Leveraging Religion in International Politics: A Social Practice Approach
No one with their eyes open can currently say that religion plays no role in international politics at this time. Just look at the role of the Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church in supporting the war in Ukraine. Or consider how Christian nationalists are trying to reshape the United States by influencing the Trump administration. In 2022, at one of the meetings of the group Pastors for Trump, a popular right-wing preacher maintained that the people in his movement want to establish a theocracy, because they believe God should ‘take over the government’.
Recently, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine leveraged religion to achieve a diplomatic goal. According to the news website Axios, Zelensky had been seeking to acquire the Patriot air defense system of Israel after it became unnecessary for them. However, for months, Israel hesitated, fearing that Russia might retaliate by supplying advanced weapons to Iran.
Weaponizing religion is of the evil one, but instrumentalizing religion is sometimes possible as long as it does not contract the central aims of the religious practice.
A Ukrainian official told Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored Zelensky’s calls for weeks on the issue. Approval was finally granted at the end of September. Why? Netanyahu wanted to discuss with Zelensky the matter of allowing ultra-Orthodox Israelis to make their annual pilgrimage to Uman in Ukraine, where a famous rabbi is buried. Zelensky, who comes from a Jewish family, did not respond until Netanyahu ultimately gave his approval.
These cases illustrate that religion plays a role in international politics. Despite this, some realists would still persist that religion’s significance is negligible. In the end international politics consists of great powers rivaling for influence. If religion plays a role at all, it is in the form of ideology. Since realists are dominating much of the current policies in international relations and have done so for many decades, how should we look at this?
A Global Resurgence of Public Religions
The case of Zelensky does not stand on its own, since there is a lot of literature about the role of religion in international relations since about the 1990s. Samuel Huntington was one of the first to mention the role that religion plays as the defining characteristic of clashing civilizations in his essay The Clash of Civilization in 1993, which he turned later into a book.
Other books are Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft in 1994 and the book The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century in 2005. The latter book extensively describes that there is a reason to take religion seriously, because something has changed the world: a global resurgence of religion.
Since the 1960s, religion has become a public matter globally. This means that it left the private sphere and thrusted itself into the public arena of moral and political contestation, the public sphere. This does not only apply to Iran after the Iranian Revolution or to the United States with the rise of the Christian right, but also to Africa where students travelled to Saudi Arabia to study at the Islamic university in Medina. Many of them returned home with the mission of reviving and reforming the Islamic faith, inspired by Wahhabism.
Although the resurgence of religion was partly caused by academics and policymakers who renewed their attention to it and made it more visible, it is safe to say that the role of religion in the world had also changed significantly. This challenges theories of international relations to reflect on their adequacy in explaining the world. The theory that was mostly criticized was realism. In my book, I do not only describe extensively the so-called global resurgence of religion, but also how classical realism and neorealism have dealt with religion.
A Realist Case to Be Cautious with Religion
The results are quite surprising. Despite the widely supported and disseminated view that realism is a secular approach to international politics that ignores religion, I found out that Hans Morgenthau’s (1904-1980) classical realism takes religion very seriously and therefore hesitates to involve it in a theory of international politics.
For him, the autonomy of the political has to be cherished and the rationality of the political sphere is the interests of nation states. When these are overlooked or subjected to religious or moral dictates, it can lead to utopian politics which are more disastrous than politics that follow the rationality of power politics. This conviction was rooted in a political theology which goes back to St. Augustine, namely, that the political and religious spheres should not be conflated.
Economics, juridical, cultural and religious factors facilitate or condition the way in which power is used to strive for justice.
Even Kenneth Waltz’s (1924-2013) neorealism which is often seen as an a-normative approach to international politics acknowledges the relevance of religion on the level of individuals and within states in his book Man, the State and War in 1959.
His political theology is also inspired by the distinction between religious and mundane affairs as brought in into the field of international relations by the Christian realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). He decides, however, to limit his theory to the international system which leaves the level of individuals and intrastate affairs out. This leads to a theory with strong explanatory power, but the consequence is that it explains a lot about a little.
Morgenthau, Waltz, but also Niebuhr bring interesting and relevant insights into the discussion on religion and international relations. These are: religion plays a role in the world, be cautious to conflate politics and religion, and a theory of international politics is limited in what it can explain. In my book, I try to integrate these elements into a new approach called a new Christian political realism. This approach combines the political theology of Christian realism with the autonomy of the political of classical realism and the theoretical insights of neorealism. It does so by approaching international politics as a social practice, an idea from the Amsterdam School of Philosophy.
Amsterdam School of Philosophy: Integrating Religion and Academic Inquiry
The Amsterdam School of Philosophy was developed by a group of philosophers who since the late 1920s have aimed to find a new integration of Christian faith and academic inquiry. This school emerged when scholars became dissatisfied on the one hand with the claim to ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ in modern science, and on the other hand with what they saw as cheap ‘biblicistic’ and often suffocating ways of bringing Christianity to bear on academic work.
Participants as well as practitioners have a worldview and many of them have a religious worldview which shapes their behavior.
In contrast with both viewpoints, this school suggests conducting academic analysis based on the idea of ‘intrinsic meaning’.
This implies that reality itself, physical, human and social reality, can only be understood in terms of certain distinctive teloi, certain intrinsic qualities that humans must discern, respect and bring to fruition – also in their academic analyses.
The most influential figure in this school was the Dutch philosopher of law Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), who, in turn, was inspired by the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920).
Seeing International Politics as a Practice Helps in Understanding Religion
Practices are coherent forms of human cooperation aimed at achieving certain goals or goods on the basis of certain standards. If we apply this to international politics we could say that the goal of it is to achieve a certain degree of justice and that power is necessary to achieve that. But economics, juridical, cultural and religious factors facilitate or condition the way in which power is used to strive for justice. That means that religion has a facilitating role, shaping or sometimes redirecting certain actions.
The context of the practice of international politics is shaped by states who interact with each other. As social constructivist Alexander Wendt argues states are ultimately the medium through which all other factors have impact on the course and direction of the practice of international politics.
Religion’s goals can overlap or become consonant with the aim of politics.
That does not mean that nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s) or faith-based organizations (FBO’s) are irrelevant, they only have to reckon with the existing power configurations among states.
Besides the actors such as states and non-state actors, a practice has participants and practitioners. In the case of international politics, one could say that everyone in the world is a participant, because – as Scott Thomas argues – the way we will live, behave, buy and vote influences the development of the practice.
Practitioners are the people who are professionally involved in the formation of the practice, such as politicians, state leaders, policymakers, etc. Participants as well as practitioners have a worldview and many of them have a religious worldview which shapes their behavior. More than 85 percent of the world population belongs to a religion and many policymakers and state leaders either openly acknowledge the importance of their religious worldview or are indebted to it in the shaping of their actions and decisions.
‘If You’re Not with Us, You’re Against Us’
To illustrate the potential pervasiveness of religious worldviews, the book of Glenn Greenwald A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency from 2008, is crucial.
He describes how President Bush’s religious worldview inspired and shaped his policies.
Opposition was made impossible by framing the world in Manichaean terms: if you’re not with us, you’re against. In this worldview, the leader is convinced of his own righteousness and the goal is a crusade against evil.
Because of this ‘sacred’ mission, all means and methods to achieve that goal are quickly deemed justified.
After all, everything that serves the good is justified. Leaders who embrace this worldview are, because of their unshakable conviction, blind to the idea that their actions may be immoral.
The previous example shows how a religious worldview can have a negative impact, but there are countless examples of positive effects of religious worldviews.
Theory Meets Practice
This writing started with the example of President Zelensky effectively using religion and cultural connections in a diplomatic context to achieve a strategic military goal. Is the practice approach as I set out above, useful to account for the role of religion? This example confirms my practice model as set out above.
Security and power are important factors in the practice of international politics. They are foundational in the sense that we cannot do without them, but they are instrumental to achieve justice. Religion influences the way in which the tension between power and justice is handled.
Its influence is not decisive, but conditioning, facilitating or supportive. With an image from ordinary life religion can be seen as like the wind. We have no control over wind, but it is there and we have to relate to it. It is up to the practitioners of international politics how they deal with this wind, raise their sails, and determine the course.
It is therefore important to look at religious actors such as religious NGO’s, but also at religious worldviews of the practitioners of the practice. Would Zelensky have understood the strategic value of religion if he himself had been completely secular? Unlikely.
Did Zelensky Instrumentalize or Weaponize Religion?
In his book Chasing the Devil At Foggy Bottom from 2023, former Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs Shaun Casey writes that there are three reasons to involve religion in foreign policy. First of all, because it is more effective. In many countries, religious figures and leaders are often powerful and influential actors, so working together can make policies more effective.
The second point is costs: better insight into the conflict can lead to lower costs. The third consideration is that complexity and controversy require expertise. As the philosopher and theologian Bryan Hehir beautifully says: ‘governments trying to integrate the understanding of religion into diplomacy is like performing brain surgery; it may be necessary, but it can be fatal if not done well’.
At the same time, Casey warns to instrumentalize religion. This happens when religion is seen as a useful instrument to achieve certain strategic political goals. It is (mis)used to accomplish goals which are not central to religion as a practice, rather peripheral or sometimes even contradictory. Another, a slightly more negative term is, weaponizing religion. In that case, religion is not just an instrument, but a weapon which implies that it can be harmful in itself. It has a manipulative and destructive connotation.
Did Zelensky instrumentalize religion or even worse, weaponize religion? The latter is definitely not the case, but he used religion to get something done on a political, strategic level. That is a form of instrumentalizing, but he did not misuse religion’s goals or exchange it for something that contradicts religion’s own goal: he wanted to secure the safety of his country. It would have been different if he would have used his religious leverage to get weapons to murder his own civilians.
Like with morality and justice, their respective goals can align or overlap with the aim of power politics. In fact, this is exactly the reason that prudence is the watchword of realism, because state leaders have to find a balance between the demands of power at the one hand and the demands for justice at the other hand. Likewise, religion’s goals can overlap or become consonant with the aim of politics.
A New Christian Political Realism to Grasp and Involve Religion
Religion has become more important in world affairs over the past decades. This requires frameworks to understand and analyze it. Christian realism, classical realism and neorealism provide valuable insight for that. Combined with the idea of the Amsterdam School of Philosophy to understand international politics as a practice, these insights make it possible to give religion its rightful place.
This means that events should not be religionized as if everything is religious, but events should also not be secularized unduly. Theorizing as well as dealing with religion in practical affairs requires the skill of right-sizing religion, as Peter Mandaville calls it. Weaponizing religion is of the evil one, but instrumentalizing religion is sometimes possible as long as it does not contract the central aims of the religious practice. Ideally, religious aims and political goals are consonant, though they have their own relative autonomous domains.
