration and Empire, and Tisa Wenger on the criminalization of Native American spirituality rituals in early 20th century United States, just to name a few.
[2] My thanks to Joshua Lupo for is editorial assistance in finalizing this piece for publication
