Abstract:
Religion and politics are today, as they were in the past, intertwined so that
if they do not form an inseparable couple then they are simply a unity which only
the analytic eye of the scholar can distinguish. However, there are social
processes underway which indicate that the possibilities exist for a society of
citizens who do not need to divinize either the state or anyone else, at least not for
public purposes. That religion deserves respect is undeniable, especially when it
caters for individuals’ balance of personality or those social needs which
rationalism cannot fulfil. But together with Gellner and Lessnoff I am of the
opinion that it fulfilled its role as ‘the forerunner and progenitor of modernity’.
Protestantism and High Islam fulfilled their respective modernizing roles. But in
the modern world religion has no ‘legitimate cognitive role’. Science has made
claims of religion ‘incredible’ and all reinterpretations of religious modernists
deserve ‘no intellectual or moral respect’. Lessnoff credits Gellner with ‘exactly’
mirroring Max Weber’s viewpoint.25 Political anthropology can agree with this provided we also realise that the globalizing world as we experience it today is by
far not completed. The tension between those who are marginalised and prepared to
believe in leaders and prophets whether genuine or false, and those who arrived to
see their modernity as a liberation from religious faith and thus a chance for a self
governed truth-seeking civil society, will be there still for a very long time ahead.
