Introduction
It is important to note that both religion and politics are essential elements of social dynamics, and they are among the core pillars upon which society rests. The given analysis will primarily focus on the given two categories in the context of citizenship, personhood, the state, and transition from localization of religion to global politics. Therefore, in order to provide a comprehensive comparative assessment of politics and religion, the emphasis will be put on their co-evolution and co-existence, which shaped human history and led to the modern condition of secularism on the basis of religious freedom.
Understanding Roots of Religion
Beliefs and ritual and cult practices are older or more ancient than politics since they appeared in the process of human development. Historically, the first type of human assimilation of the world was the primitive syncretic type, and its spiritual sphere was formed by mythology, which united knowledge and skills, norms and patterns, beliefs and rituals, mimesis and song-dance, or ornament. In the course of the differentiation of the mythological complex, various areas of spiritual culture, such as art, morality, philosophy, religion, politics, and science, were gradually isolated and relatively separated from each other (Velikonja, 2003). For all the complexity, non-linearity, and ambiguity of the relationship between religion, art, morality, philosophy, politics, science in history, they mutually influence each other, formed the unity and integrity of this universe of spiritual life (Fox, 2018). In different epochs, various historical and cultural situations took shape, and certain areas of culture received the most intense expression and development. For example, these are art and philosophy in Antiquity, religion in the Middle Ages, philosophy in the New Age, and science in modern times. However, the state as the main subject of political power, occupying a central place in the political system, possessed the tools of the use of force and always provided the opportunity to ensure the dictates of politics, and not only within the political system but also in other areas of the life of society, groups, individuals.
One can indicate that religion is one of the spheres of the spiritual life of society, groups, an individual, a way of practically spiritual mastery of the world, one of the areas of spiritual production. As such, it can be characterized from different angles. First, it is an aspect of their life that arises in the process of the formation of a person and society, its actively acting component. Religion has foundations and prerequisites in the cosmos, planet Earth, society, groups, and the individual. Among scientists, the most widely represented point of view is that the emergence and existence of religion are primarily associated with relations of non-freedom, dependence, with that area of human existence that is inaccessible to management, command, regulation (Fox, 2018). However, having these relationships as its basis, religion can and transforms them within itself into the experience of stability, security, freedom, and power.
Second, religion is a way of expressing and overcoming exclusionary relationships. It expresses the transformation of a person’s own forces into forces alienated from him, a reversal, a rearrangement of actual relations, the adoption of one for the other, and the doubling of the world take place. Expressing the relationship of alienation, religion acts simultaneously as a way to overcome them. The need for liberation from the power of alien forces seeks its satisfaction in the ideas and rituals of purification, repentance, justification, salvation, asceticism, overcoming falling away from God, gaining a lost paradise, and consolation. Religion mitigates the effects of real alienation through charity, charity, and the unification of disunited individuals in a community.
Thirdly, religion is a reproduction, a reflection of reality; it imprints in itself the processes and properties of nature, society, and man. If so, then it contains relevant, adequate information about the reflected. Receiving data, she actively processes and transforms them, creates a picture of the world, an image of personhood, nature, and society (Fox, 2018). Religion reflects the diverse phenomena of reality, both those aspects of it that determine bondage and dependence and those relations in which human freedom and the ability to control natural and social processes are expressed.
Expression of Political Relations and Processes in Religion
It is important to pay attention to the foundations of religion, rooted in politics. They are primarily associated with the imperious nature of political relations, mechanisms of coercion and authoritarian influence, the use of the power of the state, including repressive mechanisms. One may argue that the basis of religion is a person’s sense of dependence. In the early stages of history, this dependence was reflected in natural religions with their personifications of the forces and phenomena of nature, but gradually man turned into a political being.
From a purely physical being, one’s personhood becomes a political being, just as God from a purely metaphysical being becomes a political being and different from nature. The alienation of politics from the individual and social groups, political coercion to certain types of activity, political means of exploiting workers, oppression of the state, the use of brutal suppression mechanisms by the authorities, lack of control of power, ethnic cleansing, genocide, exploitation of colonies by metropolises, and wars (Hurd, 2017). All this determines the formation of relations of the lack of freedom, dependence, and domination-subordination. In addition, the political factor, expressing the interests of certain groups, organizations, institutions, can enhance the actions of social dynamics, anthropic, socio-cultural, anthropological, psychological foundations, and preconditions of religion. An example of social factors can be a destructive policy in the field of material production in general or its individual sectors, while anthropic ones can include support for polluting industries, orders for the production of chemical, nuclear, biological, or psychotropic weapons. An example of sociocultural elements is a reduction in budget allocations for the development of education and culture, and anthropological ones are the failure to ensure the optimal minimum costs for the implementation of health programs, while psychological factors can involve the excitement of fear and anxiety through the media.
Political and power relations of the State are reflected and expressed in religious consciousness, activities, relationships, organizations. These relationships influenced the formation and development of ideas and concepts about the gods. The earliest of these ideas is the image of a tribal deity, which arose under the conditions of a late clan system, the folding and development of tribal ethnic groups. The tribal god rallied the representatives of a given tribe, expressed its separation from other tribes, was limited in its radius of action by the framework of this ethnic group, outside of which other gods ruled. He was in charge of all the processes in which the vital activity of the tribe manifested itself, but most importantly, he was a warrior god, a protector, inspired to fight with other tribes and their gods (Fox, 2018). During the formation of the state, the formation of alliances of tribes or city-states around the most powerful tribe or city-state, the god of the latter became intertribal or national, turned into the head of the pantheon, which included the gods of other tribes and city-states as subordinates. A system of polytheism was formed, and with the further division of labor and differentiation of society, as well as under the influence of integration processes, the formation of nationalities, power, monotheism was formed in some peoples. The idea and concept of the one and only God, who controls all the diverse natural and social phenomena, arose, among other things, as a reflection of the structure of monarchical despotism, headed by a single ruler.
Dynamics of Religion and Politics
The State’s political phenomena are reproduced in religious relations, and the latter represents a type of relationship in the spiritual sphere of society and the idea of citizenship. They are formed in accordance with religious consciousness, are realized and exist through religious activity, individuals, groups, institutions, organizations can be their carriers. Religious relationships have a subjective element and a plane of consciousness. The latter assumes a certain relationship of people to objectified beings, properties, and connections, as well as believers with each other. The first relationship unfolds in the plane of consciousness, but it manifests itself in real relationships between people, for example, between a layperson and a clergyman. The contacts of believers with each other, although they are related to the indicated creatures, properties, connections, are real relationships (Fox, 2018). At the same time, the religious consciousness, reflecting and expressing real relations, in their image and likeness constructs the schemes of religious relations. In accordance with these schemes, the relations of objectified beings with each other and people, people with these beings and with each other are represented the schemas model relationships of domination and subordination, state structures, legal relations, and family relationships. In Catholicism, there is a canonical, ecclesiastical law that prescribes the rules and relationships between the clergy and the laity, as well as within the clergy.
Political, state, and legal relations are reflected in the structure of religious organizations. The structure of a religious organization is prescribed by certain norms, church law or charter, apostolic rules, and constitutions. Organizational principles determine its constituent parts, a set of positions and roles, rules for the subordination and coordination of the activities of individuals and individual links, nodes of activity, and, accordingly, groups of actors designed to ensure the unity of the association (Siedentop, 2014). Depending on the conditions of origin and existence, religious organizations adopt the monarchist in Catholicism, the parliamentary-royal Anglicanism or Episcopalians, the republican-democratic in Calvinism and Baptism. The primary unit of an association is a religious community, and a complex of links is built over the communities up to the highest echelon or the center of the association. There are a number of other constituent elements in the association that have specific organizational ties, but at the same time, are included in the overall structure. The individual components have their own infrastructure, and all the links become interconnected tools, organs of the whole.
The bearers of religion in different historical conditions could be a family, ethnos, estate, class, professional group, a state with its subjects or parts of these communities, socio-religious groups, and religious individuals. A particularly large role in the storage and transmission of religion was played by the strata distinguished by religion: Varna of the Brahmans in Ancient India, the priests in the ancient slave-owning states, the class of clergy in medieval feudal monarchies. With the formation of stable religious communities, differentiated from others, the priority is given to them in ensuring the preservation, development, and functioning of religion.
Secularism and Sacralism
Depending on the place of religion in society, its influence may be greater or lesser. The place of religion changes in the course of sacralization and secularization. Sacralization is a process of involvement in the sphere of religious sanctioning of various forms of social and individual consciousness, social relations, behavior, and activities of people, institutions (Joas, 2016). Secularization is the process of freeing public and individual consciousness from the influence of religious ideas and views, social relations, activities, and institutions from religious sanctioning (Taylor, 2007). The tendency towards sacralization is characteristic of pre-capitalist types of societies, such as primitive, slave-owning, and feudal. With the formation of bourgeois relations, the destruction of the patriarchal-medieval community, the development of sciences and industry, the process of secularization expanded.
In the modern age, in the global political arena, religion occupies a different place in different countries and regions. The degree of its influence depends on the level and nature of economic and political development, class, interethnic and other relations, on the degree of activity of religious organizations. The influence of traditional tribal religions is great in a number of countries in Africa, South America, Australia, Islam in North Africa, the Near and Middle East, in Indonesia, Buddhism in the countries of Indochina, Judaism in Israel, Hinduism in India, and Shinto in Japan (Lane & Redissi, 2016). They actively interfere in various spheres of public life, including politics, Christian organizations in the developed countries of the USA, England, or Italy.
At certain stages of history, in certain regions and countries, political relations have received and are receiving the religious design, religious significance. The interests of classes, strata, ethnic groups, estates, professional and other social groups, political conflicts during slavery, feudalism, in the conditions of the Asian mode of production, in regions where patriarchal-clan and feudal relations are currently preserved, and often in developed countries, were and performed in a religious manner.
Religious individuals, groups, associations, organizations are adhering to the principles of social service, rejecting the principles of religious law. The examples might include leaders of confessions, heads of religious organizations and these organizations themselves, monastic orders, ethnoreligious and socio-religious groups, religious states, other carriers of religion, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Judaist, Hindu, and other parties, trade unions, women’s and youth movements, specially created to solve some problems of formation, as well as various international unions. Religious subjects form certain political attitudes, develop religious and political concepts and programs, norms of church law, principles of the state structure. Political issues occupy a significant place in the social encyclicals of the Popes. Historically, religious and political movements took shape, which was a product of the fusion of political and religious processes (Lee et al., 2018). The socio-political practice of religious subjects was protective, neutral, radically rejecting in relation to the authorities, the regime, the existing order, and other phenomena of politics. A special form of religious-political relations and movements is religious wars – armed clashes, the main goals of which are expressed in religious demands. This includes converting the unconverted, gaining religious freedom, restoring the purity of the original principles of religion, establishing new confessional truths, defending the old faith.
Religious Freedom and Personhood
Freedom of thought includes the right to dissent, presupposes freedom of scientific research, discussion and creative activity, the right of everyone to education, participation in cultural life, and enjoyment of the results of cultural, including scientific, progress. Freedom of conscience means the ability of a person to independently make an ideological choice in favor of a religious or non-religious worldview in their various forms, to form the motives of the corresponding action and determine the actions themselves, to show tolerance to other ways of thinking, views, beliefs, and readiness for consensus. Until a certain age, a person does not have and cannot have such freedom. One cannot talk about the realization of freedom of conscience if a person accepts or changes views under the influence of suggestion, hypnosis (Hurd, 2017). Freedom of conscience is trampled upon when a person is forced to accept or reject beliefs. Freedom of religion is the freedom to have or accept any religion of one’s choice and to practice one’s religion either alone or in community with others, publicly or privately, in teaching, worship, worship, and the performance of religious rites.
Freedom of opinion includes the freedom to adhere to one’s beliefs, both religious and non-religious, to freely express them, seek, receive and impart information and ideas by any means and regardless of state borders. All people are equal before the law and have the right to equal protection without any discrimination. Rights and freedoms are ensured without any distinction as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other beliefs, national and social origin, property, class, or another status (Hurd, 2017). In countries where there are ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities, persons belonging to such minorities may not be denied the right, together with other members of the same group, to use their culture, practice their religion and practice its rituals. Parents are given the freedom to provide religious and moral education for their children in accordance with their own convictions. Any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence must be prohibited by law. The freedom to profess religion or belief is subject only to restrictions established by law and necessary to protect public safety, order, health, and morality, as well as the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the historical type of connection between the political and religious authorities, the state, and religious organizations determined the specifics of raising the issue of freedom in religious relations. The understanding of freedom in religious terms in different historical situations was filled with different content. In the conditions of the union of state and ecclesiastical authorities, the subordination of the Church to the state or the state of the Church, the ideas of the independence of the Church from the state, non-interference of state power in religious affairs, or the independence of the state from the Church arose. The domination of any religious trend and the constraint of other beliefs conditioned the formation of the ideas of religious tolerance, religious freedom, freedom of religious conscience. The emerging religious pluralism led to the idea of the need to recognize the freedom and equality of religions and confessions. With the formation and development of rule-of-law states, equality of political and civil rights, regardless of religion, was formulated. The development of paradigms of thinking, science, other areas of culture, and the associated expansion of the secularization process contributed to the emergence of ideas about freedom of thought, conscience, awareness of the right not only to confess but also to non-confession of religion, and the establishment of secular state education.
References
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