Religion and Politics

Religion and politics share a common concern: the order of human beings in the social world in order to avoid the problem of chaos. If at least one definition [Page 771]of politics is the means by which we order our community and even our personal conduct through the formulation and acceptance of certain rules, laws, and institutions that oversee them, then religion has always had a political function by structuring the world—both inner and outer—in order to provide or enforce some kind of organizing order and meaning of the community. Dominating premodern or pre-Enlightenment concepts of religion and religious life was the notion that the individual was ensconced in a broader order of things, one ordained supernaturally that structured communal relationships as well as personal attitudes toward authority and social power by linking that order of things to some transcendental authority. Religion possessed a political function precisely because it served as the undergirding rationalization for law and the ways that social relationships were governed and organized within the community.

At the same time, religion also, and most important, provided an inner sense of obligation on the part of individuals that legitimized certain forms of social power and hierarchy. The separation between the inner or private life and the outer or public one was always unified in traditional religious societies, or at least mostly so. The result was that ritual and belief served a political purpose in the sense that they provided a legitimation for authority, since they were able to unite the political hierarchies that existed within the community with a cosmological schema. Thus, the relation between religion and politics has always dealt with the problem of value orientations: individuals must orient their subjective values, at least in some degree, toward the acceptance of the order in which they live. Both religion and politics therefore find a common ground in that they seek, albeit in different ways, to orient individuals toward social order and in some way to legitimize that order.

The word religion is a compound of two Latin words: re (“again”) and ligare (“to bind”). In this sense, it denotes a strong connection with origins, with the foundations of the past, as an authority for grounding or validating the present. But its connection with politics becomes more explicit when we realize that the past participle of the verb ligare is lex (“bound”), which is the Latin word for “law.” Religion, therefore, becomes more than simply a metaphysical doctrine in this sense, for it takes on the status of an order between members of a community by “binding” them to certain acts and beliefs. Religion, therefore, can be said to possess a political function in the sense that it provides a framework—either through subjective ethics or through sacred law—to orient individuals toward a particular social order, usually a social order that has some grounding or validity in a transcendent authority (i.e., a god or gods). Historically, religion and politics existed more as a unity—each one informing the other—to the extent that, in some cases, as in ancient Egypt, little distinction existed between religious understanding of the universe and social order and political authority.

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