Search Results (17)

Religion in international relations should not be viewed solely as a source of conflict or cultural differences; it also has a constructive dimension, as demonstrated by the international activities of faith-based organizations (FBOs). FBOs have benefited from the post-Cold War expansion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in global affairs. Their growth is often linked to raising awareness among various social groups about security challenges or issues traditionally addressed by state and inter-governmental actors, as well as increasing international interconnectedness. While FBOs differ from classical NGOs in their strong religious motivation, they too often organize around specific missions or messages. The Community of Sant’Egidio (CSE) is a distinctive example of a faith-based organization that operates both as a religious community within the Roman Catholic Church and as an internationally active NGO. Unlike many NGOs, which are founded in response to a singular issue, CSE has broadened its scope over time, addressing a wide range of concerns, from poverty alleviation and peacebuilding to humanitarian aid and, more recently, environmental issues. This paper explores the process by which the CSE has discursively constructed its identity and examines how this process has contributed to its growing influence on the international stage. Full article

Beyond the once dominant secularization thesis that anticipated the decline of religion in the modern era, the academic study of religion has in recent decades revisited secular as one of the factors that shape religion and religions in the globalized world. Against this theoretical backdrop, in this article, I use the case of South Korea to explore how secular and religion interact in contemporary global society. It focuses on describing the postcolonial reformulation of secularity and the corresponding transformation of religious diversity in Cold War South Korea. The Japanese colonial secularism rigidly banning the public and political engagement of religion was replaced by the flexible secular-religious divide after liberation of 1945. The porous mode of secularity extensively admitted religious entities to affect processes of postcolonial nation-building. Religious values, interests, and resources have been applied in motivating, pushing, and justifying South Koreans to devote themselves to developing the national community as a whole. Such a form of secularity became a critical condition that caused South Korea’s religious landscape to be reorganized in a vertical and unequal way. On the one hand, Buddhist and Christian populations grew remarkably in the liberated field of religion, while freedom of religion was recognized as a key ideological principle of the anticommunist country. On the other hand, folk beliefs and minority religious groups were often considered “superstitions”, “pseudo religions”, “heretics”, or even “evil religions”. With the pliable secularity at work, religious diversity was reconfigured hierarchically in the postcolonial society. Full article

The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ hypothesis suggested that global politics would revert to inter-civilizational (inter-religious) conflict with the end of the Cold War. Conceptual and empirical refutations followed, but the idea that pre-Cold War inter-polity interaction was generally characterized by such conflict was not addressed. We consider this a possible historical libel. First, we briefly review the position of major faith traditions toward making and keeping agreements with those of other faith traditions. Most forms of agreements are sanctioned, and there is inconsistent and minimal support for duplicity. Second, using the MATRS database of multilateral treaties, we identify 79 sovereign entities active between 1750 and 1900 (when multilateral treaties were numerous and official state religions were prominent), link states to their official religions, and analyze the pattern of 385 multilateral treaties’ signings. We conclude that there is no tendency among states with one official religion to avoid entering into treaties with those of other official religions. The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ hypothesis is a historical myth. Full article

This article examines the contested nature of American efforts to expand America’s twentieth century notion of tri-faith idealism—the unity of the three monotheistic faiths of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—to include Muslims both at home and abroad. It does so through a contextual, historical study of the construction and dedication of the Islamic Center of Washington. The construction of the Islamic Center ultimately proved a lightning rod that electrified competing wings of Protestant Christian nationalism within in the United States—namely “inclusivist ecumenists” and “exclusivist populists.” Full article

In 1917, in the context of extreme anxiety of a rural Catholic population during a period of war, revolutionary upheaval, and anticlerical politics, the apparition of St Mary to three children near the Portuguese village of Fátima stirred up emotions that have created a cult that is still attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year and that has found followers all over the world. How did this happen? One has to look at the history of changing meanings related to the cult of Our Lady of Fátima, its integrative energy, and the global spread of the cult. The fact that, most recently, immigrants with Hindu and Muslim background are also among the pilgrims to Fátima speaks of the unpredictable cross-cultural and cross-religious possibilities of this cult, in which gender aspects of a female deity play an important role. This paper will analyze the various periods of the cult from its beginning in 1917 and the roles of secularism, the Salazar regime, Colonialism, the Cold War, and migration from and (later) to Portugal, in order to find insights into a fascinating global cult and how it has changed and adapted to a society that has developed a new attitude towards traditional Catholicism. While the history of the Cult of Fátima has been studied before, this article seeks to introduce a global and, at the same time, long-term historical perspective. Full article

During the Korean War, conflicts between right-wing Protestants and radical socialists escalated and erupted into massacres, killing thousands of Korean civilians. Such extreme violence and tumultuous events afterwards—including Korea’s division into two separate states and the Cold War system—eclipsed the imbricated interactions between Protestant Christianity and socialism under Japanese colonial rule. While focusing on Korean Protestantism and socialism to probe their contest and compromise for survival, this article traces the tripartite relationship among the followers of Protestant Christianity, Marxist socialism, and Japanese imperialism as it evolved throughout colonial Korea between 1910 and 1945. These 35 years comprised a period of multiple possibilities for interaction among Korean Protestants, socialists, and Japanese authorities in the changing global environment. The international organizations with which they were associated influenced Korean Protestants and Marxist socialists while facing the common crisis of Japan’s assimilation. Namely, the Korean Protestant churches affiliated with Western missionaries’ denomination headquarters in their home countries and world Christian conferences, while the Korean socialists allied with Moscow’s Comintern and other radical political movements abroad. Within this broader context, these two religious and ideological forces competed for supremacy, cooperated in a joint struggle against the colonial regime, and antagonized each other over their divergent worldviews. By examining their complicated tripartite relationship, this essay comprehensively depicts the dynamic history of the Western-derived religious and political doctrines meeting a non-Western empire in a foreign land. Full article

The political impact of Dr. Eleanor Lansing Dulles has not been assessed in her capacity as a power broker who brought her theological understandings to Cold War United States policy. The deep influence of both her brothers—Allen, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Foster, Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower—on global affairs and diplomacy has been the topic of myriad studies. Works draw extensively on family biography, noting that both “nature and nurture” brought religion to US foreign policy. Including Dr. Dulles in the analysis provides nuance and complexity to definitions of Christian nationalism and underscores the legacy of both missionaries and religious thought in US foreign relations during the early Cold War. Contextualizing religiosity through a study of gender and the Dulles family legacy of female missionaries into the Cold War narrative builds upon the existing literature of the Dulles family, religion, and Cold War diplomacy to challenge concepts such as Christian internationalism, Christian nationalism, and Left–Right binaries. Diplomacy is revealed as her form of Christian missionary work in the secular sphere. Eleanor Lansing Dulles became a missionary not for a religion, but for a nation. Full article

This paper explores the intersection of personal responsibility, futility, and faith in visual representations of nuclear apocalypse. In two films produced during the late Cold War, Testament (1983) and When the Wind Blows (1986), the protagonists attempt to follow public guidance, maintain daily routines as their health and communities break down, and make muddled connections to religious faith. In Testament, a mother is left to care for her children in suburban California for months after an unexplained nuclear attack isolates and contaminates the town. In When the Wind Blows, a retired couple living in the British countryside diligently follow government instructions to “protect and survive”, while quickly succumbing to radiation poisoning. In a contrasting post-Cold War visual representation, the speculative artwork of the artists Erich Berger and Mari Keto imagine the storage of nuclear waste as a personal responsibility. In OpenCare (2016), waste is encased in steel pellets mounted on a bronze disc, and a series of artifacts and instructions assist in determining continued toxicity. While Testament and When the Wind Blows project the futility of personal responsibility and faith in nuclear survival, Berger and Keto’s system envisions a deep nuclear future requiring continued personal management and care. Full article

This article explores the growing affinity for the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church by far-right Orthodox converts in the United States, highlighting how the spiritual draw to the faith is caught up in the globalizing politics of traditionalism and a transnational, ideological reimaging of the American culture wars. Employing ethnographic fieldwork from the rural United States and digital qualitative research, this study situates the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church in the international flows of conservativism focused on reclaiming social morals and traditional religiosity. In doing so, this article sheds light on how the post-Soviet Orthodox Church is viewed politically by a growing contingent of American religious and political actors who are turning to Russian Orthodoxy and Putin’s government during this New Cold War moment of tension between the United States and Russia. I argue that the allure of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church for conservatives in the West offers us a window into how the institution is situated imaginatively within transnational politics, thereby providing us insights into the rapidly transforming culture wars fomenting globally. Full article

The origins and use of national space rhetoric used by NASA, the US government, and the media in America began during the Cold War era and relied, in part, on religious imagery to convey a message of exploration and conquest. The concept of space as a “New Frontier” was used in political speech, television, and advertising to reawaken a sense of manifest destiny in postwar America by reviving notions of religious freedom, courage, and exceptionalism—the same ideals that originally drove expansionist boosters first to the New World and then to the West. Using advertisements, political speeches, NASA documents, and other media, this paper will demonstrate how this rhetoric served to reinforce a culture held by many Americans who maintained a long tradition of believing that they were called on by God to settle New Frontiers and how this culture continues to influence how human spaceflight is portrayed today. Full article

Catholic religious orders that have education as part of their mission have often used visions of the afterlife in theatre productions as vehicles to transmit a message of conversion, especially to those who, because of age or illiteracy, would not benefit as much from Scripture readings or complex sermons. In this article, I look at how such visions of the blessed and the damned, of heaven and hell, of angels and demons, were used in educational theatre in Italy by the Jesuits in the 16th century and the Salesian sisters in the 20th century. The historical background for the Jesuit and Salesian plays I analyze also reveals a propagandistic layer of meaning in their representation of the afterworld, as the Jesuits’ tragedies date to the years of the Counter-reformation, while the Salesian sisters’ plays belong to era of the cold war. Thus, the Jesuit and Salesian theatrical depictions of heaven and hell provide insight not only into the religious understanding of the eras, but also into the social and political concerns of the times in which they were composed, as well as the diverse educational messages transmitted to young men and young women. Full article

In this essay, “In God We Trust”, the official motto of the United States, is discussed as an illustration of the contested character of American civil religion. Applying and evaluating assumptions from Robert N. Bellah and his critics, a conceptual history of the motto is presented, showing how from its first appearance to today it has inspired debates about the place of civil religion in American culture, law, and politics. Examining these debates, the changing character of the motto is explored: its creation as a religious response to the Civil War; its secularization as a symbol on the nation’s currency at the turn of the twentieth century; its state-sponsored institutionalization during the Cold War; its part in the litigation that challenged the constitutionality of civil religious symbolism in the era of the culture wars; and its continuing role in the increasingly partisan political battles of our own time. In this essay, I make the case that, while seemingly timeless, the meaning of the motto has been repeatedly reinterpreted, with culture, law, and politics interacting in sometimes surprising ways to form one of the nation’s most commonly accepted and frequently challenged symbols. In concluding, I speculate on the future of the motto, as well as on the changing place of civil religion in a nation that is increasingly pluralistic in its religion and polarized in its politics. Full article

In contrast to the tendency to focus on political and social reasons for the rapprochement between the Soviet government and the Russian Orthodox Church, between Stalin and the later patriarch Sergei, this article deals with theological and ecclesiological sensibilities. One would expect such reasons from the side of the church but I also argue that they were important for Stalin’s considerations and acts. His deep awareness and intimate knowledge of the church, and active involvement and concrete proposals in the long interaction between church and state, were as important as those of Sergei. The article begins with a reconsideration of Stalin’s period of theological study, which influenced him deeply and provided with him unique insights into the nature of the church. After this period, an intriguing path unfolds, through key categories of Stalin’s thought thought and his effort—which was strongly opposed – to include the article on religious freedom in the 1936 constitution, let alone the definition of socialism (in contrast to communism) in terms of two biblical verses in the very same constitution. At the same time, the statements and actions of Sergei, already from 1927, were also part of the narrative, so the analysis moves between church and state until the meeting in 1943. All of this is crucial material for understanding developments in the period officially known as the Cold War. Full article

In the 1960s there appeared in England a group of young university educated Catholics who sought to merge radical Catholic social teachings with the ideas of Karl Marx and the latest insights of European and American sociologists and literary theorists. They were known as the English Catholic New Left (ECNL). Under the inspiration of their Dominican mentors, they launched a magazine called Slant that served as the vehicle for publishing their ideas about how Catholic theology along with the Social Gospels fused with neo-Marxism could bring a humanistic socialist revolution to Britain. The Catholic Leftists worked in alliance with the activists of the secular New Left Review to achieve this objective. A major influence on the ECNL was the Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, O. P. Slant took off with great success when Sheed and Ward agreed to publish the journal. Slant featured perceptive, indeed at times brilliant, cutting-edge articles by the Catholic Left’s young Turks, including Terry Eagleton, Martin Redfern, Bernard Sharratt, and Angela and Adrian Cunningham, among others. A major target of the Slant project was the Western Alliance’s Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence, which they saw to be contrary to Christian just war theory and ultimately destructive of humankind. Another matter of concern for the Slant group was capitalist imperialism that ravaged the underdeveloped world and was a major destabilizing factor for achieving world peace and social equality. Despite their failure to achieve a social revolution “baptized by Christianity,” the English Catholic New Left broke new ground in terms of showing how a traditional religion with a highly conservative and sometimes reactionary history had the capacity to offer new paths forward and remain an inspiration to progressive thinking Christians trying to navigate the shoals of a post-modern world. Full article

The article is an examination of the roots of the amalgam of complex forces that informed the ‘religious cold war’. It looks at the near and the more distant past. Naturally this includes consideration of the interwar years and those of the Second World War. It also means addressing divisions in Christianity that can be traced back to the end of the third century, to the official split of 1054 between Catholic and Orthodox, the impact of the Crusades and the entrenched hostility that followed the fifty-seven years imposition on Constantinople of a Latin Patriarch. It surveys the rise of significant forces that were to contribute to, as well as consolidate and strengthen, the religious cold war: civil religion, Christian fundamentalism and the Religious Right. The article examines both western and eastern mobilization of national religious resources for political purposes. Full article