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Religion, Politics and Gender
Equality: Public Religions Revisited (Draft)
Author(s):
José Casanova
Programme Area: Gender
and Development
Project Title: Religion,
Politics and Gender Equality
No. of Pages: 30
The
aim of this paper is to revisit the argument first presented in “Public
Religions in the Modern World” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) in
order to ascertain the extent to which the theoretical-analytical framework
developed there needs to be critically revised and expanded in response to two
main challenges. The first arises from the global imperative to develop
comparative analytical frameworks which are applicable beyond Western Christian
contexts. The second challenge derives from the equally urgent need to place
the politics of gender equality and the related religious-secular debates into
the center of any discussion of "public religion" anywhere in the
world today.
The central thesis in 1994 was that we were witnessing a process of
"de-privatization" of religion as a relatively global trend. It did
not interpret the deprivatization of religion necessarily as an anti-modern,
anti-secular, or anti-democratic reaction and, thus, offered a critique to
prescriptive theories of privatization of religion and to the secularist
assumptions built into social theories of Western modernity and into most
liberal theories of modern democratic politics. One of its two new analytical
contributions was the analytical disaggregation of the theory of secularization
into three disparate components or sub-theses, namely, a) the theory of the
institutional differentiation of the secular spheres, such as state, economy,
and science, from religious institutions and norms, b) the theory of the
decline of religious beliefs and practices as a concomitant of levels of
modernization, and c) the theory of privatization of religion as a precondition
of modern democratic politics. Such an analytical distinction makes possible
the testing of each of the three sub-theses separately as different empirically
falsifiable propositions. The second main analytical contribution was the
distinction of three different types of "public religion,"
corresponding to the analytical distinction between three different areas of a
modern democratic polity: "state," "political society," and
"civil society." Obviously, this is an analytical, one could say,
"ideal-typical" distinction. In actual empirical reality the
boundaries between the three areas of the polity are by no means so clear cut
and therefore the delineation of the different types of public religion can
also not always be clear and distinct. Nevertheless, the purpose of the
analytical distinction was to put into question any rigid theory of
privatization which would like to restrict religion to the private sphere on
the grounds that any form of public religion represents a threat to the public
sphere or to democratic politics. This paper, therefore, argues that the
meaningful question cannot be whether "public religion" in general,
much less whether "religion" in the abstract, is good or bad, ally or
threat, but which kind of public religion, in which particular context, for
which particular purpose?
This paper revisits and expands this framework critically in order to address
specifically the issues of globalization and gender equality. It addresses
three main shortcomings or limitations of the original argument: 1) its
Western-Christian centrism, 2) the attempt to restrict, at least normatively,
modern public religions to the public sphere of civil society, and 3) the
empirical framing of the study as church-state-nation-civil society relations
from a comparative national perspective, neglecting the transnational global
dimensions. It proceeds by offering first a revision and expansion of the analytical
framework of "public religions" in order to make it more amenable to
a global comparative perspective beyond the Christian West. The second part of
the paper attempts to address some of the ways in which the central issue of
gender equality impacts upon religious politics and some of the ways in which
the deprivatization of religion may in turn affect the politics of gender
equality.
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