On the religious state, the secular state, and the religion-neutral state

Abstract

One of the most pressing questions of our age is the relationship between established and disestablished religions and the state. It underlies many of the conflicts across the globe including the treatment of the Rohingya by the Buddhist majority in Myanmar, Muslims under Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India, and Palestinians under the Jewish State of Israel. Many of the world’s conflicts are often driven by conflict between ethnic/religious groups over state control: Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; Christians and Muslims in Nigeria; and Shiites and Sunnis in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. The many wars of religion have been driven by states controlled by ethnic/religious majorities. The English Civil War (1640–1660), for instance, was triggered by the attempt to impose the Anglican Church of England over the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. Conflicts between states are often exacerbated by those states being aligned with a religious majority which is at odds with an opposing state-religion alliance (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia; India and Pakistan). The state is the vehicle through which an ethno/religious majority can impose its religious values over a society as a whole including minorities. Ethno-religious groups fight over control of the state and if not, over influence on state policy. German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt ([1943] 2007, 336), who herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany and found a home at the New School’s university in exile in New York, identified this as the problem of the nation-state, which assumes a homogenous ethnic/religious population when there is not. Nation-states, as understood by Arendt ([1944] 2007, 371), cannot exist when there are mixed populations. No country is able to achieve this type of purity and attempts to obtain it have resulted in ethnic cleansing and proven to be catastrophic. The alignment between what we now conventionally categorize as the state on the one hand and religion on the other has existed since the very origins of the state (that is, of monarchies): in the ancient river valley civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India (Hinduism), and China (Confucianism). In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the paradigmatic alignment of state and religion is the Davidic kingdom. With Constantine, Christianity became the religion of the Roman state. In Islam, the alignment between state and religion has its origins with the prophet Mohammad, who was both a religious and political leader. The Great Schism between Eastern (Byzantine) and Western Empires was a split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in