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As the title of this thread suggests, the conversation I hope to have here is less real-world politics and more the politics of the worlds you build. The other week, I had to read a large chunk of David Buckley's scholarly 2017 book Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines, where he presented an institutional analysis of the interactions between religion and state in those three countries.
There is, of course, a lot to unpack here. What I mean by 'institutional analysis' is that he looked at the way those institutions, particularly through their elites, interacted: the Philippines' bishops versus the local government, for example, rather than the perspectives of individual believers and voters. His theoretical framework counterpoises the relative stability of those particular democracies against societies that have fallen, or are in immanent danger of falling, to the so-called 'secularism trap', which he defined as "the breakdown of democracy due to the decision of either religious or secular elites to pursue maximalist demands related to the place of religion in democratic politics". In other words, countries where the state suppresses local religions or where local religions countermand the powers of the state are countries that have fallen into this trap.
He classified countries in three ways. First, countries may be secular, as with all the countries he focused on, or they may have an established religion, as in the United Kingdom and the Anglican Church or Saudi Arabia and Islam. Next, secular authorities may cooperate with religious authorities. Countries like France, Turkey, and the United States don't have their secular elites working with religious elites, at least in theory, with France and Turkey assertively enforcing this separation, and the United States adopting a more laissez-faire approach. Finally, cooperation between religious and state authorities may be hegemonic or otherwise. In Tunisia, there is no official religion, but the privileging of Islam is enshrined in their constitution; in Senegal, Islam is theoretically on equal footing with other religions, only being the most important group of religious institutions due to the religion's local majority. The system in Senegal, which it shares with Ireland and the Philippines, Buckley terms 'benevolent secularism'.
For Buckley's work, I focused on the Philippines, where the local religious elites have a very interesting relationship with our secular government. The Spanish initially introduced Roman Catholicism to this country as a means of control, using religious principles and even the church's hierarchy to uphold their colonial government, such that revolutionary leaders like Jose Rizal had notable anticlerical tendencies. Once the Americans replaced the Spanish as our imperial overlords, however, this anticlericalism cooled, and both Catholic and Protestant religious leaders found themselves advocating for democracy in our transition to independence. This advocacy became rather dire under the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, with Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim religious leaders being arrested, exiled, and even killed for their dissent. At present, religious leaders have been the most active critics of Duterte's bloody War on Drugs, with the vast majority of said 'war's' victims being the impoverished, though at the same time they have also been the most ardent detractors of the otherwise popular Reproductive Health bill, a law which provides easier access to contraception and sexual education.
What lessons can we worldbuilders-cum-roleplayers take from this analysis? It's something of a trope to have religious authorities be the antagonists in one's stories, which in some contexts can be genuinely incisive -- the examples that come to mind for me, at the moment, are ND Stevenson's Nimona and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, both of which critique Evangelical fundamentalist homophobia and transphobia -- but the reality is often more complicated, especially here in the Global South. Buckley himself notes how countries that fall into the secularism trap more often have their state authorities persecuting local religious actors than the other way around. Keeping in mind this ambiguity leads to a more interesting story, by virtue of verisimilitude, whatever your side on this debate.
Buckley's book: Faithful to Secularism | Columbia University Press
There is, of course, a lot to unpack here. What I mean by 'institutional analysis' is that he looked at the way those institutions, particularly through their elites, interacted: the Philippines' bishops versus the local government, for example, rather than the perspectives of individual believers and voters. His theoretical framework counterpoises the relative stability of those particular democracies against societies that have fallen, or are in immanent danger of falling, to the so-called 'secularism trap', which he defined as "the breakdown of democracy due to the decision of either religious or secular elites to pursue maximalist demands related to the place of religion in democratic politics". In other words, countries where the state suppresses local religions or where local religions countermand the powers of the state are countries that have fallen into this trap.
He classified countries in three ways. First, countries may be secular, as with all the countries he focused on, or they may have an established religion, as in the United Kingdom and the Anglican Church or Saudi Arabia and Islam. Next, secular authorities may cooperate with religious authorities. Countries like France, Turkey, and the United States don't have their secular elites working with religious elites, at least in theory, with France and Turkey assertively enforcing this separation, and the United States adopting a more laissez-faire approach. Finally, cooperation between religious and state authorities may be hegemonic or otherwise. In Tunisia, there is no official religion, but the privileging of Islam is enshrined in their constitution; in Senegal, Islam is theoretically on equal footing with other religions, only being the most important group of religious institutions due to the religion's local majority. The system in Senegal, which it shares with Ireland and the Philippines, Buckley terms 'benevolent secularism'.
For Buckley's work, I focused on the Philippines, where the local religious elites have a very interesting relationship with our secular government. The Spanish initially introduced Roman Catholicism to this country as a means of control, using religious principles and even the church's hierarchy to uphold their colonial government, such that revolutionary leaders like Jose Rizal had notable anticlerical tendencies. Once the Americans replaced the Spanish as our imperial overlords, however, this anticlericalism cooled, and both Catholic and Protestant religious leaders found themselves advocating for democracy in our transition to independence. This advocacy became rather dire under the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, with Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim religious leaders being arrested, exiled, and even killed for their dissent. At present, religious leaders have been the most active critics of Duterte's bloody War on Drugs, with the vast majority of said 'war's' victims being the impoverished, though at the same time they have also been the most ardent detractors of the otherwise popular Reproductive Health bill, a law which provides easier access to contraception and sexual education.
What lessons can we worldbuilders-cum-roleplayers take from this analysis? It's something of a trope to have religious authorities be the antagonists in one's stories, which in some contexts can be genuinely incisive -- the examples that come to mind for me, at the moment, are ND Stevenson's Nimona and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, both of which critique Evangelical fundamentalist homophobia and transphobia -- but the reality is often more complicated, especially here in the Global South. Buckley himself notes how countries that fall into the secularism trap more often have their state authorities persecuting local religious actors than the other way around. Keeping in mind this ambiguity leads to a more interesting story, by virtue of verisimilitude, whatever your side on this debate.
Buckley's book: Faithful to Secularism | Columbia University Press