RELIGION IN LIBERAL AND AUTHORITARIAN STATES

Bryan S. Turner

The City University of New York and University of Western Sydney

Introduction: The Paradox of the Politics and Economics of Migration

Two aspects of the modern liberal state can be considered basic conditions that influence the place of religion in modern society. The first is the problem of national identity in the face of cultural diversity. Most modern states are culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse. For most states, this diversity is a consequence of massive migration, either historically or more recently. With the globalization of the labor market, host societies have become more complex and diverse, and in addition they have become more difficult to govern. Singapore is an important Asian case where migration, before and after its independence, created a multicultural society; however, today it must deal with even more diversity. Like many other Asian societies, Singapore has a declining fertility rate despite all government attempts to correct that downward trend. As a result, the state must constantly seek to import labor, especially talented labor. With its current population at just over four million and with little opportunity to recover more usable land, the state has decided to increase its population to just over six million. Unless there are very direct controls on the ethnic composition of migrants, economic openness inevitably results in greater ethnic diversity. At the same time, the state has an interest in protecting its own territorial sovereignty and in order to assert its sovereignty over society, it must create the political myth of a morally coherent and integrated society (Kamaludeen, Pereira and Turner, 2009).

Benedict Anderson (1983) has famously written about how nation-states create "imagined communities" through the spread of print media, and this mythical creation essentially involves the construction of a nationalist ideology. Like other states, Singapore must find ways of projecting a common purpose around the state and the image of a unified national community. In particular, it must foster a vivid and meaningful sense of what it is to be a "Singaporean," rather than, for example, a Chinese person living on the island of Singapore whose familial memories are more likely to be connected with mainland China. It must achieve a delicate balancing act between nationalism, internal harmony and openness to foreign talent by avoiding any impression that it favors one community over another. Therefore, the first paradox is that economic forces create multinational societies, but political forces must create national communities. Sociologists occasionally refer to this nation-building activity of the state in terms of building the cultural fabric – the great arch – of the society as the real foundation of political power (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). This paradox holds true for small countries such as Singapore, but it is also central to the recent migration and population dilemmas of relatively large European societies such as Italy and the United Kingdom. In both societies, there is a rightwing opposition to migration, whereas with a declining and aging population these societies need to accept migrants to avoid a shrinking workforce.

The second paradox is that while secular societies like Singapore strive to separate religion (as a private matter of the individual) from the public domain (of politics and economics), governments must attempt to manage religions. Owing to the first paradox, the government cannot ignore the fact that religious diversity without management will in all probability result in communal tensions, if not in open social conflict. Other things being equal, the practice of religious piety will create a certain social distance between social groups and eventually these social divisions can harden into separate enclaves. These issues have dominated much of American history and are probably more salient now than in the past. Following the work of Robert Putnam (2000), we can argue that religious communities tend to build social bonding rather than social bridging. Other things being equal, piety movements will tend to reinforce exclusive tendencies and reinforce separate identities. The role of the state is to manage such social processes in the interest of creating social unity. Where possible, it should seek to convince its citizens that such social harmony is not simply artificial. In their recent American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell (2010) take an excessively optimistic view of the capacity of American society to absorb religious diversity and proclaim its national coherence. By contrast, resentment rather than grace appears to dominate religion and politics in the United States, especially after 9/11 and more recently after the credit crunch. The aggravated public debate about the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center in the vicinity of the site of the Twin Towers at Ground Zero is simply one recent manifestation of the problems of Muslim integration. William E. Connolly (1995) has grasped this general sense of resentment in his account of the creation of a fundamentalist ideology, the rise of the Republican Right, the crisis of a number of foreign adventures from the Vietnam War to modern day Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya against the backdrop of the transformation of manufacturing industry and the financialization of American capitalism. For example, he argues that the Southern Baptist Church was originally consolidated through a shared sense of betrayal and resentment. This combination of military defeat, deep resentment against the outside world and aggressive moralization to overturn those evils forms the persistent basis of American religious fundamentalism (Connolly, 2008). The political fundamentalism of the South was part of a constituency that felt under siege from middle-class feminism, the welfare program of the Great Society, and more recently the election of President Obama. This resentment has gathered momentum against migration, especially illegal migration across the Mexican border and specifically against the growth of the Muslim population and what is seen to be the creeping threat of the Shari'a.

These alienated sectors of the blue-collar labor force, who have already been victims of the rust belt and the internet bubble, have now been subjected to the housing market crisis, the liquidity crisis, the slide in the value of the dollar, the banking meltdown, the economic recession and the legal scandals around mortgages and foreclosure. Tea Party politics might be suitably regarded as a contemporary example of status politics and political conservatism, and as such it has a long tradition in American political culture such as the People's Party of the 1890s in its opposition to big government, east-coast intellectuals, and Washington politicians. The message of the Tea Party is consistent with the basic elements of conservative thought: promote lower personal taxation, smaller government, ownership of guns, limited migration and more individual liberty. The title of the "Tea Party Manifesto" by Dick Amery and Matt Kibbe is "Give us Liberty" (2010). The politics of the Tea Party are a manifestation of the paradox that I am describing in terms of a tension between the politics of the nation-state and the labor requirements of economic growth.

Of course, not all liberal democratic societies have the same public issues regarding religion, diversity and migration. The ways in which states manage religions will clearly differ according to their histories and social structures. Canada and the United States, while they share the same land mass, do not share the same history with respect to slavery, migration and multiculturalism. America's border with Mexico has produced a set of somewhat specific conditions. The steady flow of illegal Mexican migrants is fueling anti-migrant xenophobia in states like Arizona and Nevada, whereas Canada has retained an openness to migration, taking 281,000 legal immigrants in 2010, the majority of whom came from the Philippines, India and China. Canada has of course had highly public contests with its Muslim culture following the failed experiment to develop Shari'a arbitration courts in Ontario in the late 1990s (Turner and Arslan, 2011). With a booming domestic economy and expanding energy industries, Canada has not been faced with a critical problem of illegal immigration and has retained a much more positive view of multiculturalism, which was in any case a policy invented by Pierre Trudeau.

With its history of slavery and racial conflict, the United States has been the site of communal tension and violence for the last two centuries. Clearly the scale of racial conflict in Singapore is vastly different, but the contradictory structure of nationhood and open borders remains the same. Singapore has experienced racial and religious tensions in the past. There were riots in 1951 over the religious identity of Maria Hertog, a European girl who had been raised by a Malay family (Aljunied, 2009). The government has responded to this religious diversity by preventing religious labels from playing any overt public role. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act of 1990 prevents the use of religion for political ends. The state has also been willing to respond forcefully to eliminate any signs of religious opposition to the government, exemplified by its response to what it saw as a Marxist conspiracy among Catholic intellectuals in 1987. Twenty-two members of Catholic Church organizations who had promoted awareness of the plight of foreign workers were arrested on the grounds that they were plotting a Marxist revolt against the state. These arrests were carried out under the Internal Security Act, but this blunt instrument was inappropriate in such a case. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act was designed to separate faith from social activism. However, the paradox is that in order to keep religion and politics apart, the state must actively intervene in civil society to guarantee that religious services – preaching, teaching, healing, praying and so forth – are compatible with public security, social stability and nationalist goals.

In the Singapore case, this "management of religion" has two dimensions, each of which is characterized by further ambiguities. The first dimension is the unintended consequence of creating religious enclaves. This outcome arises because the Singapore state categorically divides the population primarily into four distinct ethnic communities: Chinese, Malay, Indian and other. The consequence is that these ethnic identities inevitably play an important role in public life. Furthermore, since these ethnic categories are also in practice religious categories, it means that religion is significant in defining public identities. To illustrate this point, Malays are typically Muslim, Indians are typically Hindu and the Chinese are typically Buddhist, although there are a sizable number of Chinese who are Christian. Thus, there is an official ethnic definition of groups despite the government's attempts to break down the cultural division between various communities to foster the national identity of being "Singaporean."

The second dimension is the specific management of Islam in Singapore. This policy is seen as necessary because of the long-standing "Malay problem," namely the social and economic backwardness of the Malay Singaporeans. Singapore's government prides itself on its technological rationality, ranging from economic and urban planning to its family and cultural policies. Thus, the state has a range of strategies that are designed to "upgrade" its own population. These upgrading strategies include everything from health (mosquito control and encouraging weight control to prevent obesity) to automobile restrictions to education (including policies on "Religious Knowledge"). The Singaporean authorities have regarded individualism and "shapeless multiculturalism" as aspects of Western decadence, contrasted with the moral superiority of Confucian Asia (Harvey, 2006). The upgrading therefore manifests itself through the self-assumed responsibility of the state to intervene directly in the arenas of religion, morals, reproduction and family life. Singapore's strategies towards its Muslim population are encapsulated in Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS, or the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) and its related policies of improving Muslim education, modernizing the Shari'a and its courts, and seeking to regulate and improve Muslim family life.

Although Singapore is a small island city-state in Southeast Asia surrounded by societies that have much larger populations and resources, it is a society that is highly instructive from a sociological point of view. Singapore illustrates in clear terms the paradoxes of free-market capitalism. While the dominant form of global capitalism has been neoliberal, few Asian societies have simultaneously embraced deregulation in economics and liberalism in social life. The idea of a harmonious society based on a strong state and Confucian values has continued to be more attractive than Western liberalism – in other words, the rule of virtue rather than the rule of law. Asian societies have generally sought to regulate family and religion in the interest of social stability. The Singaporean experience shows that any society that wants to separate religion and politics (in order to guarantee freedom of religious belief and practice) must interfere systematically in society to manage religions. The success or failure of these policies will have profound implications for the wealth and well-being of its citizens and the regions that surround the island.

Although Singapore has not as yet been the target of a successful terrorist attack, there is considerable anxiety in the city-state that such an attack would have devastating social and economic consequences. It is also obvious that as a secular capitalist state, Singapore must be a potential target of some significance. Economically advanced societies can no longer rely on the conventional division between politics and religion and have entered into a new phase that will have to involve the direct management of religions. In the current context of global anxieties over security, liberal states have evolved from policies of benign neglect towards religious belief and racial identity to active management of religious institutions. In practice, these new strategies are in fact concerned with "managing Muslims" under the umbrella of social pluralism and multiculturalism. These developments can be understood in terms of Michel Foucault's concept of "governmentality," since managing religions is a recent adjunct of the more general functions of the administrative state (Foucault, 2000). Managing religions is important if the state is to reassert its authority over civil society – especially over those religious institutions that seek to articulate an alternative vision of power and truth – and if it is to command the loyalty of its citizens over and above other claims of membership.

Managing Religions

I have argued that the modern state has a contradictory relationship with multiculturalism and migration on the one hand and to security and sovereignty on the other. Security would be relatively effective and inexpensive in a society where virtually all of the citizens spoke the same language, practiced the same religion, adhered to the same dress code and supported the same cricket teams. The modern world is generally not like this. In a capitalist society in particular, the state seeks to encourage labor migration, porous political boundaries and minimal constraints on the flexibility of the labor market. At the same time, the state is under considerable pressure from economic elites to reduce the resistance of labor to the destructive logic of enterprise and capital accumulation. One solution to the resistance of organized labor to structural change in the economy is to regulate trade unions, make strikes illegal and import foreign labor to reduce the unit costs of production. Singapore has been remarkably successful in achieving these economic goals. Under Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments, similar inroads were made into the effectiveness of trade unions in influencing wage levels and conditions of employment. However, the state also has an interest in sustaining its own sovereignty, and hence wants to create and impose a cultural and moral unity on society. The modern state is an administrative order that seeks to maximize the social potential of its population (hence it has an interest in supporting migration), but it also has an interest in the enforcement of a particular type of governmentality.