Last Wednesday I shared the first part of a presentation on peace and religion by social anthropologist Dr Jacqueline Ryle. Dr Ryle’s presentation was made during last month’s Pacific Peace Conference.
In the second part of her presentation, reproduced below, Dr Ryle, who in last week’s column discussed the difficulty with finding a definition of religion based on different contexts, discusses the role of religion in conflict and peace-building from a global, regional and local perspective.
Global/international levels
There are still scholars who argue that religion is obsolete or is on its way to becoming so, but the global political events of the late 20th and early 21st century, starting with the revolution in Iran in 1979 but, most emphatically the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001, propelled religion to the centre stage of international relations and global, regional and national political agendas. This has generated renewed interest in religion as an academic field of study, resulting in an increasing flow of research on religion, society and politics.
One of the formerly strongest advocates of theories of secularisation, sociologist of religion, Peter Berger wrote in 1999: “the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. The world today, with some exceptions …, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever” (Berger, 1999). And this was written before the 9/11 attacks. Elsewhere Berger emphasises that nation states ignore religion at their peril.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that personal religious beliefs are not declining as theorists expected. There may be decline in mainstream Christian church worship in Europe, for example, but this is not a decline in religious belief per se. What we are seeing, which is also mirrored in the Pacific, is that believers today are less inclined to follow ascribed religious patterns but are choosing their religious adherence.
Religion becomes a personal choice rather than an inherited adherence. Formal religion maybe declining but different forms of spirituality are increasing.
Professor Ole Wæver emphasises that it is an illusion to think that a conversation that does not take place on the basis of religion, is the ideal basis for reaching a sensible decision (Wæver, 2011). The vast majority of the world’s population is religious. Although there is a growing and increasingly aggressive atheist voice the actual percentage of atheists at a global level is tiny, Wæver points out. Non-believers make up 15 per cent of the world’s population (with some lack of clarity with regard to the Chinese) — 85 per cent of the world’s population have religious beliefs. And half the world’s population considers that religion should have a significant influence on the way societies are run. Religion must be taken seriously as part of the variations of what Wæver terms as the “post-western” age. Others speak of the “post-secular” age (Berg-Sorensen 2013:3).
The days in which there was one authoritative centre that advocated principles, values and ways of gauging the rest of the world according to western standards, are over. Today, there are many different influential interpretations of history, responsibilities, rights, the future.
Ole Wæver predicts that when in the future these different approaches contest for recognition on more equal terms, different religions, different understandings of what religion is, and significant variations of the political role of religion will come to play more prominent roles.
Religion will be one of many dimensions in our multifaceted world. And the West will not have the option to act as supreme judge of what is right and what is wrong.
Religion and experience
Similarly, contemporary scholarship on religion, especially within anthropology, is much less focused on defining “what” religion is, “why” it is and what “function” it has in society. Much contemporary anthropological research on religion is more oriented towards the “meanings” of religion: what does religion mean to those who practice it, “how” do they perform their identities as religious beings, and “how” do they interpret and describe their beliefs and practices?
This places the agency for defining what religion is with the subject, rather than with the analyst. And much contemporary research into religion connects individual beliefs and practices at the local level with wider national, regional and global processes of change.
Peace and religion at Pacific regional and national levels — historical connections
For 75-90 per cent of recipients of western development assistance their faith and religion form the framework of their everyday lives and understanding of the world. While religion has historically been neglected, gradually aid agencies are recognising the importance of religious perspectives.
The Christianisation of the Pacific from the late 18th century onwards was characterised by both peace and violence. At some levels conversion and the values of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness in Christianity brought peace between clans and practices of cannibalism and other practices such as widow-strangling to an end.
In many cases these changes brought cohesion and cultural and religious interconnections through new shared values and practices. But Pacific Islanders also inherited denominational Protestant and Catholic missionary animosities which led to new divisions, wars and lack of peace between adherents of opposing denominations, bitter divisions, which in many cases still exist.
The violence of Indian indenture in Fiji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also violence against the freedom of religious expression and religious practice of indentured labourers.
And the freedom of religion of non-Christians in Fiji has often since been threatened or challenged by intolerance and exclusivist religious politics that sought to dominate rather than accommodate difference.
While the Pacific Conference of Churches and Interfaith Search Fiji and other ecumenical bodies have for decades advocated respect, tolerance and dialogue, ecumenical relations and dialogue and interfaith dialogue at grassroots levels is, I would argue, still not very strong.
In all Pacific Island countries, the challenge of the growing number of new Christian churches, advocating exclusive versions of Christianity and often employing a rhetoric of battling against traditional beliefs and spirits, redefined as satanic and demonic, and in their most extreme versions engaging in witch hunts, are strong religious forces that challenge the relative religious peace Pacific Island communities are experiencing and do not make it easy to engage in peace-building through ecumenical or interfaith dialogue.
Peace and religion at local/communal/individual levels in the Pacific
And moving from the regional, national level briefly to the local/individual level, religion is used in many different ways that thwart values of peace, to justify the subordination of women to men through patriarchal structures and male dominance. Specific passages of the Bible are for example used to justify the submission of wives to their husbands, to justify gender-based violence, marital rape and corporal punishment of children.
And passages from the Bible are also used against persons of minority sexual orientation to justify condemning their identity and sexuality, marginalising and ostracising them in community life.
Conclusion
Dr Ryle makes the following conclusions from her very brief “journey through these somewhat fragmented yet interrelated points on peace and religion”:
On the one hand Pacific Island peoples, communities and countries are grappling with enormous forces of rapid change, bringing in global secularising influences such as human rights and responsibilities. On the other hand, strong religious beliefs and faith permeate all communities and levels of Pacific Island societies.
When this religious feeling and agency is acknowledged and linked with inclusive peace-building and empowerment at grassroots levels, in the home, in communities, at other levels of society, it is a potential force of tremendous positive transformation.
The traditional values of relational harmony and balance between people and between people and the land resonate at such deep existential levels among Pacific Island peoples that it seems to me that there is tremendous potential in connecting and expanding this form of peace with other forms of peace.
Such other forms of peace could include the peace of respect, tolerance and acceptance of difference; the peace of equality in gender and generational relations; the peace of interreligious dialogue; the peace of caring for creation; the peace of inter-ethnic dialogue on equal terms … the peace inherent in what Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks has called the dignity of difference (Sacks, 2002).
* Reverend James Bhagwan is an ordained Methodist minister and a citizen journalist. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Methodist Church in Fiji or this newspaper.
