Observing Conservative Religious Politics

By John Ballard

A post at Duck of Minerva provides anecdotal evidence pointing to the growth of religious politics in disparate places.

Jon Western is a professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College in Hadley, MA. His teaching and research interests focus on U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, human rights and humanitarian affairs. He teaches courses such as American Foreign Policy; American Hegemony and Global Politics in the 21st Century; The United States and the Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights; and Propaganda and War (with Professor Kavita Khory).

I've been on the road most of the summer (8 of the past 10 weeks) so the blogging has been quite light. I spent twelve days in Israel and then a bit more than three weeks doing research in Europe followed by my first real vacation in more than a decade -- a three week car trip with my kids out to visit family and friends in the upper Midwest.

One of the more intriguing elements that linked all three trips was the presence of conservative, religious politics everywhere I went. I talked to Jewish settlers on the West Bank, I spent time with several young (and newly self-identified) conservative Muslims from Sarajevo and Paris, and I spent three weeks with conservative, Christian evangelicals in North Dakota, central Minnesota, and western Michigan.

Despite the differences in religion and world experiences, I am struck by the similarity of these groups to each other. Here are a few observations:

1. Perhaps the most obvious observation is that religious identity is the most salient identity held by individuals in each of these communities and, while I've interacted with each of these communities for years, the beliefs are more highly political and exclusivist than I've experienced in the past. Each community feels besieged and perceives there are coordinated attacks by "others" to de-legitimize their beliefs and their culture.

They each see existential threats everywhere they look, but the central threat is really coming from liberalism. Secularlism, human rights, globalization and open markets, free trade, labor and capital mobility, migration (legal or not), etc... are all seen as posing fundamental threats to their (perceived) way of life.

2. It is not the zeal or energy that is striking or new, rather it is the casualness and ease with which so many members of these communities express their intolerance, xenophobia, and even outright racism. There isn't even a pretense of politeness or basic civility, let alone any curiosity of the other. I had a lengthy conversation with several young Bosnian Muslims who repeatedly invoked Allah to convey collective guilt not just on the Serbs but on all the "filthy" and "genocidal" Serbs, Christians, and Jews. I heard references to Palestinians as collectively "lazy" and "bred to be terrorists." In North Dakota, I heard repeated racial epithets (the n-word) directed at President Obama and several references to his "godless Islamic cult." In some instances, complete strangers approached my conversations with various groups to add additional diatribes against the "other." I was really astounded by the ease with which such raw, emotional, and racist language was expressed.

3. Each community is adamantly anti-authority and says it "just wants to be left alone" from the influence of the state. Settlers in the West Bank settlement of Offra showed us settlement homes that were demolished by the Israeli government as part of the peace process several years back. The settlers have left the ruins untouched as a monument of their struggle against the Israeli government and the peace process. The Sarajevo Muslims railed against the the Bosnian central government for its efforts to integrate communities, to develop tax codes and regulatory infrastructures in Bosnia. And, the evangelical Tea Partiers in the upper Midwest blasted America's "socialist" federal government.

And yet, despite all of their protests, all three groups are wholly dependent on the state for their basic existence -- the settlers could not live in the West Bank without the Israeli government providing electricity, water, transportation and communication infrastrasture -- let alone security. The Bosnian Muslims would not have a unified community or protection without a viable central government. And, the rural tea partiers -- the farmers and ranchers -- could not exist without a federal government that keeps them afloat with extensive agricultural subsidies and direct assistance to maintain rural electricity, communication, and transportation -- the Dakotas rank in the top five of per capita federal dollars to states. The cognitive dissonance is palpable....

4. Many hold militant and apocalyptic views. Many of the folks I talked to believe the world is in serious trouble -- politically and economically. The settlers in Offra told my group that there will be civil war if the Israeli government tries to demolish more houses or dismantle settlements. The Bosnian Muslims -- most who were too young to fight in the Bosnian War in the 1990s -- warned that they were ready to finish the job that their fathers and brothers were unable to finish against the infidels. And, in the upper Midwest, the gun culture includes far more emphasis on automatic and semi-automatic weapons designed to protect "God and Country" from "Obama's socialism" than the emphasis on hunting with shotguns and hunting rifles I grew up with.

It is not surprising that such views seem to be rising -- especially in a time of global recession. But, it would be a mistake to conclude that these views are simply a function of economics. We've seen fairly consistent trends in the rise of religious fundamentalism across the globe for the better part of the past twenty years. Liberalism has become more deeply embedded in global institutions and practices in the past several decades, but it also has triggered widespread reactions. Still, with global liberal economic models performing poorly, we're likely to see more anxiety and the rise of more populist demagogues seeking to exploit that anxiety.

I agree with his observations but don't agree they result from a failure of Liberal economic models. Liberal economic models do exist but they are few and far between and not likely to reflect the xenophobia he describes.

I'm reminded of the "revolution of rising expectations" bouncing around academia forty or fifty years ago.The notion was that what was being called "development" sweeping the world was dividing the world's societies into Haves and Have-nots unevenly, leading to expectations on the part of the Have-nots that they soon expected to join the ranks of the Haves. The idea seemed reasonable with the post-war economic recoveries of Japan and Germany, and later the emergence of Korea and other countries that seemed to be pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.

I'm not sure what he means by "Liberalism" but the anxiety he describes is more reactionary than conservative. That anxiety derives from a very real fear that what little has been achieved over the last few decades is apt to be snatched away in a flash by forces over which they have no control. I'm thinking of transnational corporations (manufacturing, banking, trade and resources) abetted by those populist demagogues to which he refers.

We live now in a time when geo-political constructs of the past -- whether maps or ideologies -- are subordinate to global business entities. Any group standing in the way, whether religious, ethnic or political is subject to being overrun, bought out, pushed aside or eliminated. The anxiety of those groups is not based on imaginary fears. 

Bhopal, The Niger Delta, The Lord's Resistance Army, cruelty of the Zetas and other groups and a raft of other places are bleeding sores that are not fictitious. There is nothing particularly Liberal about economic models which continue to have ninety percent of a population subsisting on two or three percent of the wealth. With few exceptions that is the ratio for most of the world's economies.