Fly-Slayer, I agree that it is very much a post-modernist argument, but I also think that postmodernism provides many useful analytical tools, even if I don’t always care for the way that they use those tools.

Franklin, I think there is a big difference between monarchism and royalism, the major one being that the later vests all authority in the royal person, while the monarch is at the summit of a diverse set of authorities have a legitimacy that even the monarch cannot completely challanges.

Bruce, good tie-in to Ockham. He was a many of many razors, and not all of them simple, some of them deadly.

Humans group into alliances/tribes based on many things and have been doing so long before the modern nation-state. One such tribal affiliation is religion. Some of those tribes have required members to kill for it. The modern nation-state does use its own sacred space, rituals, etc to function in a sacred manner, but that was true long before the modern nation-state. The Roman Legion used its eagle standard in much the same way, for example. It’s also true of many other sorts of tribes. An American street gang requires loyalty to the death and has sacred symbols, rituals, hymns [rap songs], theology and its own mission.

I agree that religion was not the only factor in the religious wars, but that is not the same as saying that they weren’t about religion at all. Tribes can go to war for many reasons. In modern times the problems in Ireland were a mix of ecomonics, politics and religion at the least. No, people didn’t fight about theology in that conflict, but your tribal affiliation of Protestant or Catholic played a big part. The Sunni/Shia conflict within Islam is more than just about religion, but it is about religion too.

The image of the modern nation-state as unmanageable is only somewhat true. The US went to its most recent wars by vote of its representative government. Those may have been very bad decisions and may even have been based on lies by part of the government, but isn’t that still better than relying on a king/queen, dictator making those decisions? Your argument that Christians should remain as outsiders has merit and certainly there are strong religious arguments against taking anyone’s life. I don’t think WWI could in anyway be argued to be a just war, but what about WWII. It was more than just a nation-state that was at stake there.

For example, the argument that religion is a “constructed” category. Most of his attempts to problematize a coherent definition of religion rely on bringing in faiths like Buddhism, which are normally recognized as world religions but which lack the supernatural content we associate with, for example, the Abrahamic faiths.

I think the easiest way out of the difficulty is to acknowledge that most of the Buddha’s teachings fall into the realm of philosophy and psychology, which are in some cases joined with a folk religion that regards Buddha and/or certain Buddhists as divine beings.

I don’t think this distinction can readily be dismissed as a western construct, since it even basic familiarity with the Buddhist corpus will show that folk Buddhist beliefs usually differ quite distinctly from the beliefs expressed in, say, the Pali Tipitaka. Cf. Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s admission that there is really no such thing as reincarnation in Buddhism (since there is really no such thing as a “soul” in Buddhist cosmology) and you will get a sense of the sometimes dramatic disparity between folk Buddhism and Buddhist doctrine.

Even if previous ages might not have made the distinction between religion and the rest of culture, certainly this does not obligate us also to not make the distinction? Certainly there was no such thing as “economics” per se until the modern era, yet we can meaningfully analyze the economic realities of, say, an ancient Greek polis.

The point is that modern folks like us make the distinction between activities deemed “political” and those deemed “religious,” but if all of reality falls under a totalizing vision of life as it did for Sumerians, the distinction of religion and politics is, at a certain level and especially for ANE societies, invalid. The “state” didn’t “co-opt” or “abdicate” spiritual/religious roles because political and spiritual roles were unified and understood as such.

I take a practical view, one I first found in the writing of Robert A. Heinlein (everyone’s favorite author to love or hate around politics, political and military theory and history), paraphrasing:

Nations always go to war for practical reasons, whether simple self-defense or complex self-interest. However, young men and women require high ideals to put their lives at risk.

That, for me, defines the interface and conflict between secular and religious, sticking to the semantics Mr. Médaille has introduced. The question becomes, at any moment in history and for any nation or location, which side is in control of the balance, and which side of the balance dominates?

I see the traditional monarchies as the religious side of the balance, especially those monarchs who claimed divine mandate or approval, a practice taken to ridiculous lengths in the Roman Empire and apparently carried on by its Christian successors. I see the “atheist” regimes equally on the religious side, for the same reasons cited above and in the semantic context I’m trying to stick with: communism, Marxism, Leninism et al are just as much religions in the “high ideals” sense as any theism. Indeed, the entire argument over what is or is not a religion is a symptom of the fact that each side of the argument is threatened by its identical twin, different only in cosmetics and cultural milieu. The point, one I feel cannot be overused, is that religion is just one part of the tool set used by nations to control, manipulate, send to war and oppress their peoples.

However flawed it has become, however arguable its choices might be, the republic founded by our revolutionaries embodies the attempt to mitigate that conflict. It doesn’t replace a religious control with a secular one (something introduced later as a corruption of the original), or relegate religion to secondary status. It did, in fact, try to keep the republic in that middle place between the two extremes, by pulling the teeth it found to be dangerous wherever it could. It placed, philosophically, the ultimate authority of government in the hands of the citizens. It gave them immediate, non-violent recourse to replace its governors. It defined the realms of governance as distinct entities, and made it a high crime for one entity to try to usurp the power of any other entity, then guaranteed the existence of an organ of the citizens — free speech and the free use of it by journalists — capable of uncovering just such a crime.

I could go on, but there is one point that needs stating, in my opinion, over all the rest: Our republic cannot stand without the exact same, minimal fulfillment of citizen obligation, which is to add one’s voice to the governance, at any level. We have, right there in the Constitution, all we need to prohibit the same sorts of tyranny we decry in the rest of the world. If we don’t fulfill our part of the bargain, then we deserve ever tyrant we get, whether secular or religious.

• that religious believers have the right to state and argue their opinions in opposition to the views of religious leaders and councils even though their opinions may prove wrong;

• that religious believers have the right to state and argue their opinions in opposition to the views of religious leaders and councils even though their opinions may prove wrong;

• that no part of a religious organization is infallible;

• that a religious leader or council that tries to impose wrong teachings upon the members of the religion, or seriously abuses the rights of religious members or non-members, can be deposed;

• that the powers of secular governments are not dependent on a religion’s approval;

• that the rights of unbelievers (for example, any governmental rights they may have, and their property rights) should not be affected by the establishment of a particular religion;

• that secular rulers are not ‘absolute’ but must respect the rights of their subjects;

• that a tyrannical ruler, religious or non-religious, may be deposed.

Today we would perceive that both John and William had important arguments:-

http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/dialogus/polth.html

Whether the sovereign power is secular or ecclesial it has to be accountable to the people not merely through voting but also with regard to control over property which also has power. Jeremy Rifkin in his book “The Empathic Civilization” quotes Leslie White’s law that human “culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased.” See Wikipedia:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White's_law

Rifkin argues that the success of “energy capture” is directly linked to the evolution of communication systems such as the invention of speech, writing, printing, telephony, radio, television, computers and the Internet, etc. all of which act as part of a controlling central nervous or directing system. For human culture to continue to successfully evolve (bearing in mind that property is “captured or stored energy”) requires the maximum autonomy for human beings to combine collectively, or cooperatively, and this requires sovereign powers of “whatever flavor” to merge moral with legal rights with this “combinational autonomy” objective in mind. To allow property to be used in a solipsistic manner as the Wall Street banks have recently done is, for example, a negation of this “combinational autonomy.”

Jonathan, it is certainly a duty to defend your family and neighbors from attack; it is not your duty to become a threat to somebody else’s family and neighbors. That is neither dulce nor decorous.

Martha, I don’t see the slightest bit of historical “progressivism” in Cavanaugh’s work; if you read that into the review, it is the fault of the reviewer, not the work reviewed. When I point out that history followed a certain path, I only mean that’s what it did, without implying at all that is what it had to do. It could have been different; there is no determinism here.

The book above is well worth reading. For a quicker take, see Cavanaugh’s earlier essay-length presentation of his argument:

http://www.jesusradicals.com/wp-content/uploads/wars-of-religion-and-the-rise-of-the-state.pdf

or you can listen to a talk he gave on the topic, “The Empire of the Empty Shrine,” at the very bottom of the page here:

http://www.jesusradicals.com/theology/william-cavanaugh/

I think you (and the Mr. Cavanaugh) are generally right to claim that the modern division between “secular” and “religious” is artificial, and the result of modern epistemological prejudices (the insatiable drive to categorize, etc.). But I have trouble following your argument past these initial claims, and especially have trouble with your conclusion. Namely, you seem to suggest that rejecting the separation of church and state amounts to a refutation of Horace’s flavor of patriotism. But Horace lived outside of modernity, did he not? How does your argument even touch his notion of patriotism?

Perhaps you mean to suggest that his thought was a precursor to modern notions of civic religion. If so, will you please substantiate the idea that a willingness to die (and kill) for one’s country is a quintessentially modern stance. To be honest, I am under quite the opposite impression. It seems to me that the love of home and country – including a willingness to die in defense of one’s home, if necessary – is one of the most fundamental and natural of human allegiances, and one that transcends the modern-premodern divide. (Of course this allegiance has been denounced as “irrational” by countless modern intellectuals, but the tendency persists.) Perhaps your point is meant to address the new scale of modern, technological warfare? Or perhaps I’ve just misunderstood your point. In either case, clarification would be much appreciated.

Cordially,
Jonathan Green

My quibble with Cavenaugh’s argument is that he (seemingly) agrees with the notion that history is progressive and resorts to straw manning the liberal argument via a semantic trick… rather than beginning with the premise that people are flawed and our (secular and religious) institutions are flawed and imperfectable – and always have been.

rather than recognizing that states have been alternately co-opting and abdicating religious/spiritual roles since Sumer

This only makes sense if such a distinction between state and religious/spiritual roles existed in the time of Sumer. Can you offer any historical evidence such a distinction existed back in Sumer, rather than being an anachronistic projection of confused modern categories that simply didn’t exist until they arose as Cavanaugh has described in the origins of the modern State?

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I really wonder how this notion that “Democracies don’t war” (as Idiot Bush puts it) came to be conventional wisdom. The founders of America understood human nature far more accurately, as Federalist #6 shows; and even the most cursory observation of modern reality shows it to be false.

From what you’ve written, Mr. Medaille, it also seems that both you and he buy into a surprisingly progressive approach to history (‘The actual trajectory of history is that the state absorbed the powers of the church’) – rather than recognizing that states have been alternately co-opting and abdicating religious/spiritual roles since Sumer.

I must be missing something? Are his arguments purely semantic?