Book chapter
The Tension Between State and Religion in American Foreign Policy
Religion and the State, pp 139-156
15 Dec 2011
Abstract
This chapter calls attention to four post-9/11 episodes involving religion and United States foreign policy in an attempt to show the need for greater nuance in our understanding of the relation between religion and state. A number of observations will be drawn from these four cases. For example, it will be seen that at least in the United States, religion is neither entirely privatized nor entirely commodified and that traditional organized religion continues to pack a counterhegemonic punch. However, it will further be seen that this counterhegemonic face of religion finds only little voice in the American public sphere, which remains more open to conservative and – in the current case – imperial deployments of religion. It thus also becomes clear from the cases exhibited that how religion surfaces in the public sphere is not simply an inexorable effect of modernity but rather the result of contestation (see the contributions in Smith, 2003 for a similar line of argument based on other cases). Finally, in the cases under consideration here, there is a stark indication of what may be lost when we lose religion entirely from the public sphere: the loss also of a distinctly moral appraisal of state matters that properly should be appraised morally. Thus, for all the unhelpful moralism traditional religion brings to politics, it may also be that when the public square is entirely naked religiously (Neuhaus, 1986), it ends up morally naked as well.
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Details
- Title
- The Tension Between State and Religion in American Foreign Policy
- Creators
- Douglas Porpora - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Religion and the State, pp 139-156
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Communication
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84940017439
- Other Identifier
- 991019174631404721