Politics of Religion, Religion of Politics
Three UT Austin scholars discuss the link between religion and politics, from Obeah in Trinidad to the religious right in the U.S.
Last month the College of Liberal Arts hosted a panel discussion on “The Politics of Religion, the Religion of Politics,” featuring faculty members Martha Newman, J. Brent Crosson, and Eric McDaniel. The resulting conversation spanned from Obeah in Trinidad to the rise of the religious right in the U.S., pausing along the way to consider the emergence of the secular, the importance of religion in the Cold War, and what it means to be “churched.”
Below is a condensed version of their conversation, which has been edited for clarity.
Martha Newman: I’ll start by saying a couple of things that are almost too simple but might be a way of setting this up a bit. In our common usage of words, we tend to think of politics and religion as being separate from one another. Politics is about power, about the regulation of power or the exercise of power, whereas religion is often seen as a kind of feeling or confidence or faith, as an orientation of one’s behaviors toward the divine. These are seen as being really two distinct things, but this panel, as the title suggests, brings them together. And so do the scholars who are here today. Both Brent Crosson and Eric McDaniel work on religion and politics in different ways, in different places, and from different disciplinary perspectives. All three of us are associated in some way with the Department of Religious Studies. But I’m a historian, Brent is an anthropologist, and Eric is a political scientist. So, I thought we might start by talking about disciplinary differences and disciplinary similarities.
Why don’t we start, Brent, with: How do anthropologists approach these terms and these ideas?
Brent Crosson: It’s hard to sum up one single approach of a discipline, but within anthropology, Talal Asad is an important figure. Some see him as trying to do away with the category of religion, but I think he was trying to make us aware of how we use the category of religion. And he’s drawing on earlier work in religious studies which points out the ways that Western European secularism shapes how we think about religion so that secularism isn't the absence of religion but the demand for religion to take certain forms that are acceptable or unacceptable, good or improper. What Asad points out is that religion cannot be separated from power, that power is involved in its definition. As much as we want to think about religion as purely a space of ethics or morality or a space of private belief, religion and power are continually entangled. That’s not to say that the aspiration to separate religion and politics is a bad thing, but I think the problem enters in the ways that that definition of religion is differentially applied to groups depending on social status, race, gender, et cetera.
In the practices that I look at in the Caribbean, Obeah, they were criminalized as an assumption of supernatural power, so through defining them as a form of power that was improper. It should be reiterated, though, that all religions are involved in questions of power. No religion is simply a nice moral sphere where it’s all about the good and it only does good things. We all know in practice that that’s not true. But in my work, I’m concerned with how this definition of religion was used to criminalize and racialize certain practices, not just in the Caribbean but beyond, and how those definitions of religion still have life today in terms of the ways that certain practices are seen as proper or improper. And the ways that Afro Caribbean religious practices are often cast in a negative light by showing them to be involved in some kind of practice of power goes back to a Western definition of religion that’s supposed to be separate from magic, where magic is about power and religion is just asking nicely, if at all.
Newman: So, in some ways the very use of the term “religion” as opposed to, say, magic or superstition becomes a way of creating social and political distinctions in the societies that you’re looking at.
Crosson: Yeah, though it’s hardly ever explicitly stated. But I’m interested in tracing these distinctions, and they’re differentially applied. Any religious practice involves transformation or doing things in the world or power. But colonial authorities singled out certain practices and criminalized them by isolating those things that they thought were improper, which was really a kind of question of racialization and discrimination.
Newman: Eric, how does this work in political science?
Eric McDaniel: Thinking about what political science is, it’s a study of power and who gets resources. A simple way of thinking about what politics is is: “who gets what, when, and how?” We’re interested in how these resources are divvied up. Building upon what you said about “politics is about the regulation of power” and what Brent pointed out about religion being linked to power, I’d say that religion provides the justification for power. Who should have power, who should have decision making, who’s legitimate and who’s not legitimate in this decision making?
For political science, specifically quantitative political science, we’re concerned about measurement. Religion is something that’s amorphous and hard to tie down, but when thinking about the ways in which to measure it, we can think about it in terms of practices. How often do you go to worship services? How often do you read religious texts? How often do you pray? How important is religion to you? Another way to think about this is belonging. We can think about the various religious traditions, but then even within these traditions there are distinctions. There’s been a lot of work there, specifically amongst the Protestants, of trying to group them — you have the evangelical Protestants, you have mainline Black Protestants and these other groups — but that’s not enough. People can be in the same denomination but still think completely differently. From there we’ve moved to what I think is the much more difficult aspect of thinking about religion and measuring religion—that is, beliefs.
Part of the work that I’ve been doing is thinking about “what do people believe their religion calls of them?” Because once we understand what their religion calls of them, we understand how they think about power and how they think about politics and how they enter into the political world. It also helps us understand why two people in the same denomination could be using the same religious rhetoric for two completely different things. That leads to a big question we have as political scientists in thinking about this linkage between religion and politics, which is: who’s pulling the cart? Is it that religion is directing politics or is it politics directing religion? Right now we’re seeing clear shifting in terms of religious beliefs or religious traditions based upon partisan lines, but historically we’ve seen this linkage between religious institutions and politics. Which is taking the lead? It may differ. As new religious movements come in, that may drastically change politics, but as the politics change, it might change the religion. It’s difficult to really put your hands on these ideas and measure and figure out which one comes first.
Newman: One of the things I wonder about is if being secular is really just a way of hiding or controlling what is religious, so that there’s sort of a hidden set of religious assumptions still behind the secular. When you look at categories of religion and religion in politics, are you also then including people who say they are not religious? Do they still belong in these categories of religious people in some way? Or do they become something separate that you don’t then work with?
McDaniel: That's a very important group. Looking at the people often referred to as the unaffiliated or the “nones,” what we find is that there are people who are unaffiliated and then people who are atheists. Ruth Braunstein, who is a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, has looked at this and what she finds is a lot of the people who are unaffiliated really don’t want to have to be tied to an institution. They have that level of independence, and the growth of nondenominational churches allows them to kind of move away from certain labels. They still might think like a Baptist, though, so they’re Baptist-adjacent. We’re also seeing a lot of people who are not identifying in terms of partisanship. People are not identifying in a lot of ways. I think it’s really a part of people trying to re-sort themselves and figure out where they’re going to put themselves.
But given the importance of religion within the U.S., if we have a number of people who are not engaged in these institutions, what does that mean? What institution are they now going to to gain certain information?
This is something that the U.S. has encountered before. After the Revolutionary War there was a concern about Americans being unchurched. During and before the Cold War, Americans were being unchurched. There’s always been this fear that the U. S. will become unchurched and what do we do about these individuals who are either atheist or unaffiliated? Because they are seen as a group that you can’t really predict and a group that you don't know where they’re coming from.
Newman: And when you use “churched,” you mean any religious institutions. So unchurched would be people who aren’t Jewish or aren't Muslim or aren’t…
McDaniel: Yeah, they’re not interacting with religious institutions. And if you look at American attitudes, Americans do not like atheists at all. There’s a survey question — I think Gallup has asked this question — that if your party nominated somebody who was a woman, black, gay, Jewish, or Catholic for president, would you vote for that person? And what you see over time is about 90 percent of the people saying, yes, I would vote for that person. But atheists still trail drastically. They’ve only asked this question about Muslims once and Muslims are maybe one point ahead of the atheists. And another thing: the Texas Constitution says you cannot hold office unless you acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. It can’t be enforced, but the idea is that there’s something horribly wrong with an atheist. I think it’s something that creates a lot of this concern about the unaffiliated and what this means going forward for how we understand the U.S.
Crosson: The thing about the Cold War and this fear of atheism is interesting because according to one origin story, our field or discipline, religious studies, was born out of this Cold War fear of atheism. They were like, “we need a discipline that’s going to teach these university and college students religion so that they won’t become atheists.”
Newman: And this is when “under God” got put on our money and in the Pledge of Allegiance. They’re both connected to the Cold War, and we forget that. We think it’s always been there, but it hasn’t.
McDaniel: Yeah. I think Hoover told a group of children, “the best way to fight communism is going to church.” Billy Graham said, “if you want to be a better Christian, be a better American. If you want to be a better American, become a better Christian.” It’s this wedding of piety and patriotism. One of the things that I point out in my most recent book is that a lot of religious institutions have a flag representing their religion or whatever denomination they’re part of, but they have an American flag there as well. And if you think of religion as respecting no borders, why is there a need for the American flag? Why does Notre Dame start off its games with the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer? Because there’s this, again, strong connection between the two.
Newman: Thinking a little more about American politics, I wonder how your understanding of the relationship of religion and politics helps you understand what’s happening in the U.S. right now. We’ve talked a little bit about the history, but we’re all looking at the election, we’re all looking at a variety of different Supreme Court decisions and other kinds of discussions. Why do we need to understand religion to make sense of what's happening right at this moment? Brent, why is understanding Trinidad going to help us understand the U.S.? Because I think it probably does in some ways, doesn’t it?
Crosson: In terms of the U.S. elections, what can Trinidad show us? I think it’s probably better to look towards Brazil or Argentina, more within Latin America, to understand a certain style of sovereignty that is often hard for liberals to understand. There’s a certain vision of sovereignty where the sovereign can stand outside the law in order to enforce law and order. Trump is the law-and-order president but his ability to stand outside the law is also part of the attraction of his kind of sovereignty. And I think that there’s this desire for order. His supporters imagine this sovereign figure coming in and imposing a certain social order that they want to maintain.
On the other hand, I think there’s a more liberal style that’s more about trying to imagine the possibility of consensus. Like thinking that there’s these Trump supporters out there who are just misinformed and if we could have a rational discussion or if they could get better information they would see the light and then we’d all get together. This is a very mainstream white liberal idea, but it’s the dream of the ability to have consensus. I think there is some kind of ontological difference between those two visions of politics that makes it hard for people to understand where each other are coming from.
McDaniel: What you see out of a lot of Trump supporters is that he’s taken on the image of being a Messiah-like figure who’s coming in to save us from whatever damnation is coming about because of the changes you’re seeing. A lot of the thinking about this in the U.S. context goes back to the idea that religion justifies power and that the dominant religious perspective is there to dictate who gets power and who does not. If we think of religion as establishing a sense of morality and undergirding that, then we can think about how people are following through on this. And I think the press is still a little bit behind on its nuance in talking about religion. It treats groups as if they’re homogeneous and it fails to recognize there’s a lot going on.
You get a lot of complaints about “where’s the coverage of the religious left.” It’s almost as if the religious left is seen as illegitimate, but certain pockets of people are calling this out and you now have some level of mobilization on the left. One of the best examples of that would be Reverend William Barber III in North Carolina with his Moral Mondays protest. You have Jim Wallis with Sojourners and Robbie Jones with the PRRI and some of the work that he’s done. But this group is not getting anywhere near the attention that the Christian right is getting. It’s seen as, “to be religious means to be this,” and that ignores a lot of things. It gives us a very simplified story of religion in American politics that undercuts the good, the bad, and the ugly of religion.
In general, we and the press have failed to get at the huge racial divide in American religion and how segregated American religion is. If you want to talk about two Americas, there’s two Christianities that are in a constant fight with each other. The growth of the Nation of Islam, the growth of the Black Israelites and other, what you may think of as extremist, religious organizations, is out of frustration at what they’re seeing coming out of white Christianity, which is, as they see it, the antithesis of Black liberation and Black equality.
Newman: That’s why I think the question that you’re asking about what people feel called to do is an interesting one. Someone once suggested to me that the big division within Christianity — and it may not be a division, because there’s a kind of yes and both — was between people who want to model themselves on Jesus’ behavior versus people who see Jesus as the atoning sacrifice for your sins. These are two different ways of thinking about what you’re called to do. One is to go out and perhaps take care of the poor and the other might be to convert people so that they too understand the sacrifice that has been made for them. Those are two very different perspectives. I’m curious how that might map onto the racial division that you’re thinking about within Christianity.
McDaniel: Thinking about modeling yourself after the way Jesus carried himself, you see that in the idea of understanding Jesus as being a refugee, somebody who was an outsider, someone who was part of an oppressive system and trying to overcome an oppressive system versus somebody who is a conqueror. The left talks about this as, “We need to overcome oppression out of a love of each other. We need to care for the sick. We need to make sure that the poor are treated well. We need to not marginalize people, but bring them in.” But from the other side, it's about, “No, we need to dictate exactly what happens.” It moves from being something that's anti-establishment to something that is the core of the establishment. What you get out of the left is much more of an anti-establishment approach of saying, “look, the way we do things needs to change. We need to evolve in terms of how we think about the world.” Whereas the other one is more, “because of Christ’s sacrifice I’m justified in having this power.” And that creates two completely different outlooks on the world. One is about identifying with the powerless. The other one is about identifying with power.
This panel was part of UT College of Liberal Arts’ Open Forum dialogue series, which places faculty from different disciplines in conversation with one another over shared topics of interest and research.
Martha Newman, interim chair of UT’s Department of History and a professor of history and religious studies, is a scholar of medieval European history with an interest in the intersection of religious practices and ideas with social change.
Eric McDaniel, an associate professor in UT’s Department of Government and co-director of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab, is the author of Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches and co-author of The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, which explores the ramifications of Americans’ belief that the U.S. is God’s chosen nation.
J. Brent Crosson is a sociocultural anthropologist of religion, secularism, migration, and politics. An associate professor in UT’s Department of Religious Studies, he’s the author of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad, which won the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for Anthropology of Religion.