Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History

By James W. Laine

Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their relationship from the policies of Alexander the Great to the ideologies of modern Europe secularists, with stops in classical India, China, and the Islamic world. Meta-Religion is a groundbreaking text that brings power and politics to the fore of our understanding of world religions, placing religion at the center of world history. This synthetic approach is both transformative and enlightening as it presents a powerful model for thinking differently about what religion is and how it functions in the world. With images and maps to bring the narrative to life, Meta-Religion combines sophisticated scholarly critique with accessibility that students and scholar alike will appreciate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780520959996

James W. Laine

James W. Laine is Arnold H. Lowe Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College.

Book preview

In honor of beloved Virgil—

O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .

—Dante, Inferno

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Joan Palevsky.

Meta-Religion

Meta-Religion

Religion and Power in World History

James W. Laine

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laine, James W.

    Meta-religion : religion and power in world history/James W. Laine.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28136-3 (cloth, alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-28137-0 (pbk., alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-95999-6 (electronic)

    1. Religions—History.    2. Religion and politics—History.    I. Title.

BL80.3.L34    2015

201’.72—dc232014020289

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To my wife, Joy,

and our children,

Maria, Patrick, Claire, and Rosie

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE. RELIGION AND EMPIRE IN ANTIQUITY, 330 B.C.–710 A.D.

1. Alexander and Ashoka: Cosmopolitan Empires and Religious Policy from Egypt to India, 330–230 B.C.

2. Imperial Religion: China to Rome, 250 B.C. –250 A.D.

3. The Debate over Dharma: Hindus and Buddhists Compete for Ideological Dominance in South Asia

4. Confessional Religion and Empire before the Rise of Islam

5. The Rise of Islam and the Early Caliphate, 622–711 A.D.

PART TWO. THE ISLAMIC MILLENNIUM, 700–1700 A.D.

6. Imperial Islam, 690–1500 A.D.

7. The Great Islamic Empires of the Early Modern Era (ca. 1500–1700)

PART THREE. THE MODERN WORLD

8. Putting Religion in Its Place, I: Reformers, Kings, and Philosophers Challenge the Church

9. Putting Religion in Its Place, II: Revolution and Religious Freedom

10. The Contemporary Era: The Worldwide Regime of Meta-Religion

Conclusion

Notes

Suggested Readings

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

1. The empire of Alexander the Great

2. The empire of Ashoka

3. The Han Empire, ca. 100 A.D.

4. The Silk Road Eurasian trade routes

5. Arabia, ca. 600 A.D.

6. The gunpowder empires

FIGURES

1. Siwah today

2. Ashokan Pillar

3. Terracotta warriors

4. Chinese Emperor Shih Huangdi

5. Second Temple in Jerusalem

6. Augustus Caesar

7. Sanchi Great Stupa

8. Yakshi at Sanchi Stupa

9. Stupa

10. Seated Buddha

11. Mathura Buddha

12. Kushana Emperor Kanishka

13. The Ka’ba

14. Dome of the Rock

15. Eighth-century map of Baghdad’s round city

16. Taj Mahal

17. Akbar, lost in the desert while hunting wild asses

18. Hagia Sophia

19. Portrait of Martin Luther

20. Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses

21. Jefferson’s Bible

22. The Apotheosis of Washington

23. Culte de l’Être suprême (Cult of the Supreme Being)

24. La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People)

25. Pope Pius IX blessing troops before the Capture of Rome

26. Pope Pius IX

27. Swami Vivekananda

28. Mahatma Gandhi

29. Mao, the Great Helmsman

30. Falun Gong demonstration

Preface

I have written this book because I am unhappy with the usual surveys of world religions.¹ Ambitious surveys of the world’s religions—whether they are college textbooks or popular accounts—convey large amounts of data. You can usually find there a serviceable summary of the Bhagavadgita or the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) alongside the Gospel of Luke, but perhaps far more arcane material as well.² There will be potted histories of the major world religions, though besides the Big Five—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism³—its not clear how to slot in the other traditions like Daoism, Sikhism, Jainism, Shinto, not to mention the tribal religions of Native Americans or sub-Saharan Africans. Usually, as an afterthought, there are attempts to relate all these traditions to questions we modern folk are raising (e.g., about environmentalism, feminism, violence), whether or not those were their questions. And finally, there will be a word or two about just what religion itself is, what defines this category in which we have included all these traditions. How much do we include here? What if Confucians or Buddhists claim they are not religious—can we count them anyway? And what about various clearly secular ideologies, especially Marxist ones; do they, in effect, replace religions in some societies? Do we study them as religions?

I do not mean to disparage these books, nor the noble efforts of their authors to portray fairly and accurately the religious lives of ancient and modern people all over the globe, and I cannot replace here what they accomplish in those books. Students interested in facts—facts about the authorship of the Christian gospels and the doctrines of early Buddhism, facts about the Hindu gods and their worship in temples, facts about Zen meditation and Islamic personal law—should turn to these textbooks. What the usual hefty survey lacks is not facts but clear arguments about how those facts were chosen. What argument about the very nature of religion lies behind the chapter-by-chapter account of particular religions? For example, it is often assumed that real religion is all about the interior experience of sincere individuals, and thus the religion of lukewarm or hypocritical conformists is ignored. In other words, we are concerning ourselves with a tiny minority, but nowhere is that explicitly stated. Many Religions of the World textbooks should be retitled The Religious Life of Noble Persons.

Why do we read surveys of the religions of the world? Partly because, in an effort to be less parochial and more cosmopolitan, we want to see how other people answer the big questions. And partly because, assuming that a survey will be a menu of personal options, we believe we can use it to consider the options and pick a religious path that appeals to us. The most popular among such books are those that appeal to the seeker, providing the reader with a taste of a variety of spiritualities. Pursuing either or both of these aims depends on the idea that religion is a genus, comprising roughly equivalent species. And that each of these examples of religion—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam—serves the same function in society, or at least should serve the same function in society that privatized Protestant Christianity serves in open, tolerant, secularized western societies. Religion in this view, or at least authentic religion, is a personal philosophy and set of private practices with virtually no political role.

I am also somewhat unhappy about the way religion is treated in the study of world history. Surely the study of the history of the world is strikingly less Eurocentric than it was a few decades ago, yet a certain ingrained narrative is there. We still tend to have lodged in our heads a seemingly obvious progression that leads from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Rome to England to Massachusetts to California. India and China are added in, but often as classical and timeless civilizations unrelated to our story, the rise of the West.⁴ The most striking things about that narrative is that it ends up with us, and that it rather sidelines the vast Islamic civilization that dominated world trade and cultural exchange for a thousand years (ca. 700–1700 A.D.).

Unquestioned assumptions—about models of world history or the ways religions evolve—produce other blind spots. Why are religions and civilizations treated like organisms that take birth, grow, flourish, decline, and die? Why is there often a survey of the most ancient Indian mythology, reflected in Vedic Sanskrit texts composed before 1000 B.C., as part of a historical narrative of Hinduism, while there is no similar account of Greek and Roman mythology as the first chapter of European religion? The simple answer is because organizing a book with chapters on major world religions will mean having chapters on Hinduism and Christianity. Hinduism includes a treatment of early Vedic ritual and mythology, even while Vedic priests did not think of themselves as belonging to a religion named Hinduism and the vast majority of modern Hindus know very little about ancient Vedic traditions, while Christianity replaces the pagan traditions of Greece and Rome. Its prehistory has been covered by the chapter on Judaism, which again is treated as an ancient tradition going back to Abraham, even while the Rabbinic religion of the Judaism we know today was largely the product of the first century and Abraham would hardly have thought of himself as a member of the religion of Judaism. (Some Muslims would interject here that Abraham knew that he was a Muslim.) So the prevailing view has it that some ancient religious histories are relevant and others are not. But consider the medieval Italian peasant, celebrating holy days on an annual cycle, in harmony with the rhythms of agriculture, and venerating saints at sacred sites with ancient pre-Christian roots. Certainly such a person would affirm that she was a Christian. But is her religion really the same as that of the first-century Christian participating in what the Romans would have seen as a nonconformist cult, anticipating the imminent end of the world? Or does she, in fact, have more in common with the Roman pagan, both following ancient traditions and both suspicious of novelty? Similarly, is Mexican Catholicism both a chapter in the history of Euro-American Christianity and a chapter in Native American religion?

The more important problem with popular and textbook surveys of world religions is that they are bloodless. They present each religion as though it were a museum piece. Here’s what Hindus believe (or do). Here’s what Muslims believe (or do). Here’s what Christians believe (or do). Isn’t that nice? They all have these uplifting ideas about being a good person! Behind the well-meaning blandness is an unspoken relativist theology based on humanist notions of fairness: all these religions are products of different cultures; all have good things to teach us; if we open our minds and learn about them we will accept each other with respect and good will. This unspoken argument shifts the discourse to a level where both reader and author are above the religions they study, respecting them but not taking them seriously in the religious way religious people take them. It avoids even the most basic arguments about how scholars deal with the problems of defining and studying religion and ascertain the boundaries to this field of inquiry. Are Christianity and Hinduism really two comparable species of the same genus (religion)? Should we present only portraits of only the noblest Buddhists and Muslims? Or the most representative? Most Buddhists do not meditate, and most Muslims do not pray five times a day; are these people accounted for in the usual summary treatments of Buddhism and Islam? And if most people in world history have been unwilling to relativize their own religious beliefs, if many of them were in fact willing to kill or die for them, how should we account for that without simply assuming a sort of smug pact between reader and author that we are somehow more advanced than those benighted, intolerant, and bellicose souls of the past, especially in light of the fact that the twentieth century was the bloodiest on record. If we moderns are not fighting about religion, and we often are, we are still fighting about something. And most often, we still prosecute our wars with a rather religious conviction.

• • •

My interest in the world historical framework for the study of religion was first provoked by my study of history with Otto Nelson at Texas Tech University in 1970, when he suggested that I read W. H. McNeill’s Rise of the West. That interest was extended when I read M. G. S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam at the suggestion of my fellow graduate student Kevin Reinhart, now a professor of Islamics at Dartmouth College. I thank these dear friends for their inspiration and for all their wonderful, intellectually stimulating and enriching companionship over the last decades. While at Macalester, several colleagues in the History Department also gave me much to think about. I want to thank especially Paul Solon, Jim Stewart, Peter Rachleff, Karin Velez, and David Itzkowitz.

Outside my own field of specialization, I have also been inspired by the work of biblical scholars, especially Gene Gallagher and the late George W. MacRae, and my friends at Macalester College, Calvin Roetzel, Allen Callahan, Susanna Drake, and Andy Overman. Andy and I have taught a course and an NEH seminar together, and those many conversations resulted in the way I have conceived the first third of this book. I am extremely grateful to these friends.

In the 1980s I ventured into the field of Islamics, especially in order to understand the ways Hindus and Muslims in South Asia relate. This resulted in my book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and made me realize the limitations of studying Hinduism in an isolated way. In this field, I have been much influenced and aided by Carl Ernst, Stewart Gordon, Bruce Lawrence, Brendan Larocque, SherAli Tareen, and Mashal Saif.

Many other colleagues at Macalester assisted me as I ventured far outside my specialty. I want to thank especially Brett Wilson, Barry Cytron, Erik Davis, Joëlle Vitiello, Kiarina Kordela, Terry Boychuk, David Martyn, Satoko Suzuki, Arjun Guneratne, Paula Cooey, and the late Juanita Garciagodoy. I also received useful advice and counsel from Van Dusenbery, Daniel Williams, Andy Fort, Roland Jansen, Shana Sippy, Jeanne Kilde, Richard Davis, and Bruce Forbes.

Prior to undertaking this work, my studies have mostly dealt with India. In that field, I have continued to benefit from the generous help of a number of prominent South Asianists. I thank especially Alf Hiltebeitel, Vasudha Narayanan, James Hegarty, Richard Gombrich, Charlie Hallisey, Eleanor Zelliot, Irina Glushkova, Jim Masselos, Philip Lutgendorf, Paula Richman, Lynn Zastoupil, Fred Smith, Christian Novetzke, Lee Schlesinger, and Wendy Doniger.

My department at Macalester has been a congenial place to work, especially because of the constant help and unwavering support of my brilliant administrative assistant, Toni Schrantz. I would also like to thank our student worker Joanne Johnson, who provided much help with securing images for the book. I am sure I tried the patience of several people at the University of California Press. I thank my editor Eric Schmidt for his early encouragement, and for the patient work of Andrew Frisardi, Cindy Fulton, and Maeve Cornell-Taylor. Thanks also to Alex Trotter for his work on the index.

Macalester students in my course World Religions and World Religions Discourse have provided me with much to think about, as have my students in Introduction to the Religions of the World at the University of Minnesota. It is primarily for students such as these that I have written this book.

Of course, all my work would be impossible without the love and support of family and friends. I am grateful for the hospitality of my English relatives, Olivia, Dave, Barbara, Betty, Ahmad, Jamal, Kareem, and Yussef. My Texas family has been behind me from the beginning. Thanks to Rick and Nancy, and especially my mother, Marie. I’ve appreciated the encouragement of my oldest friend Bill Walter. Thanks also to Richard and Jill Michell for their constant friendship. Jill graciously provided two fine drawings for chapter 3. Finally, I have had the enduring affection of my children, Maria, Patrick, Claire, and Rosie, and had the best of companions in my wife, Joy. From England to India to Connecticut and Minnesota, as a scholarly advisor, partner, and friend, she has been there every day. To her and our children, I dedicate this work.

For eight beautiful years, my loyal dog Patches led me on daily walks. He didn’t give a damn about religion or power but probably helped me more than anyone to stop and think. I hope the results honor his memory.

James W. Laine

Saint Paul, Minnesota

July 10, 2014

Introduction

In order to avoid the sort of bland detachment and presumed political neutrality of the usual world religions survey, I will pursue a particular argument that I believe takes religion more seriously than is usually the case in the academic world, where religions are appreciated more than fought over. My argument is a simple one: If you have discovered the truth, will you not want to live in a world governed by that truth? In other words, if God has spoken to you in a revelation; or the subtle nature of Reality has appeared to you in meditative experience; or you have perhaps only felt that all was right with the world as you participated in a stately ritual of renewal—will you not extend all your efforts to bring your world into congruence with the truth you have reached? And will not such efforts necessarily involve attempts to exercise power, and thus involve participation in politics? Is not the story of religion inseparable from political and military history? Is religious tolerance really such an obvious value and really the primary goal of studying religion? Or is something more complicated going on?

I am following an old argument in the sociology of religion, one Peter Berger expressed in his classic book The Sacred Canopy: Every human society is an exercise in world-building. Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise.¹ Berger goes on to develop a perhaps overly static model, in which human beings create a world to inhabit, begin to experience that world as fully natural, and thrive to the degree they are successfully socialized to live harmoniously in that world. Those not fully socialized seem to be on the road to serious mental imbalance. More recently, scholars influenced by Michel Foucault see culture, in more dynamic terms, as a place where dominant cultural patterns are continually resisted. There might be a dominant culture and a reigning orthodoxy, supported by the elite classes, but there are always people who are less influential and powerful, who push back, employing the weapons of the weak to claim their vision of society.² While they may never win, they are also never vanquished.

Whatever model of society one adopts, the fact remains that religion is almost always a fundamental part of world building. It plays a role in the constructive phase, when prophets argue articulately about how to conceive the truth, but also in the less noticeable phase of maintaining the taken-for-granted views of the world that have become habitual, natural, and thus almost beyond argument.

Now, if many of us in modern western culture find it possible to inhabit a world where religion does not play a primary role in creating that world, where religion is not congruent with what is seen as natural—a condition which holds for many people who nonetheless still affirm conventionally religious beliefs³—we have two fundamental questions to ponder before we proceed. First, if religion nowadays is not taking, as Berger would have it, a distinctive place in the enterprise of world building, what has replaced it? And second, if the religions we do see around us are not playing that role, what, exactly, are they doing? We might also ask whether this condition, usually referred to as secularism, is a condition unique to the modern western world. When one hears the assertion about a religion, It’s not so much a religion; it’s a way of life, one has to wonder what kind of religion is not a way of life.

Before we explore possible answers to these questions, it is probably necessary to consider briefly the way scholars imagine religion operating in societies where it has a primary function in creating and maintaining the objective world. At the risk of creating too sharp a divide between the traditional and the modern, we can, for the sake of argument, consider a traditional society one where religion reigns supreme, maintaining an authority in matters of morals and metaphysics, and deeply embedded in everyday life. In Hindu India, one avoids eating with the left hand, not because it is evil to do so, but because one has internalized the sense that it is impure and has the special function of washing after defecation. A fully socialized Hindu might feel nauseated by the idea of eating with the left hand; in other words, not eating with the left hand is more an instinct than a consciously followed external rule. In a traditional Catholic society, people accepted the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of theology. Children were baptized and confirmed, were taught to declare allegiance to the creed, and were sternly warned against heresy. They grew up with a calendar formed by Christian culture, where holy days were the holidays; the private world of desire for food or sex was governed by religious notions; and everyday greetings were religious declarations, the religious God be with you (adios, adieu) slowly giving way to the neutral-sounding good-bye. If the church’s authority in theological matters was threatened, it might exercise explicit temporal powers in prosecuting heresy. But it was in another sense that it exercised its power in more self-assured, unselfconscious ways. On Easter Sunday, the individual in this society experienced that calendar date as an objective fact: it felt like Easter, and virtually everyone participated in expected behaviors that reinforced that reality. The more profound power of religion is not coercive; it is not an external pressure, but a seemingly natural inner impulse. Even in the modern world, we can see that whenever adults smile benignly on a little group of girls in their Easter dresses, they reinforce a custom that will make it likely for those girls to grow up wanting their own daughters to observe Easter similarly, and thus continue traditions that are less about theology than they are about belonging.⁴

Now, my portrayal here of traditional Catholic culture is probably tainted by nostalgia. Close historical studies have revealed more tension in the actual religious worlds of medieval Catholics than one might suppose.⁵ Similarly, lower-caste Hindus—wildly underrepresented in the literature—might also inhabit a world much less fussy in matters of ritual purity. Nonetheless, even contemporary anthropological accounts of village culture in our own times, both Hindu and Catholic, often capture a way of life in which religion is not a set of abstract ideas about the world but something embedded in the world that people inhabit.⁶ One has to note here that nostalgia for a village community where religion reigns supreme may drive the very modern phenomenon of the American exodus from city life, the escape to exurbs beyond the reach of government, where megachurches supply many social services and the notion of the separation of church and state seems less and less apt.⁷ On the other hand, for those unmoved by this nostalgia—those for whom religion is a matter of private belief—the comprehensive way of life of the exurban megachurch is not just odd but incomprehensibly cultic and perverse.

Just as the origin of the systematic study of society in Europe—the discipline of sociology—coincides with the rise of individualism, the origin of the comparative study of religion coincides with the European Enlightenment demotion of religion from its preeminent role. Only after the fracture of the Holy Mother Church could the Faith be replaced by multiple religions, and only once Christendom was replaced by nation-states (after the Enlightenment exalted Reason to replace God), could the power and authority of religion in European society be assumed by secular institutions. And only in such secular institutions could one take up a position above the variety of religions and presume to study them fairly and comparatively. Thus the academic study of religion, a discipline that is less than two centuries old, takes place in a context in which the nation-state has already assumed the right to adjudicate a multiplicity of religions (including alien religions, it should be noted, encountered in the colonies). We all know this, but it is a fact that often slips from consciousness when we are going about the business of studying religions, some of which are part of cultures where they take a royal position, and some of which are part of a world more familiar to us, where religion has been dethroned. And forgetting that fundamental difference, we proceed to talk about both kinds of religion as though we are talking about the same thing.

To anticipate the extended argument that will inform this book, religion is in many cultures a constituent of the world-building process, often the most important constituent, and thus, not surprisingly, engaged in struggles for power. It is thus inseparable from politics. But in the modern West, especially in Europe, this typical situation seems not to be the case, as secular institutions, governed by values of the Enlightenment (democracy, individual freedom, reason—all revered, by the way, as sacred) have replaced religion in its political and world-building role.⁸ Even in America, where resurgent evangelical Christianity is taking a more confident political role, the secular values of democracy and freedom are also taken for granted, though unrecognized as the products of Enlightenment.⁹ The modern condition, where religion as the bedrock of taken-for-granted assumptions has been replaced by less explicitly religious ideas and institutions, makes it hard for us to understand traditional religion and its relationship to power, and it also blinds us to the fact that our secular institutions are not a neutral ground for the fair adjudication of multiple religions, but the coercive instruments of something that effectively stands in for the One True Faith; the one reasonable, just authority. We might find it incomprehensible that people go to war for their religion, while we find it perfectly reasonable that we carry out military strikes to defend freedom or even protect our way of life.

Since the treatment of religion as something neatly separate from politics is misleading, I want attend to the place of religion in world-historical contexts often defined by the history of politics and war—religion as a critical part of the construction of the real world of legitimate power. I begin with the age of Alexander the Great and end with the contemporary world, the age of the war on terror. It is a story that often crisscrosses Mesopotamia, the region of modern Iraq. So, as a corrective to the sort of world history that centers on Europe, we will see how Mesopotamia, the most ancient center of civilization, is the crossroads of religion and power in the ancient world, connecting Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, and China, while today it is, among other things, the battleground of the crusaders for democracy and the oil-rich Muslim critics of American imperialism. Both Alexander the Great and George W. Bush talked to God before invading Iraq. Both spoke of bringing democracy to the region. Both men were personally religious but sought to encourage vague and universal values, religious and political, rather than promote the particular doctrines of a specific sect or religion. (And both had sinking poll numbers late in their careers!)

Of course, a comparison of the lives and policies of Alexander the Great and George Bush would be abstract and fruitless. But the relation between religion and politics has not changed as much as we might initially think. If one is to exercise military and political power over a large area, one must encourage and promote values that are consistent with one’s political agenda. And since often such populations are committed to multiple religions, and therefore are committed to what might be incommensurate worldviews, one must offer a vision of something that transcends and supersedes these religions. In the modern world we often talk rather blandly and bloodlessly about promoting tolerance. Certainly if we are to live together we must tolerate each other’s religion. But while much ink has been spilled defending this virtue, we also find that even the most tolerant person has a commonsense measure by which the religions of others are evaluated and then affirmed, tolerated, or rejected as barbarous. The Sunnis and Shi’is of Iraq should tolerate each other, we aver, but the sacredness of democracy is above debate, and its opponents subject to censure and attack. The precondition for the multicultural acceptance of multiple religions (tolerance) is the shared acceptance of something above religion, something with the power to set the political conditions of shared community. But since religion often speaks the language of ultimacy, how do we imagine that something that would transcend it, and thus demote it?

In my analysis of religion and power, I will use two pairs of terms in the following specific ways:

Inclusivism here means the intellectual or political approach to religion, which assumes that differing religions can be included within an overarching system. When the Hindu accepts Jesus as an avatar, he is an inclusivist, accepting Jesus into an alien system in which he is one avatar among many.¹⁰

Particularism here means an assumption that different people in different times and circumstances should have different religious beliefs and ethical standards. The particularist would argue that a monk should be a vegetarian, but a soldier should not. Particularism is consistent with the ideology of the caste system, and the ideas of karma and rebirth.

Exclusivism here means the assertion that a particular truth or religion is exclusively true and thus involves the rejection rather than the inclusion of others. This position is often characteristic of monotheism and religions like Christianity that emphasize orthodoxy (strictly defined belief, as opposed to practice).

Universalism here means the assumption that a particular truth or religious doctrine is true for all people in all times and circumstances. So the Buddhist Four Noble Truths are assumed to be always true, regardless of context.

The thesis of this book is that the usual textbook account of the world religions, acquainting the reader with all that is good and noble in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions, does little to acquaint us with the central issues of the study of religion. It fails to deal with the fact that if religious cultures create worlds, the inhabitants of those worlds share not only doctrinal beliefs (Jesus is the Son of God; everything is impermanent; there is no god but God)—doctrines the contemporary ecumenist would have us treat as personal opinions to be politely discussed—but more importantly, convictions that have become so taken for granted that they seem embedded in the very nature of reality (human beings have equal dignity; karma produces a particular rebirth; history is the theater of God’s Will in the world). What serves as tolerance is often the willingness to set aside the doctrinal as long as the practical concerns of governance operate under assumed notions of the Good, notions that appeal to the vast majority and exclude only the weak minority who can be classified as barbarous. These appeals to taken-for-granted values can form what I will call a meta-religion,¹¹ whether they are the reasonable ideas of Pax Romana or the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹² They become the basis for dealing with multiple religions in the context of a common political community, in other words in a world where religion is more than private individual opinions about abstract metaphysical problems (hobbies as Stephen Carter would put it).¹³ When Barack Obama expresses his respect for all people of faith and reaches out to Muslims, he embraces those Muslims who are ready to share his politics, those whose religion is thus congruent with democratic values.¹⁴ On the other hand, those who would counter American or European exercise of military power with their own weapons in the name of Islam are not people of faith but perpetrators of a perverted ideology. They are terrorists. And their religion, in the minds of most westerners, is not the real thing.

If we are now beginning to see the ways the taken-for-granted Enlightenment values of secularism serve as a meta-religion, we may also benefit from seeing the ways in which premodern people found to articulate encompassing ideologies that stood above the multiple religions of cosmopolitan societies. All premodern empires encompassed peoples with a variety of religions. Few were