Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:01
[Music] the title of my talk today is when is religion a conversation
00:00:24
stopper i'm going to talk about the rise of religion in the public square and what kind of repercussions
00:00:35
that hold for our societies and and under what conditions can we achieve mutual respect so in recent decades the intersection of
00:00:49
religion and political agendas has become an increasing factor in the world hindu national nationalism in india for example has risen under the current government leadership of prime minister nohindra
00:01:02
modi in 2019 the supreme court of india entrusted the original site of a muslim mosque babri mashid which had been destroyed by hindu riots
00:01:15
in 1992 exclusively to hindus donald trump marshaled the unapologetic and vehement support of evangelical christians in the united states
00:01:27
this past summer the u.s president truculently brandished a bible in front of saint john's church near the white house in washington d.c for a political photo op
00:01:40
in december 2020 at a washington d.c rally in support of the defeated trump who to this day has not acknowledged the legitimate election results and just weeks before the violent
00:01:54
insurrection in the halls of the u.s congress in january 2021 the author radio host and trump supporter eric matuxis harang to the crowd
00:02:06
we are here today to cry out to the god of heaven to ask him to have mercy on the greatest nation in the history of the world in october 2020 a heart-wrenching
00:02:20
brutal murder and beheading of a middle school teacher samoa pati in confluence honoring france occurred at the hands of an islamist terrorist
00:02:33
that event provoked despite patti's careful and sensitive presentation of the controversial images of muhammad published in the journal charlie hebdo in 2015
00:02:47
rekindled the debate in france about the meaning of lai city in this case how to respond to radical religion in the public sphere in a society
00:03:00
founded on the right to free speech in the separation of church and state all of these examples though vastly different in form and context
00:03:11
reflect the conflation of the religious and political domains that confront the world and in particular bring into sharp focus the question of religion's
00:03:23
place in the public sphere granted this intersection illustrates perhaps nothing new in the history of humankind yet its current proliferation is worth our renewed attention
00:03:37
in an op-ed in limond november 2nd 2020 william marks professor at the college de france addressing the understandably indignant and horrified response to the public
00:03:51
execution-like murder of samuel patti insightfully refers to a french allergy nacional exhibited towards religion which in his view
00:04:04
manifests a grave intellectual era and political mistake marx continues his globally relevant essay concerning the purported allergy of anti-religious discourse by
00:04:19
referencing the french philosoph voltaire who believed marx rights in the ideal of the passive coexistence of all confessions of believers and non-believers that
00:04:33
mutually respect each other in the public sphere voltaire via marx raises a critical question about the parameters or conditions for establishing
00:04:45
and maintaining mutual respect in democratic and pluralistic societies thus sensitivity to and respect for religious sentiment in the public sphere
00:04:58
is critical in this regard as marx suggests but i believe that a burden must also be placed on the way and manner in which religion becomes manifest in the public domain
00:05:11
for the achievement of mutual respect in a pluralistic society if intellectuals and politicians need to rethink the reception and response to religious
00:05:23
influence to respect religion in our societies and in public discourse a two-way street in which both sides must respect the other must exist
00:05:36
to attain voltaire's lofty goal of mutual respect in other words religious thinkers and believers must also play a role in achieving mutual respect
00:05:50
in this brief talk i want to approach this by discussing the role of religious sentiment in the public square as a supplicant supplement to marx's important appeal
00:06:03
in preface the violent or autocratic applications of religious beliefs as we have seen in the previously cited examples do not necessarily preclude benevolent
00:06:15
motivations or even fruitful results that might ensue from the discharge of religious values in the social or public or political sphere nor do such
00:06:27
acts inevitably suggest that religious discourse in the public sphere categorically manifests the assertion of parochial power yet if we believe that in democratic and
00:06:40
pluralistic societies the public square must remain open to fair and civil debate then such powerful religious sentiments that become linked to political action
00:06:53
begs the question of religion's role in the public square to be more specific when religious forces attempt to monopolize the ways and means to attain
00:07:05
religious and political insight in a self-contained model or when religious acts are considered to be ordained by divine authority debate about the
00:07:17
parameters of generating human knowledge and achieving social unity become unconditionally seated to those belonging to that religion in what state and
00:07:31
condition does that leave the spiritual outsider is there room in such a construction for creating inclusive public discourse in social cultural and political domains
00:07:45
is religion from this perspective a conversation stopper as richard rorty so famously put it by which he meant that religion should be private
00:07:58
and hold no place place in discussions of public policy to explore further and reiterate there's nothing malevolent in and of itself in the application of
00:08:11
religious sentiment to inform our viewpoints and actions in the social and political sphere as nicholas waltersdorf has argued in response
00:08:23
to rorty's controversial argument that religion is a conversation stopper and thus should be denied space in the public sphere waltersdorf counters rorty
00:08:35
in all the great religions of the world there are strands of conviction which tell us that pocketbook privacy and nation are not of first importance
00:08:47
in all of them there are strands of conviction which tell that in the name of god we must honor the other even when that other is not only
00:08:59
other than ourselves but other than a member of our nation silence religion woltersdorf continues and the debasement represented by private and group egoism
00:09:12
will follow many religious thinkers and believers hold beliefs that can be defended from an ethical viewpoint the commendable strands of conviction
00:09:27
that guide us to honor the other as waltersdorf's assessment puts it are worthy and even essential to democratic discourse in public debate
00:09:39
yet his penultimate claim that when religious belief is restricted or eliminated from public discourse then as he put it private and group egoism
00:09:50
will follow assumes a causal relationship between religious precepts applications in the public sphere and social outcomes that is far more
00:10:02
problematic waltersdorf's rationale seems to me to be another example of falling into a an unresolvable causality trap
00:10:14
rarity in a later reconsideration that he addressed to waltersdorff points out we grant that ecclesiastical organizations have sometimes been on the right side
00:10:27
but we think that the occasional gustavo gutierrez or martin luther king does not compensate for the ubiquitous joseph ratzingers and jerry falwells history suggests to
00:10:41
us that such organizations will always on balance do more harm than good yet rorty's argument is also essentially based
00:10:52
on the establishment of a causal link between religion the ecclesiastical organization and malevolence to resolve these two opposed views of causality or about
00:11:06
causality are we likely to achieve a successful conclusion by listing or creating a tit-for-tat data set for good and bad religious influence hardly
00:11:19
casting lists of examples of good religion or bad religion at opponents whether institutional organizational or individual will scarcely provide a conclusive
00:11:32
answer waltersdorf however adds a significant caveat to his strands of conviction that exposes what i believe is the crux of the problem in the intersection of religion and politics
00:11:47
when he conditions the purpose and utility of these strands quote in the name of god religious voices have often co-opted providence in their appeal to a higher
00:12:01
authority which can be and frequently has been abused in the name of an articulated religious myth that intersected with the political sphere
00:12:14
and yielded horrendous outcomes the creation of myth as a bonding element in the social cultural and political sphere is part and parcel to the history of humankind whether that
00:12:28
god was religion or to use waltersdorf's analogies pocketbook privacy or nation the abuses of ideological canopies
00:12:41
hardly require list millions of heretics have been tortured murdered or burned at the stake in the name of religion crusades inquisition in salem
00:12:55
millions of others have been executed in the name of national glory and cultural personality stu stalin's colleagues gulags and nazi death camps and the pocketbook
00:13:08
also easily intersected with the genocide in the belgian congo in the name of a civilizing mission that exhibited the confluence of religion politics and the pocketbook in its most
00:13:21
hideous form despite the heroic efforts of some missionaries to to expose the abuses no list suffices to encompass all of the strands of conviction
00:13:37
that have emerged as unassailable ideologies in the name of god the nation or economic gain my point however is to avoid a tit-for-tat assessment of
00:13:50
malevolent or benevolent applications of religious precepts or oppose religious conviction rather i only hope to expose the particular linkage
00:14:02
between religious taxonomies and political applications that has repeatedly raised its ugly head throughout history many religious believers
00:14:14
and their factions attempt to address legitimate social and political issues in spiritual and moral terms which can so easily be grounded in the claimed
00:14:27
authority of providence divine ordination and thus become the source of imposing and self-interested mandates and models in response
00:14:40
to the debate with rorty and others over religious discourse in the public sphere jeffrey stout implores us to grant that the political benefits and dangers of each package of
00:14:53
commitments will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis and to inquire into what happens when belief in god's existence
00:15:05
gets linked to this or that set of collateral commitments religious factions often become intricately entangled in the social and political dynamics of
00:15:17
their communities and nations they co-opt religious precepts in an attempt to address prevalent social cultural and political dilemmas
00:15:30
but which include the assertion of their influence in the community and collateral commitments that serve the affirmation of their religious tenets in political outcomes this does not
00:15:45
denigrate religious values categorically yet it does bring into focus front and center what was and can be done with religiously derived
00:15:57
viewpoints they can easily merge with collateral commitments that underlie and corrupt benevolent notions and aims and open them up to justify and carry
00:16:11
out malevolent exploits in the name of god one is reminded of bruce lincoln's bold comparison of al qaeda's ideological justification
00:16:24
of the brutal and despicable violence of september 11 2001 and george w bush's religiously grounded political response in that context lincoln wrote
00:16:38
rather than being a divine and unfailing ground of morality religion begins with a human discourse that constructs itself as divine and unfailing to which deeds
00:16:52
any deeds can be defined as moral in a democratic and pluralistic society in which rational and logical and perhaps most importantly
00:17:04
in our current era the best scientific evidentiary arguments should be made religiously based arguments that tap into a higher authority
00:17:16
can be and have been conversation stoppers it should be respectfully called such when religious religious arguments that inform the public's fear
00:17:29
are grounded solely in divine authority you
End of transcript