Recognizing religion: Politics, history, and the “long 19th century”
| Author | Jonathan C. Agensky |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116681428 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116681428
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(4) 729 –755
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116681428
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E
JR
I
Recognizing religion: Politics,
history, and the “long 19th
century”
Jonathan C. Agensky
Ohio University, USA
Abstract
Analyses of religion and international politics routinely concern the persistence of
religion as a critical element in world affairs. However, they tend to neglect the
constitutive interconnections between religion and political life. Consequently, religion
is treated as exceptional to mainstream politics. In response, recent works focus on
the relational dimensions of religion and international politics. This article advances
an “entangled history” approach that emphasizes the constitutive, relational, and
historical dimensions of religion — as a practice, discursive formation, and analytical
category. It argues that these public dimensions of religion share their conditions of
possibility and intelligibility in a political order that crystallized over the long 19th
century. The neglect of this period has enabled International Relations to treat religion
with a sense of closure at odds with the realities of religious political behavior and
how it is understood. Refocusing on religion’s historical entanglements recovers the
concept as a means of explaining international relations by “recognizing” how it is
constituted as a category of social life. Beyond questions of the religious and political,
this article speaks to renewed debates about the role of history in International
Relations, proposing entanglement as a productive framing for international politics
more generally.
Keywords
19th century, empire, historical sociology, international politics, religion, secularism
Corresponding author:
Jonathan C. Agensky, Department of Political Science, Ohio University, Bentley Annex 211, Athens, OH
45701, USA.
Email: agensky@ohio.edu
681428EJT0010.1177/1354066116681428European Journal of International RelationsAgensky
research-article2017
Article
730 European Journal of International Relations 23(4)
Introduction
Religion has always been a salient force in world politics, notwithstanding its “rediscov-
ery.” Still, religiously motivated activity in the public sphere intensified in the post-Cold
War period, as has its impact on global culture. In response, scholars across disciplines
have recognized the need to revise traditional notions of modernity and secularity, for
which the intertwined relationship between religion and politics poses new puzzles
(Snyder, 2011; Thomas, 2005; Duffy-Toft et al., 2011). By now, the relative neglect of
religion within international political scholarship has been significantly acknowledged
and addressed. However, although religion is topically recognized, it is still often
substantively misrecognized.
For contemporary International Relations (IR), the emergence of religion as a core
concept is relatively recent. Along with foundational categories like race, ethnicity, and
gender, it largely remained on the “backburner.” According to Sandal and James (2011:
3–4), this reflects the “reluctance of IR theory scholars rather than the nature of IR per
se.” This observation is important but tells only part of the story. A Eurocentric philoso-
phy of religion — as contemplative, private, and prone to devastating consequences
when made public — has long maintained a foundational, authoritative, and constitutive
force within international political scholarship, casting religion as exceptional to main-
stream politics and religiously identified actors as inherently suspect.1 This has only
started to change. Recent works address the artificial boundaries between religious and
secular thought, the internal heterogeneity of the secular project, and its differential
accommodations of religious expression (Calhoun et al., 2011). By uncovering the
“religious” in the “secular,” they successfully demonstrate how secularism is not what
it has long been thought — conclusive, monolithic, inevitable, and stable. The flip side
proves more troublesome: neither is religion.
In this article, I outline an “entangled history” approach that emphasizes the con-
stitutive, relational, and historical qualities of religion — as a practice, discursive
formation, and analytical category. Joining other recent works in pursuit of historically
nuanced modes of analysis (Chatterjee, 2011; Göle, 2010; Wilson, 2014), I bridge the
“religious” in the “secular” by focusing also on the “secular” in the “religious”: how
religious categories carry residues of politics that precede public and private distinc-
tions and how they are fraught with contestation over the boundaries of legitimate social
organization. Rather than make definitive claims about religion and politics, I seek to
pluralize the perspectives with which both are analyzed. I argue that religion and inter-
national political order constitute a single field, rooted in long-19th-century liberal
state-building and empire. Contemporary scholarship participates in this field, sustained
by global hierarchies. Religious ideas and practices are continually reworked within the
power-laden spaces of global politics. The same is true about how they are analyzed,
legitimated, and disciplined. Historical entanglement is also a productive means of
framing international politics more generally, emphasizing the importance of long-term
relational dynamics and endogenous processes of subject formation and knowledge
production.
This article comprises four sections. First, I engage post-Cold War scholarship on
religion and international politics, calling attention to entrenched Eurocentric framings
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