Religion and Politics: In Search of Resemblances

Abstract

As unlikely as it would have sounded a generation ago, historians of modern Europe have rediscovered religion.¹ Apart from being increasingly attentive to the various social, cultural and intellectual roles played by its so-called ‘traditional religions’ (Judaism, Christianity and Islam),² growing numbers of historians employ ‘religion’ as a key concept in the study of phenomena not conventionally associated with religion. Thus we hear about the ‘religion of nature’ practiced by eighteenth-century travellers and writers who perceived an unspoiled wood or wilderness as reaching beyond itself³ or about the ‘religion of history’ professed by those nineteenth-century historicists who believed that historical inquiry would tell them who they were by showing where they came from.⁴ We are told about a ‘religion of science’ that made its appearance among nineteenth-century scientific entrepreneurs and, in rather different form, entered school books in the atheistic German Democratic Republic.⁵ Likewise, in the field of political history, we find scholars discussing ‘liberal religion’, the ‘religion of socialism’ and, most notably, ‘political religion’.⁶ Perhaps Stanley Fish was right after all to predict a couple of years ago that religion would succeed ‘high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender and class as the centre of intellectual energy in the academy’.⁷