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Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion 1st Edition

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In recent years, North American and European nations have sought to legally remake religion in other countries through an unprecedented array of international initiatives. Policymakers have rallied around the notion that the fostering of religious freedom, interfaith dialogue, religious tolerance, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to combating persecution and discrimination. Beyond Religious Freedom persuasively argues that these initiatives create the very social tensions and divisions they are meant to overcome.Elizabeth Shakman Hurd looks at three critical channels of state-sponsored intervention: international religious freedom advocacy, development assistance and nation building, and international law. She shows how these initiatives make religious difference a matter of law, resulting in a divide that favors forms of religion authorized by those in power and excludes other ways of being and belonging. In exploring the dizzying power dynamics and blurred boundaries that characterize relations between "expert religion," "governed religion," and "lived religion," Hurd charts new territory in the study of religion in global politics.A forceful and timely critique of the politics of promoting religious freedom, Beyond Religious Freedom provides new insights into today's most pressing dilemmas of power, difference, and governance.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0691166099
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0691166094
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Princeton University Press
  5. Publication date
    September 1, 2015
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6.59 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
  8. Print length
    216 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Admirably combative. . . . Consistently thought provoking."---Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement

"[This] book deserves a wide readership. . . . Hurd brings a theoretically sophisticated understanding of 'religion' to an area of study traditionally conducted by those in political science or international affairs. . . . Ideal for use in the classroom."---Michael Graziano, Religion in American History blog,

"Maybe Hurd is amongst the ‘experts' that the ‘governed' or rather governors are listening to. If not, they might pick up this book."---Stewart Rayment, Interlib

"

This book represents a profound and meticulously documented
argument for the unavailability of religion for projects of moderation, division, and bifurcation into good and bad religion. . . . It will make an excellent reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam, Secularism, and Modernity, Middle Eastern Politics, religion and politics, and on theories and methods in Religion Studies.

" ― History News Network

"Hurd's critique of religious freedom achieves a degree of adamantine persuasiveness rare for any scholarly argument."---Jeremy F. Walton, The Immanent Frame

"This book is not a trade wind but a typhoon. In Heisenbergian ways, it does not just observe; it intervenes in an entire field of activism, policy, and scholarship."---Benjamin Schonthal, The Immanent Frame

"A signpost book, and the directions it provides are more precise than merely ‘beyond.' It guides the reader through approaches to religion in IR theory, charts original maps of complex situations of inequality, and sets the landmark for critical analysis, which future debates in the field can effectively build on."---Kristina Stoeckl, St. Antony's International Review

"Scholars and policymakers alike will benefit from Hurd's grounded, eminently teachable framework for tracking the strange career of "religion" across contemporary governance projects."---Lucia Hulsether, Religious Studies Review

"A timely and compelling critique of the burgeoning prevalence of religion as normative and analytical category in both global politics and academia. . . . The compelling push to systematically destabilize religion as a political category and to normatively think beyond religious freedom makes this book an outstanding contribution for those with an interest in the intricate relationships of religion and global politics."---Tobias Müller, Political Theory

"In sum, [Beyond Religious Freedom] is a fascinating critique of the advocacy of religious freedom on the part of global political actors. . . . Hurd’s invitation to think ‘beyond religious freedom’ will hopefully generate a rich and ground-breaking debate on the nexus between religion and global politics."---Gowhar Quadir Want, Muslim World Book Review

Review

"The defense and violation of religious freedom are intensely politicized but poorly understood. Hurd provides an important intellectual and practical service with this thoughtful and well-researched examination of the issues."―Craig Calhoun, director and president of the London School of Economics

"In this brilliantly argued book, Hurd shows why the stakes are very high and the dangers very real when governments set the standards for religious practice. Beyond Religious Freedom is intellectually courageous and deeply grounded in religious as well as political theory. There is simply no better guide to the contemporary global religious landscape."―Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

"In this important book, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd shows how the suffocatingly tautological language of policymakers today constructs religion and religious freedom as both problem and solution in the context of myriad challenges facing the world community. Mobilized alternatively to underwrite good religion on behalf of an agenda of reassurance and to thwart bad religion on behalf of an agenda of surveillance, religious freedom is repeatedly discovered to be the indispensable condition for peace in our times, always available to short-circuit understanding of complex social situations."―Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

"Beyond Religious Freedom tackles a crucial topic, is compellingly structured, and has a powerful and highly critical line of argument. I learned an enormous amount from this fascinating book."―Christian Reus-Smit, author of Individual Rights and the Making of the International System

"This is a compelling, stimulating, and original book. Hurd argues that powerful Western democracies promote religious freedom in other societies in ways that privilege standard, recognized religious groups and marginalize personal religious or cultural practices that don't fit the model. Beyond Religious Freedom deals with a timely, politically charged topic in a thoughtful and well-informed way."―Jack Snyder, author of Power and Progress: International Politics in Transition

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; 1st edition (September 1, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 216 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691166099
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691166094
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.59 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 12 ratings

About the author

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor of Politics at Northwestern University, where she studies the intersections of religion, law, and politics in the US and abroad. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, 2008), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, 2015), and co-editor of Politics of Religious Freedom and Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. She co-directs, with Winnifred Sullivan, a Luce-supported research project “Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad” (2016-2019) and co-organized the “Politics of Religious Freedom” project (2011-2014). She co-directs the Buffett Faculty Research Group on Global Politics & Religion at Northwestern.

Downloadable articles and other information are available through the following link:

http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~esh291/Elizabeth_Shakman_Hurd/home.html

"Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad" project website:

http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/religion-home-abroad/

"Politics of Religious Freedom" project website:

http://politics-of-religious-freedom.berkeley.edu

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
12 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Edward E. Curtis IV
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential book for understanding religion and politics
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2018
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Beth Hurd’s book is not only necessary reading for anyone studying religion and foreign affairs but also for all those concerned with the ways that religion shapes and is shaped by U.S. politics. The book is full of insight and a pleasure to read!
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Kim
4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2021
Integral to any free, liberal society is the right to religious freedom, and so social scientists and religious scholars have attempted to craft an understanding of this basic right. How should religious freedom be practically applied? What types of laws should governments legislate in order to protect this right, and how should the laws be crafted? What are the bounds of religion and religious freedom? In her book Beyond Religious Freedom: the New Global Politics of Religion, Dr. Elizabeth Hurd attempts to address these questions and lay a path forward for how scholars, public officials, and religious leaders should continue to think about religious freedom. Hurd offers exceptional insights on the topic of religious freedom in that she challenges the traditional notions of religious freedom by rejecting the established bounds of what is considered “religion” and suggesting an intersectional approach to religion.
The book originates in the fields of international relations and religion studies by describing the historical and political origins of the relatively recent efforts of global actors – mostly from wealthy states in the global north – to bring religion into global politics. It examines the underlining assumptions of these projects and describes how they construe notions of “religious freedom, religious tolerance, and the rights of religious minorities.” Chapter 2 of the book describes the idea of the “two faces of faith,” which Hurd borrows from the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. This canonical idea of religion is that there is bad religion and good religion. Bad religion is the type of religion that needs to be monitored and controlled by governments and civil leaders in order to prevent it from slipping into violence. Good religion is a tool for seeking the “common international good.” Good religion is expected to help mitigate the appeal of extremist, bad religion by offering an appealing alternative. Governments and civil society organizations are expected to work with good religion to build successful humanitarian programming and human rights campaigns. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 give the reader a picture of how the global north’s conception of religion has manifested itself in global politics through “constructs of religious freedom,” “religious tolerance and religious engagement,” and “religious rights” respectively. Chapter 6 describes how scholars, public officials, and religious leaders can escape from the northern paradigm of religion and begin to think “otherwise about religion.” The book ends with an appeal to liberate religion studies from the confines of religion studies departments and political science departments to the broader social sciences, humanities and beyond. Hurd makes the case for an intersectional study of religion, arguing that, for example, knowing that someone is a Methodist tells you very little about that person.
Being uniquely innovative, Beyond Religious Freedom is able to accomplish the task by offering scholars new methods of thinking about and studying religion: expert religion, lived religion, and governed religion. Previously, religion was thought about in terms of religious, secular, and sectarian, which Hurd argues unnecessarily boxes in religion and actually inhibits a fuller and complete assessment of religion. Hurd’s new paradigm for thinking about religion allows for the total assessment of religion from the absolutely and unquestionably religious to the messy and maybe-not-even-religious aspects of religion. Expert religion is religion as understood by those who create “policy-relevant knowledge” about religion i.e., scholars, think tanks, etc. Lived religion is religion according to the people who practice religion. It is the lived experience of people who interact with religion on a frequent basis. Governed religion is religion defined by people who possess political or religious power and are able to define the confines of religion be it religious-secular boundaries or religious-religious boundaries. Along with the emphasis on intersectional analyses, this new paradigm offered by Hurd gives scholars, public officials, religious leaders, and those with an interest in religion a fresh method to explore religion and politics from any perspective.
Hurd does leave a more developed employment of “thinking otherwise about religion” to be desired by the reader. The book does not do much more work than establishing that such an approach would be credible and useful to knowledge production. Much of the book is dedicated to the historical and political foundations for the pervasive religious, secular, sectarian paradigm for studying religious freedom. For this reason, further research is necessary that employs the methods propagated by Hurd in this work.
Beyond Religious Freedom, is a well written and thorough exploration of the history and politics of religious freedom projects globally and adequately expresses how these projects are a product of a conception of religious freedom that has originated in America and Europe. It makes a compelling case for knowledge producers, those in power, and practitioners alike to examine their current ideas about the confines of religion and its interactions with other categories of society. Hurd disassembles the notion of tidy religion and reveals the truly messy nature of religion – crucial for nuanced study. This book is worth reading is you are a scholar, policymaker, government or public official, religious leader, or are simply interested in religion.
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Joshua Lewis Berg
4.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2017
Given humankind's propensity to simplify things for the ease of mental consumption, we are accustomed to imagining religion as having a concrete and self-evident definition. However, the term “religion” is not universally representative, even though it has come to be considered as such. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, in her new book from Princeton University Press, Beyond Religious Freedom: the New Global Politics of Religion, challenges this assumption.

Populations and governments historically alternate between periods of enlightened thought and often oppressive religiosity and theocracy. Governments have moved into new territory by undertaking to define and actively defend what is termed “religious freedom,” for believers and nonbelievers alike. Given this fact, in spite of a plethora of heterodox views and practices along a continuum of belief, Beyond Religions Freedom undertakes an exploration into what is meant by “‘religion’ as an explanatory category,” and subsequently, a reconsideration of “how we look at religious freedom and religious persecution.”

In the introduction, the reader is confronted with this fact that is so obvious, it is jarring to realize we have largely been oblivious to it; the term “religion” is not so sweeping as we have given it credit. It truly defies definition and cannot possibly represent the disparate multitude of belief systems, lived practices and ethnic associations worldwide.

In the preface, Hurd gives us actual numbers as a sample of the distortion and propaganda leading to, and from, advocacy for religious freedom and religious rights when “a politics defined by religious difference, privilege (sic) forms of religion favored by those who write laws, control resources, and govern societies, and marginalize other modes of belief, being and belonging.” The number she adduces is from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. In an effort to showcase supposed prejudice against Christians, they recently published the number of Christian martyrs as 100,000 annually when, arguably, the number of people who actually died because they were Christians, was just a tiny fraction thereof.

In her introduction, she goes on to give us a concise overview of her process and conclusion. In order to understand the “drive to operationalize” religion and the consequences thereof, she develops three related arguments. First, she considers how constructs of religious rights are being packaged into political projects and delivered around the world. Second, she analyzes, through the lense of history and politics, the attempt at incorporation of a concern for religion, as a supposed self-evident category, into global politics. Third, she explores the relation between international projects relating to religious rights and the social, religious, and political contexts in which they are deployed. She focuses on the lacunas created between sanctioned religion and lived religion.

Hurd separates the idea of religion into three separate admittedly somewhat “arbitrary and porous,” but nonetheless very helpful categories: expert religion, lived religion and governed religion. Aided by these heuristics, she objectively “seeks to open the study of religion and global politics up to a broader social and interpretive field.” The conclusion she draws is that “neither religions nor religious actors are singular, agentive forces that can be analyzed, quantified, engaged, celebrated, or condemned--and divided between good and bad. To rely for policy purposes on the category of religious actor is, rather, to presume a certain form of actorship motivated by religion that is neither intellectually coherent nor sociologically defensible.”

Hurd begins her discussion with an interesting dichotomy known as the “two faces of faith,” the idea that religion is simultaneously the problem and the solution. Using the Sahrawi refugees in Southwestern Algeria as a real life example, she highlights some programs that strive to protect “peaceful religion” and project it internationally and other programs, even sometimes the same ones, which strive to suppress “intolerant religion.”

She then breaks down what can be meant by international religious freedom, how it manifests, especially in North America and Western Europe, as an institutionalization of external religious rights promotion, and the consequences thereof.

Next, she moves into religious engagement, including deploying chaplains as well as engaging certain and specific religious institutions and éminences grises and not others. The argument is that government-sponsored religious outreach activities are not, and cannot be, evenhanded efforts to bring religion back in “to international relations to compensate for its alleged exclusion or to secure its free exercise.”

An extended case study of the Alevis of Turkey, “explores the implications of adopting religion as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve their freedom:” minorities under law. The creation of this category “creates a world in which citizens are governed as religious subjects, contributing to the consolidation of a social order in which groups are distinguished by perceived religious differences creating apostates and insurgents on the margins of legal religion.”

The final chapter looks beyond religious freedom; it delves into religious violence, intergovernmental efforts to contain it and the folly thereof; and it again proposes thinking otherwise about religion. “The religion that is chosen for protection under modern law, the religion that is subjected to state and international legal administration, does not, and cannot, exhaust this vast and diverse field of human goings-on.”

Hurd is an academic and her overall style reflects that. Her dialectic is necessarily repetitive as she builds her case. Far from tiresome, this reinforcement helps the reader navigate and absorb the text. She also enables perspective and better comprehension and elicits empathy, by substantiating her arguments with real life examples.

Religious freedom is important but implementation is confounding. Can and should governments just step out of the way and let people have their lived experiences, or do minorities need protection and, if so, how is that accomplished without promoting one group while marginalizing others? Are distortions meant to curry government sympathy and favors, like the inflated numbers of the CSGC, avoidable? What about the problems caused by multiple and diverging exogenous categorizations of complex groups like the Alevis? Since the global religious landscape is so vast, encompassing autochthonous and imported religion, strict orthodoxy as well as fluid syncretism, belief and nonbelief, and cultural traditions and practices that defy definition, incorporating politics, art, media and popular culture, what is “religion” anyway?

Hurd’s thesis is a vital one and in need of further investigation. We should be stepping back and asking the proper questions, the questions Hurd rightfully proposes we must; “Which activities in the vast sea of human affiliations and actions are designated as religious and primed for engagement, partnership, and dialogue, and which are not? Whose version of which religion is under scrutiny? Which authorities speak in its name, and on whose behalf? What is the relationship between these authorities and the individuals and communities in whose name they allegedly speak? How do researchers account for the practices of individuals that may have tense or nonexistent ties to such institutions or authorities? Conversely, how do researchers consider those who have ties to many simultaneously?”

Much of the world, either due to complacency or ignorance, has unconditionally accepted “religion” as a category no longer in need of analyzation and Western “religious freedom” as a panacea. Hurd illuminates quite clearly the inherent danger in persisting, guided by this illusion. Anyone concerned with truly protecting the rights of all humankind must read this book and pass a copy to their government representative.
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