From Iraq to 11 September of the Twin Towers in the United States, from the war in Afghanistan, to the advance of Isis, to the last, tragic, terror attack in Paris. More and more often there is talk of a "clash of civilizations" and of war between religions". On these issues Manlio Graziano, professor of Geopolitics and Geopolitics of religions at the American Graduate School in Paris, at Paris–Sorbonne and at the Skema Business School, has published a new book: “Holy War and Holy Alliance” published by Il Mulino, which will in bookstores from next Thursday, January 15th. The subtitle "Religions and international disorder in the 1st century" clarifies even better the theme of the essay of which we publish below, with the kind permission of the publisher, some passages taken from the last chapter.
HOLY WAR AND HOLY ALLIANCE
Religions and the international order in the XNUMXst century
PROJECTED IMPACT
For at least four decades, religions have returned to the public scene; numerous indications seem to suggest that, in the future, their role will be increasingly important. In just the months of writing this book, the religious pretext was used to cover up, justify and even dignify political and military confrontations in Mali, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Iraq, Burma, Sri Lanka, India and even Ukraine. It was a central aspect of the "Arab Spring", and continues to be so dramatically in the countries where those revolutions aborted: Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. Iraq remains a hotbed of potential chaos for the entire region, a chaos in which mujahideen as zealous as they are richly armed are ready to place their capital of "holy wars" at the service of this or that interest, local or international. It took of the time before the return of religions to the public scene was no longer considered a curious coincidence but a general trend. Even today, however, in some countries of more ancient secularization, the widely prevailing opinion is that the "return of God" does not concern them, that it essentially concerns the emerging countries, without solid political traditions; for some, it would even concern only Muslim countries.
The lack of understanding of the universal character of desecularization is particularly acute in France, where the idea prevails that the 1905 law on the separation of church and state regulated once and for all the relationship between religion and politics. The effects of this misunderstanding – based on an almost Pavlovian legalistic tropism – are sometimes paradoxical. During their electoral campaigns in 2007 and 2012 respectively, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande both spoke out on the 312 law: the first, to propose mitigating its bonds, with the idea of seducing the authorities and the Catholic faithful; the second, to propose to engrave it in the bronze of the Constitution, with the idea of seducing masses imagined as Jacobin and anti-clerical. It seems evident that neither of them had bothered to read the 1905 document of the French bishops, in which they hoped that the 2005 law would not be touched: «It seems appropriate not to change this balance thanks to which it was made possible in our country today's peace". Neither Sarkozy nor Hollande realized their projects; but if they had, they would have had the opposite effect to that intended. (…)
In the United States, it is now practically impossible to run for any elected office without making a show of a solid religious baggage: the defeated candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, John McCain, suspected of lacking fervor, was forced to counterbalance his defect by throwing into the arena a fundamentalist heavyweight of the caliber by Sarah Palin. In that same 2008 campaign, Barack Obama broke two records that were perhaps decisive for the final victory: he was the candidate who spent the most in the entire history of the United States and the one who mentioned God most often. The same Obama who, reversing the principle of John F. Kennedy ("I believe in an America in which the separation between Church and State is absolute"), stated in 313 that "secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave religion at the door before entering the public square". But the interest of politics in this new religious "great awakening" does not depend only on the possibility of exploiting it for immediate purposes, be they electoral or military. One of the most critical fronts that has opened up with the acceleration and intensification of international competition is that of social spending: with the exception of a few emerging countries, states are forced almost everywhere in the world to reduce the financing and management of public services in the sectors of health, education , pensions, emergencies, culture and even sport; almost everywhere in the world, religious organizations and institutions are called to fill these gaps with their networks of protection and social assistance. In 2006 (latest census available), the Catholic Church alone managed around 2000 hospitals and dispensaries, 80.000 rest homes, almost 14.000 orphanages, just over 9.000 universities and around 1.000 elementary, middle and high schools in the world. If we consider that, in secular France, the number of Catholic institutes increased from 125.000 to 2010 between 2012 and 8.847, one can easily imagine the pace Catholic social services are developing in the rest of the world. (…)
On the other front, in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in veritate, Benedict XVI repeated the explicit offer of a sharing of social responsibilities thirteen times, claiming it as a «progressive opening, in a global context, to forms of economic activity characterized by quotas of gratuitye of communion» (that is to say, voluntary work and other forms of benevolent activity managed directly or indirectly by religious entities). Forms of activity, Pope Francis later specified, which must not consist "exclusively in actions or programs of promotion and assistance", but must be "first of all an attention paid to the other" (Evangeliigaudium).
It is a plus, compared to any social structure of the State, which cannot fail to strengthen the feeling of historical superiority of religions and Churches over public institutions. Finally, another reason why politics intends to take advantage of the re-emergence of the religious phenomenon is the international context. Religions constitute an element of stability and anchoring to tradition which is particularly useful in an era characterized by instability and change. The stronger and more influential a religion is, the more capable it is of fulfilling this task of political auxiliary. The governments of Muslim countries often present themselves as champions of the religious cause to exploit the trust that the faithful place in Islam as a guarantee of justice; but the more Islam is bent to particular interests, the more it loses its political (and perhaps even religious) effectiveness in the eyes of the masses. Countries with an Orthodox majority enjoy the full support of their respective Churches, which corroborate their identity and contribute to the maintenance of the social and political order. (…).
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, exercises its authority at both the national and international levels. This is why it is difficult to find countries that close their doors. Israel too, since 1993, has established diplomatic relations with the Holy See; and Saudi Arabia wanted to invite Benedict XVI, while rejecting his request to open Catholic places of worship on the peninsula. And as for relations with the People's Republic of China, their current stalemate apparently does not depend on the will (or lack of will) of Beijing. The United States is obviously the country most affected by the current shift in the geopolitical axis of the world.
Perhaps this is the reason why certain personalities of the American Catholic community (which represents between 25 and 30% of the population) have such a disproportionate weight in its political, military and judicial institutions. The vice president, the chief of staff, half of the government members, the Speaker of the House (Republican) and the chairman of the Democratic parliamentary group, the national security adviser, the internal security adviser, the director of the CIA and the chief of staff they were Catholics when the second Obama administration was launched in February 2013. Never in the short history of the United States have Catholics enjoyed such political visibility. (…)
Since Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected, many observers have shouted "revolution", the end of the rigidity of Roman centralism, of the most obsolete prohibitions. At the time of writing, few clues seem to warrant such enthusiasm; moreover, many seem to underestimate the fact that Bergoglio is the first Jesuit pope, that is to say a member of a purely political order, which has been illustrated throughout history for its excellence in qualities such as subtlety, discretion, prudence and the malice. What appears evident is that the Argentine pope is trying to create an atmosphere conducive to the implementation of a line already theoretically accepted by the large body of the Church, but hitherto hindered by the lazy inertia of habits: the charismatic role of a Church that does not founded more exclusively on positional income and becomes an "outgoing" Church, that is, in a state of permanent mission. (…)
The "new proportion" of Francis' Church seems to revolve around the charismatic notion of "joy" and "missionary zeal". It is no coincidence that many are seduced by his personal charisma. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio is well aware that a smiling face and a sober lifestyle are very important image effects, which support but do not replace the political strength of the Church. A force that is made up of experience, organization, centralization, relationships and strong principles around which to build the holy alliance. and that one facet of uneven development is uneven religious development. The tendency towards desecularization constitutes the indispensable historical context for any hypothesis of a "holy alliance" between the great religions of the world. But this tendency towards desecularisation coexists with tendencies towards secularisation: in different countries and sometimes within the same country. Many countries are "modernising", that is, they are retracing the "roughly uniform" path, as Braudel said, of each of industrialization. The effects of those processes are also "roughly uniform": if the economic and social development in Turkey, Brazil, India or China manages to give the impression of a "strong and perennial growth", to the point of generating the expectation of "continuous improvement" (Ernest Gellner), it is probable that many of those who have managed to reach the psychological stage of the middle class will begin to adopt increasingly secularized models and lifestyles.
It is also possible that these tendencies end up finding themselves on the terrain of a new religious form, more individualistic and more secularized, while remaining rigorously fundamentalist: the struggle of certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish women for the right to pray at the Wailing Wall could be a symbol of this new religious form .319The shift of power currently underway will almost certainly lead the populations of the old "advanced" powers to live in increasingly precarious conditions; it is possible that, on the contrary, the populations of the so-called emerging countries could live in less and less uncertain conditions in the future. Such an eventuality could lead to a paradoxical result: a more religious Europe and America grappling with a more materialistic Asia and Africa. Of what to feed new "clash of civilizations".
