Open Society, Closed Religion
Guy Stroumsa
Guy Stroumsa is the Martin Buber emeritus professor of comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and emeritus professor of the study of the Abrahamic religions at Oxford University. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a recipient of the Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. His The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Almost half a century ago, I asked Amos Elon, who had just published The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971), why his acclaimed book, a portrait of Israeli society after the Six-Day War, featured no chapter on religion. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a shortcoming, I agree.” His curt answer implied that he did not wish to be bothered.
The reluctance to deal with religion’s many problems is indeed very common in contemporary liberal societies, but these problems refuse to be ignored. Whether we speak of mere challenges or of a deep and acute crisis, the contemporary predicament of liberal democracy can be adequately understood only when its religious elements are taken into account. My credentials to tackle the issues at hand are of course rather limited. If I’ve agreed to jump into the mêlée, it is because of my belief that historians of religion can perhaps shed some light on the perennial dimensions of contemporary phenomena. Today, not only in liberal democracies, but in many regimes around the world, religion appears to have become a real peril, endangering the very thread of society. “Thugs for God’s Sake,” as I propose to call them, violently threaten society almost everywhere - and certainly in Jerusalem, where I live. The Holy City, on the fringe of the Judean Wilderness, has long attracted religious violence. In the Byzantine times, hordes of Christian monks knew to express the intensity of their faith through the havoc they were throwing on Jewish communities around. Today, our Thugs for God’s Sake are either fanatic Jewish settlers launching pogroms on their Palestinian neighbors, or Haredi mobs insisting on going on with their daily lives while blatantly ignoring and flouting all governmental rules aimed at fighting the current Covid pandemic. Both settler racist violence and Haredi criminal carelessness are largely tolerated by the authorities, although public anger is expressed at the Haredi couldn’t-care-less attitude, settler racist violence is by and large ignored, even condoned. In both cases, enclave societies affirm their autonomy while at the same time insist on dictating rules of behavior to society at large. While the Thugs for God’s sake do not define our predicament, they certainly make us feel it acutely.
IS MONOTHEISM AT THE ROOT OF RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE?
That most famous samizdat of the Enlightenment, the Book of the Three Impostors (often falsely attributed to Spinoza), blames Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad for all evils propagated by religion throughout history. Since then, monotheism has often been presented as the first and main culprit of religious intolerance and violence, in contradistinction to the tolerant attitude ascribed to ancient polytheistic systems. This view has been advocated most recently by my friend Jan Assmann, who authored the idea of “the Mosaic distinction” between true and false in religion. If Moses was the inventor of the idea of religious truth, the price of monotheism is an inescapable propensity to violence in the name of religion, and the Jew are ultimately responsible for having introduced the link between religion and violence. Preposterous accusations of anti-Semitism have been hurled at Assmann, who has sought to clarify his views, arguing that the religious violence syndrome is typical, of Christianity and Islam, from the Crusades to Isis and Boko Haram, but not of Judaism, which has not been exposed, throughout history, to the perverting power of political rule. This may well have been the case until 1948, but since then, the Jews have learned very fast how to mix religious and political power.
“The contemporary predicament of liberal democracy can be adequately understood only when its religious elements are taken into account.”
Yet the common finger-pointing at monotheism as the root of all religious violence remains unpersuasive. According to the approach traditional since the Enlightenment, polytheist on non-theistic systems, such as Greek and Roman religions, Hinduism or Buddhism, remain free of the lethal connection between religion and violence — something patently counter-factual, of course. Always and everywhere, religion and politics (or, rather, church and state) have been bedfellows. In many societies, spiritual and political leaders retain to this day a complex and tense relationship. Religion can also be, and throughout history has often been, a ferment of liberal democracy. In some ways, religion lays at the very root of the ideals of a liberal society. Throughout the centuries, the demand for freedom and justice has been repeatedly expressed in the language of the prophets of Israel. Social revolutions have often been activated in the name of God and of a true understanding of religion. The Church Fathers of Late Antiquity were the first to develop some of the central values, such as human dignity underpinning the humanist movement at the roots of modern individualism, and hence of an open society. Closer to our day, the courage of many Christians, rooted in their religious convictions and with the help of the churches, was a powerful motor in launching the movement which brought down the East German Communist regime in the late 1980s.
Liberal democracies reflect a broad spectrum of legislation related to religion, ranging from countries with an established religion to those that insist on a strict separation of state and church. In France, the 1905 law of separation between church and state was meant to weaken, if not to rule out, the traditional presence of religion in public life — although the Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague has suggested, tongue in cheek, that the church never separated from the state as these two entities had never been united. In America, as already noted by Tocqueville, it is the very separation between church and state that permitted the Americans to be religious, while Thomas Jefferson pointed out that this separation was beneficial to religion.
“In a closed society, religion will usually be static and coiled around itself.”
Not all liberal democracies offer equal treatment, or status, to all religions practiced among their population. In all of them, however, freedom of religion is a declared right, including freedom from religion. Individual rights may at times clash with those of the community. But a liberal democracy must balance those rights, and the right of the individual to live in a legally recognized personal relationship of her or his choice strikes us today as obvious. Collective rights of communities (be they ethnic or religious) cannot preclude the right of the individual to leave her or his community of birth, or to marry outside it. Israeli personal law is based on the inheritance of the Ottoman millet laws: marriage, divorce, burial, is done only within the recognized religious community. Hence, there is no civil marriage or divorce, two citizens belonging to two different religious communities cannot legally marry, or divorce on equal terms between man and woman. It must be added that while different Christian Churches are recognized by law, among Jews only the Orthodox Rabbinate enjoys official recognition, while Reform and Conservative communities are denied any such rights. The Establishment of Jewish orthodoxy in the Israeli state reflects a fundamental ambivalence on the very definition of the country, which has not decided whether it wants to be the embodiment of Herzl’s idea of a Judenstaat, a national state for the Jewish people, or a state according to the Jewish orthodox religious law, or halakha. Such a country, obviously lacks one of the basic criteria of a liberal democracy.
ARE RELIGION AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ANTAGONISTS?
Today, the concept of the “open society” immediately evokes Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, a book written during the Second World War in defense of liberal democracy, and first published in 1945. But it is Henri Bergson’s last work, Two Sources of Morals and Religion (first published in 1932, and almost forgotten today) that inspired Popper’s title. In that book, Bergson argues that two basic kinds of religion run in parallel to two major categories of society. In a closed society, religion will usually be static and coiled around itself; an open society will foster a dynamic form of religion, one that will constantly seek to broaden the limits of the group and raise the level of its ethical demands.
Despite major setbacks, the last three centuries or so have seen a substantial advancement of the idea of a public space, namely a religiously neutral sphere, in which the religious identity or praxis of citizens is irrelevant. In a sense, this shrinking of the boundaries of religion in the modern world, its progressive limitation to the realm of the individual, is the main theme of Charles Taylor’s A Secular World, an important book with a misleading title, dealing, more accurately, with Religion in a Secularizing World. More than a status, secularization remains a project, a vector. Indeed, the public sphere was never fully religious, and it is hard to see how it could become fully secularized. Taylor’s grand narrative begins around 1500 CE, covering half a millennium of constant and dramatic transformations in the life of societies and individuals. The fear, often expressed today, that the depth of the present crisis points to the reversal of the vector, strikes me as premature, reflecting an over-reaction. Taylor’s narrative, of course, works for the Western world (Christian Europe and its American extensions). For European Jews, the Middle Ages did not end until the Enlightenment, while Islamic societies (and the Jews living within the Islamic world) remained ensconced in Medieval patterns of thought and behavior until the coming of print in the nineteenth century.
And yet, since the last decades of the twentieth century, we have learned the hard way how utopian was the Enlightenment expectation that religion (or at least traditional Christianity) would in the future wholly give up its public dimension. This expectation, indeed, was predicated on the conception of religion as essentially rooted in faith, i.e., in the inner person. This conception reflects a largely Protestant attitude to religion; it ignores or plays down collective dimensions of religion.
“The failure of liberal societies to reachfull secularization—to complete the retreat of religion to the personal sphere—took many by surprise.”
In the relationship between liberal democracy and religion, the antagonism between the two is neither natural nor essential. The state-religion relationship is best perceived as an ever-evolving, never fully satisfactory modus vivendi. Our first task, then, is to identify and describe adequately what has changed recently in this modus vivendi. To a great extent, liberal democracies today are also affluent societies, in which traditional religious identities undergo constant erosion. Statistics concur: a smaller and decreasing percentage of the population retains religious behavioral patterns of the previous generation. This is true throughout Western European countries, and also in North America, where the percentage of those who claim to have no religious affiliation whatsoever keeps growing from poll to poll. In such a situation, traditionalists obviously feel increasingly marginalized and entrenched. This explains the will to resist the threat by reaffirming one’s specific religious identity, an identity perceived in radical opposition to ambient beliefs and behavior.
In order to understand why such an attitude comes from traditionalist milieus who feel more and more estranged from mainstream society, however, we must bring another major social phenomenon into account: the massive waves of immigration to Western liberal societies from many parts of the developing world. As a rule, immigrants bring with them different religious identities. In the United States, immigrants from Latin America are usually Roman Catholics, but also include significant (and growing) numbers of Evangelical Christians. Those reaching Europe, usually from Africa and the Near East, are more often than not Muslims, mainly of the Sunni persuasion. From Denmark to Spain, from the UK to Greece, the new Muslim communities have had in the last two generations a massive demographic and 37cultural impact upon European countries. Typically, Muslim immigrants, coming from traditionalist societies, are religiously observant, at least to some extent. When combined with economic stagnation, the influx of populations with religious and cultural identities different from those of the local majority is bound to provoke a broad spectrum of reactions, sometimes fused with religious prejudices and racist bias.
A feeling of unease is aroused in broad sections of the population by visible ethnic and religious changes. This unease is often combined with a fear of suddenly losing one’s sense of identity, of having become a minority in one’s own political realm and cultural tradition. Each of the two elements of this combination, the uninvited addition and the unexpected frustration, animates, strengthens and radicalizes the other.
In traditional societies, religion and culture reflect various aspects of the same identity. Since the end of the Second World War, drastic demographic changes in liberal democracies have led to a massive intensification, to an extent previously unknown, of their multi-cultural and multi-religious character. Even then, more or less liberal societies are not always able to contain even small religious minorities without some friction. Witness the massive rise of anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair in the French Third Republic, as well as its brutal growth in Weimar Germany. Indeed, Jews did not represent more than one percent of the German population in 1933. Multi-cultural and multi-religious societies now represent major features of our globalized world. In such societies, stressing ethnic and religious identities, what the French call communautarisme (the willful maintenance and cultivation of enclave societies defined by their ethnic, linguistic, and religious specificities), offers a new modus vivendi.
For Popper, an open society allows individuals to make personal decisions. An open society, endowed with cultural and religious pluralism, offers freedom of belief and the wide dissemination of information. Its members have agency. They believe in human values and in the sacrality of the human person.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the failure of liberal societies to reach full secularization — to complete the retreat of religion to the personal sphere — took many by surprise. Jürgen Habermas postulated that we were now entering an era of “post-secular societies.” Recognizing the idea of a total separation between religion and state as an illusion, he described this separation, reflected for instance in the laws and practice of the German Federal Republic, as a “limping separation.” Accepting that reality does not adequately reflect purely abstract models, however, does not entail denying their relevance. The status of the churches in contemporary Germany does not represent, for Habermas or for anyone else, a real subject of worry. By and large, indeed, one can consider these churches as instances of “open religion,” a concept I have discussed elsewhere.1
IS FUNDAMENTALISM MODERN?
Open religion in an open society does not constitute a problem. What does create problems is, rather, the presence of closed religion within an open society.
But how will we describe closed religion? For Bergson, a closed society produced a static religion, and a dynamic religion could flourish only in an open society. A religion was born static, or it was born dynamic. Bergson was here dependent upon taxonomies of religions fashionable since the last decades of the nineteenth century, when “world religions” were all the rage. “Good” religions (such as Christianity or Buddhism) were universalist. Others (such as Judaism or Zoroastrianism) were particularist. For Bergson, only universalist religions were dynamic; others, essentially tribal, remained forever static. This was of course an illusion: no social institutions can remain static, while societies constantly evolve.
We have long abandoned such simplistic, rigid categories, and understand that any religion can be, in different cultural and political contexts, either dynamic or static, open or closed. Like all cultural creations, religions are in constant evolution. In adapting to new conditions, the transformative motor in a given religion is its hermeneutical system. When the traditional way of understanding the scriptural sources no longer accords with the immediate perception of reality, the system will offer a new interpretation of the sources, a new reading of them, in order to overcome the dissonance between beliefs and reality. When the mechanism of hermeneutics does not function properly, a gap is created between religion and the ambient culture, which threatens the delicate balance between religion and culture in society. The process described here is well known, and can be found in all religions. In Islamic law, or fiqh, the technical term is “the gate of legal reasoning (bāb al-ijtihād).” Are we able to understand when and how this gate closes?
What is usually (and rather inaccurately) called “fundamentalism” often represents the culmination of the complex process briefly described here. Fundamentalism, originally referring to a movement of return to the “fundamental principles” of Christianity among conservative Presbyterian theologians from the Princeton Theological Seminary in the late nineteenth century, is by definition a modern movement — not the “return” of a phenomenon from the religious past. The demand to return to the roots is understandable only as a response to the perceived estrangement from these roots. Various movements throughout history have required adherence to the letter of the Scriptures rather than to their traditional interpretation. Among the Jews, the Karaites, who reject the Talmudic tradition, have embodied since the early Middle Ages the most striking expression of such a Scripturalism. Fundamentalism, however, represents a different and characteristically modern phenomenon.
The hermeneutical system of a religion stops functioning properly, I suggest, when society changes faster than it can adapt. When the old hermeneutical system fails to interpret the new reality, the religion seems to close itself, refusing to accommodate new aspects of society. In the Roman Empire, for instance, during the fourth century, Christianity mutated from being a despised and prohibited religion first to being tolerated, then to becoming the state religion, and finally the only one permitted. In the contemporary world, a similar phenomenon seems to accompany many Muslim immigrants to Europe (and of Orthodox Jews in Israel and elsewhere), who endeavor to retain in their new surroundings cultural patterns from their previous society. The attempt to preserve old cultural patterns actually creates a new reality: it thwarts the smooth functioning of the hermeneutical system, interposes a cultural hiatus with society at large, and creates an enclave society. In other words, a closed religion is one that has lost the hermeneutical elasticity needed for re-interpretation. A striking example of such a lack of hermeneutical plasticity is reflected in the continuous expectation, within orthodox Judaism, of a return, after a hiatus of two millennia, to daily blood sacrifices in a rebuilt Jerusalem temple, a rebuilding which would obviously demand the destruction of the Muslim Haram al-Sharif.
Members of such a closed religious community will now live in a reconstructed symbolic world, as if the surrounding society was of no real relevance for their inner life. “Islam, my true nation!” can exclaim many young Muslims, even when they are French, British, Swedes or German by birth. For the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson, the nation was, first of all, an imagined community. In our globalized world, imagined communities can take a number of forms. One of the most powerful is the religious community (in the case of Islam, the umma, or “nation of Islam”). In that sense, contemporary Muslims living as religious minorities in liberal democracies can perceive their own religious community as representing their true national identity more adequately than their passport, precisely because they feel alien to the core culture of the host country.
Alienation from the ambient culture may also be expressed as a sense of being suddenly deprived of political agency. In the history of religion, the locus classicus of such voices is found in apocalyptical literatures and eschatological movements, from Qumran (who would at once dream of a cosmic war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, and at once show strikingly peaceful manners, at least according to Josephus Flavius), through the Christian millenarists and to the most recent irredentist Islamists.
Paradoxically, another diametrically opposed form of the relationship between religion and politics can have similar effects, in the sense that it too permits the emergence of radical forms of religion that threaten liberal societies. In When Prophecy Fails (1964), the American social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues asked what happens to a religious group when an intensively expected prophecy fails to be realized. The authors described how the cognitive dissonance among the members of the community soon compelled a major readjustment of expectations.
Less commonly understood is the opposite case: what happens when prophecy succeeds? In such cases, what I call a cognitive consonance may also foster a burst of irredentist religion, built on a feeling that the end of times, which is at hand, requires totally new rules of behavior. What happened to Christianity in the fourth century, after Constantine’s conversion, represents a classical example of cognitive consonance. In such cases, the modus vivendi demanded by the liberal state is cast aside as irrelevant, and conceptions until now more or less neutralized (such as Jewish messianism, as was demonstrated long ago by Gershom Scholem) are set in motion.
“In multi-cultural societies, the classical models of pluralism do not seem to function smoothly.”
An obvious and painful example is that of the messianic-fundamentalist movement which started a generation ago with Gush Emunim, among the settlers in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, which has led today, in the name of the Torah, to the religious justification of racist violence, by rabbis in some pre-military yeshivot. It now finds its expression in incendiary pamphlets such as Torat Hamelekh, which preaches a return to the Davidic kingdom of old in order to hasten the end of days. In this case, the threat to liberal society does not come from marginalized religious minority communities — from without, as it were — but from radicalized traditionalists within the majority religious group.
Pundits often present the religious menace to open societies as rooted in the failure of traditional religions to absorb modernity — in other words, from their closure. They speak of a “return” of religion (in a world that was supposed to have overcome religion). It is more accurate, however, to speak of a mutation of traditional religion, of the creation of new forms of religion, disconnected from the ambient culture and at odds with it. The nation-state, that paradigmatic expression of political modernity, is still around. Meanwhile, our contemporary societies are now not only pluralist, but also culturally plural (what is sometimes called “glocal,” the local expression of globality). In multi-cultural societies, the classical models of pluralism do not seem to function smoothly.
WHAT CAN LIBERAL SOCIETIES EXPECT FROM RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES?
More than twenty years ago, the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, soon echoed by John Rawls, coined the term “decent society.” Margalit proposed that a decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people. While it may not be liberal, a decent society allows some kind of tolerable life for all. Rawls notes, for instance, that a decent society will not humiliate women. “A hierarchical society,” he says, “may have an established religion with certain privileges. Still, it is essential to its being well-ordered that no religions are persecuted or denied civic and social conditions that permit their practice in peace and without fear.” In other societies, Rawls adds, the religious and philosophical traditions underlying the institutions create more serious problems, for instance “the subjection of women abetted by unreasonable religion.” We could apply this insight to the realm of religion. Institutions of a decent religion, like those of a decent society, will not humiliate anyone — those within (women, for instance) and those without (members of another religious community, or none).
Traditional religions may not be asked to give up on their theologies, but only to neutralize those elements that may prove “indecent.” Rich hermeneutical traditions possess all the necessary tools to do so. Through a combination of education and legislation, it is at once the right and the duty of a liberal society to actively stimulate such hermeneutical tools, and to help “neutralize,” in Gershom Scholem’s sense, the volatile power of religious ideas.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
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Notes
1. Guy Stroumsa, “Open Religion and Its Enemies,” in Richard A. Burridge and Jonathan Sacks, eds., Confronting Religious Violence, 2018.
