Religious Minorities Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In 1843, Karl Marx announced, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” And it seemed that a little more than one hundred years later, many Westerners had kicked their religious habits. Shortly after Marx, God’s obituary writer Friedrich Nietzsche famously stated that God was dead and that we had killed Him, and by the 1960s, religion was indeed supposed to be dead. In 1967, Martin E. Marty (2004) suggested that spirituality as a topic of public discourse had been abandoned in that decade; however, religion turned out to be the great vanishing act of the twentieth century, reappearing in a flood of intolerance. The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence in religious interest, and religious minorities have been at the center.

Religious Fragmentation

For most of the twentieth century, the principal interest in religious minorities was as a sociological group deserving of particular rights, but of little interest to politics other than that, and an array of international, regional, and national declarations and laws were introduced to protect their rights. Gradually accepting its marginalization in relation to the state, Western Christianity relinquished most of its political functions to the state and loosened hold on the status of national religion, while religious minorities increasingly demanded recognition.

This move to a religious level playing field had the dual benefits of recognizing emerging minority rights while neutralizing religious influence on the national political scene, or so it seemed. Jonathan Fox (2008) argues that religious discrimination has, in fact, increased since 1990, and he offers six major reasons: policies of domestic protection from external influence, religion seen as challenging the state, perception of religious movements as dangerous, religion already linked to national identity, existence of a symbiotic relationship between religion and state, and state religion itself creating discrimination against competitors.

Religious resurgence has fragmented majority religions into minority groups from within and led to the emergence of new religions. Some religious minorities are dismissed universally as a cult, and new religions are frequently ridiculed or discriminated against. They can be perceived as dangerous cults like the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo, as harmful like the Unification Church or Scientology, and as disruptive like Islam fundamentalism. Other religions, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, are treated as borderline sects. Religious discrimination also may overlap with ethnic discrimination, such as in the case of Jews and Sikhs, and create further problems of classification.

Varieties Of Religious Experience

This has played out differently around the globe, and William James’ phrase “the varieties of religious experience” is more apt than ever. Samuel Huntingdon (1993) argues that religious resurgence is a response to urbanization and massive social changes in the twentieth century. As people feel more alienated, religion provides meaning and identity. In the Western consumer culture, it has come back as consumer choice, and as the major political blocs of communism fell, religion filled the void. The religious wars of old gave way in the late twentieth century to new forms of religious terrorism and ethnic cleansing. States also have agonized over more subtle issues like the role of religious dress in schools and in public.

Islam is at the forefront of this debate. The watershed Iranian Revolution (1979) marked the rise of a more globally visible Islam, becoming politically important because of its impact on Arab politics where it is dominant and a concern where it is a minority, particularly in the West. The 9/11 attacks, other acts of extremism, “hate speeches,” the Danish cartoon controversy, and the killing of a Dutch filmmaker have highlighted the tensions in liberal policies of multiculturalism and tolerance. Yet, Islam today is not just about fundamentalism, for there has been a general revitalization of the faith. In the areas of immigration, education, and use of Islamic law there has been a desire of Islamic minorities to hold onto their faith in non-Islamic cultures. Many Muslims reject secularism and want to promote Islamic non-Western values and identity, eschewing hierarchy while balancing transnational and local ideas.

Christianity remains the world’s largest religion, but continually splinters into minorities largely because of liberal and conservative differences on theological and cultural matters. The most significant today is evangelical Pentecostalism, which is growing exponentially in Africa, Asia, and South America to the point of shifting the center of Christian gravity. Hence, in Central and Latin America, evangelicals have challenged hitherto Roman Catholic dominance and become an important political influence promoting conservative and laissez-faire ideals, while conservative Anglicans in America have sought communion with dissenting African bishops over issues like homosexuality.

A Search For Tolerance

The secularization thesis that wealthy societies would repudiate religion as people found their comfort, or opiate, elsewhere, no longer prevails. Perceiving a failure of secularism and liberal democracy, religious minorities have challenged both political and religious orthodoxy. Religious minorities challenge the Western universalist model of religion as a private sphere where all religions are merely different spiritual paths. The problem is that religions make truth claims that often conflict with liberal ideals, cultural trends, and other faiths, and that stray from the parameters acceptable to liberal tolerance. For instance, debates with feminism, sexual ethics, animal rights and ecology bring religious minorities and liberal values into conflict over other rights, such as the role of women in religious life, abortion, ritual slaughter, and stewardship of the earth’s resources.

It is increasingly recognized that identifying an individual or group purely according to religious identity begs gross oversimplification. People belong to gender, class, nation, and various other identifiers, wherein they may hold as much in common as they have in religious difference. It is also an oversimplification to assume there is a singular faith, for each faith is multifaceted. In this spirit, some religionists react by generating interfaith dialog and understanding, arguably the converse of twentieth century relativism. By working together, even agreeing to disagree, they believe tension and conflict can ultimately be transformed into harmony. Religions represent different truth claims, but they are also a human search for ultimate meaning. Thinkers and policy makers who thought we would grow out of it ignored this very core of religion, but the general resurgence of religion and the burgeoning of religious minorities demand a new search for tolerance in the early twenty-first century.

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