In 2023, a Swiss public university invited applications for a position in Jewish theology. In addition to scholarly credentials, there was one additional requirement: Only members of the Catholic Church should apply. I learned about the incident from Israeli newspapers, which expressed some consternation. The requirement actually made perfect sense in the historical context of the Swiss state’s religious settlement, whereby higher education in religion is coordinated with established churches. But it appeared puzzling at best and offensive at worst from beyond the country’s borders. In Israel itself, while those who teach Jewish studies do not need to be Catholic, there are other oddities. Perhaps the most influential Sharia court judge in the country’s history (and yes, the state of Israel has Sharia courts) studied Arabic and Islamic law at Hebrew University with a Jewish professor.
Many discussions of religion and politics assume that there is a dichotomy or continuum: Societies are either fully secular or have varying degrees of established religion. And religion is defined in terms that can show a secular bias — it is a matter of personal belief (“faith” is often used as a synonym). The idea of the secular is also linked to geography: The modern nation-state is said to have evolved in Europe in a secular fashion; when that structure was replicated in other regions, nonsecular paths were often followed.
The relationship between religion and the state can certainly change the moment one crosses an international border, but the patterns cannot be reduced to “secularism,” “modernization” or the presence or absence of the supposed “Westphalian” model formulated in 17th-century Europe following devastating religious wars, whereby states defined by territory treat faith as a private concern. Nor can they be understood as simply reflecting a specific religion’s teachings. These patterns were rather established when modern bureaucratic states were built throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Decisions that were made, often for short-term reasons or convenience, became rigid, such that they remain with the inhabitants of those states today. The ways in which emerging states made room for the sacred turn out to be as manifold as the states themselves.
When one examines particular cases up close, all the simple stories dissolve. Ideas of “secularization”; of Christianity being this way, Islam being that way and Buddhism a third way; of the spread of the European model of the nation-state all vanish, and very different pictures emerge. In modern societies, religion seems to appear in many places — family and social life, education, charity, bureaucracy, legal status and authority — that reach far beyond an individual’s private inner life, or soul. And if by “modern state” we mean one with a set of clearly delineated official structures that have direct and regular interactions with citizens, who populate a “society” distinct from the state, then such a political form has clearly emerged pretty much everywhere since the late 18th century. If some areas in Europe saw this form emerge slightly earlier, the difference can be measured in decades, not centuries.
Almost all modern states encountered religion as they emerged; the question was less whether to deal with it than how. When approaching family life, education, charity and social services, modern bureaucratic states developed a wide variety of arrangements for incorporating, regulating or excluding religious actors. Even the existence and definition of “religion” as a field were shaped by how states evolved.
Thus, the results do not vary according to binaries such as secular vs. theocratic or Western vs. non-Western models. Nor can they be largely explained by older texts, as though the Bible, the Quran, the U.S. Constitution or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen settled the place of religion in the state. Older religious texts give little guidance on bureaucratic chains of command. More recent political texts that still predate the development of the modern state are hardly more detailed.
For instance, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — which is often taken to be the foundation of American secularism — meant something very different when it was issued in a country without a “modern state,” as we have defined it, and without clear distinctions between public and private or between religious and secular parts of social life. It is perhaps the more loquacious Internal Revenue Code as much as the terse First Amendment that shapes interaction between religious and state bodies in the United States today. That constitutional clause has been read as both permitting individual states to establish religion and also prohibiting them from doing so. It bars Congress from establishing an official religion but also requires it to protect religion’s “free exercise.” As new questions arose, such as the place of religion in an extensive public school system, that two-part formula framed subsequent disputes rather than resolving them.
But this recency in the definition of how religion and the state relate is not just American. Perhaps the state with the least involvement in religion in the world is Sierra Leone — the descendant of a political entity formed by Great Britain over two centuries ago, with a strong Christian missionary and religious foundation, but one that lost religion as it expanded its territorial reach a century later. What began as a religiously inspired effort to establish a colony, in part for persons liberated from slavery, grew very rapidly in the late 19th century to cover a much larger area, in which Islam was spreading and inhabitants often avoided clear distinctions among Christianity, Islam and other practices. Religion just got left out; the state emerged in a context in which it simply was not, and did not need to be, clearly defined.
In Sri Lanka, the British government — then exclusively composed of Christians — undertook the construction of an extensive civil service and bureaucracy in the 19th century, which explicitly built Buddhism, and Buddhism alone, into official structures. When British imperial officials began constructing this state apparatus, they found themselves in a position (under an 1815 treaty in which the rulers of the Kingdom of Kandy recognized British oversight) of offering protection to Buddhism, including supervision of Buddhist temples. In the educational realm, British rule gave a measure of protection to Christian missionary efforts to build schools, a trend that sparked some pressure from non-Christians to create an alternative system but also to de-emphasize Christianity in the missionary schools. The result has been a system in which the state poses as favoring religious freedom but also protecting Buddhism; it both sponsors and administers religion, but does so in a spirit sometimes deferent and sometimes diffident. That complex blend of approaches not only folds religious debates into politics but also incorporates them into the state itself to be managed, not always peacefully.
Globally, these patterns do not break down into European (or Western) and non-European (or non-Western) variants. Newcomers to the German region of Westphalia itself might be surprised to be asked by Westphalian officials to declare one of a small number of faiths to which they may subscribe. They might also be puzzled to discover that public universities train clergy and religious teachers in state schools. The French state portrays religion as a private matter — unless the religion is Islam, in which case French leaders have spoken of the need to promote a French variety of the religion.
I list all these anomalies because they become much less puzzling if we introduce a new way of understanding the relationship between religion and the state. When scholars and commentators approach the subject, they tend to speak of “religion and the state,” as if these are two clearly distinct entities whose interaction they need to probe. The dominant approach can lead to a variety of issues.
Religions are frequently examined via their core tenets and the modern state by looking for its origins, in a way that can create idealized and unchanging understandings, given birth to overly sweeping interpretations. The interaction of religion and the state is also often dealt with using vague, overarching concepts, notably “secularism.” Even when gradations of secularism are recognized, these risk flattening out the various forms and meanings of religion and even the distinctiveness of a “religion” as a field. It also becomes easy to focus on how political authorities use religion, with everything reduced to the manipulations of autocrats. Religious structures are seen as set up to secure the rule of authorities and regimes, or to reproduce themselves over time. But while officials do indeed make religious structures, they do not do so as they please; the existence and nature of key structures are often far better explained by historical evolution and the nature of state-building in the modern era than by the needs of rulers.
Additionally, Europe often figures as the point of origin for the model of the secular nation-state, which then diffused outward or was forcibly exported through imperialism. But the changes attributed to European nation states were actually far more global, as well as quite varied in their particularities. Nor did they require “national” states. Most of the population of Europe inhabited states that were officially multinational until the late 20th century (such as the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union). National states emerged unevenly but globally in the 19th and 20th centuries. Imperialism sometimes brought state formation and sometimes inhibited it; in some cases, strong states were built to resist it. Some European states were secular, but few as much as Sierra Leone; some were religious (such as Spain) in ways that created contention that a Sri Lankan might recognize.
How do religion and the state overlap? That is not a question with a European origin or a European answer; it is one that should be posed globally but answered locally. States everywhere stumble on areas that might be considered religious, whether they intend to or not. When they begin to educate children, make policy over family life, provide health care, register property, define rights and levy taxes, they step into religious territory.
And indeed, in that process, they often define what “religion” is, as well as what lies inside the state and what lies outside of it. It is rare that a state avoids religion entirely. Most — even those that present themselves as secular — fold some aspect of religion into their structures or patterns of administration or regulation. Such patterns were generally not formed in the distant past but as modern states emerged, extending and intensifying their presence in schooling, counting, taxing, housing, conscripting, policing and providing for those they govern.
If the Middle East is religiously distinctive today, it has less to do with essential differences between Islam and other religions than with bureaucratic decisions that were made beginning about two centuries ago. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire in particular established strong patterns and built structures which almost all post-Ottoman states have inherited — modifying them, to be sure, but generally coloring within Ottoman lines. And non-Ottoman states often established similar patterns that their successors have also inherited.
This was most marked in the bureaucratization of charitable endowments, mosques and courts — a set of processes that were deeply interrelated. The Ottoman dynasty began ruling patrimonially half a millennium ago (with government essentially an extension of the sultan’s household). At that time, it relied on an Islamic scholar for guidance on religious matters. That official — the “mufti of Istanbul” — was referred to by the honorific title of the “shaykh al-Islam.” As the Ottoman state grew more complex and far-reaching, the Shaykh al-Islam metamorphosed from an individual into a state bureaucratic structure. It took on more administrative functions, overseeing judges (trained in Islamic jurisprudence) and other state functions that had a religious emphasis.
In the 19th century, these processes intensified, as the Shaykh al-Islam became more bureaucratized and took on more functions, while also being more clearly marked off as having a religious purview. Rather than an individual in the capital appointing local judges and other religious officials in the provinces, there emerged a hierarchical structure marked by specialization, bureaus and central oversight. It oversaw religious education, religious courts and other religious structures, and existing schools and courts came to be seen as specifically religious institutions. New schools and courts were formed that fell outside its purview. These structures were hardly anti-religious or fully “secular” — they often contained religious elements and were staffed partly by those with religious educations — but they fell under the oversight of other ministries or state structures.
With many mosques and charitable foundations supported by endowments — and with those supervising such endowments subject to a measure of judicial oversight — the judicial apparatus retrospectively labeled “religious” imposed a greater degree of control and regulation. Those courts retained jurisdiction not only over endowments but also over legal matters involving family life (such as marriage, divorce or inheritance).
This was a bureaucratic evolution that showed some Islamic particularity, such as judicial oversight of endowments, a feature of the way that Islamic legal scholars had developed the concept of a charitable endowment. But even this hoary institution was being structured in a new and more intrusive way. Oversight was no longer the ambit of an individual judge but instead the task of a new bureaucracy that replaced loose personal authority with regulations and control that amounted to state management.
Other structures evolved as well, such as a more hierarchical and specialized court system, based not only on increasingly complex judicial structures but also on codified laws and regulations. Similar developments occurred in other fields that had religious aspects. Almost all states emerging around the same historical period encountered questions of property, education, social service and citizenship that their predecessors had not faced to the same degree.
The result was a set of structures that were just being solidified as the Ottoman realm was broken up into different territorial states. All those states inherited a structure to oversee endowments (and thus mosques and some charity), and most formed this into a “Ministry of Awqaf” or similar administrative body. As a result, mosques are generally regulated spaces; while ownership doctrinally belongs to God, almost all post-Ottoman states assign administration and oversight to state bodies. All states treat “personal status” or family law as a distinct area, though the existence of separate “Sharia” and “civil” courts varies; some have folded the jurisdiction of the former into the latter. Almost all allow specifically recognized non-Muslim communities (and occasionally Shiite Muslims) to be governed by their own laws and, occasionally, their own judicial structures for family matters, though application more often falls to regular courts. All have primary and secondary educations that include religious instruction. Many have state muftis who deliver Islamic legal advice to state bodies.
There is one other subtle but critical feature shared by post-Ottoman states. I have been speaking of “religion” but post-Ottoman states actually rarely define “religion” as a generic category of political, social or spiritual life. Instead, they tend to treat “Islam” as the default religion — one that is, in that sense, not merely marked off but also somewhat defined by state bodies and sanctioned religious authorities — while allowing exceptions in specific areas (often education and family law) for other specified creeds. Much of what appears in public as “Islamic” is thus part of the state; specific religions are also recognized and almost licensed to serve as alternatives. The best place to see this arrangement in operation — and to understand both what is distinctive about it and what is less distinctive — is in higher education.
When I travel to research universities anywhere else in the world — and I have visited them on four continents — they look familiar in so many ways but almost never in how they treat religion. They are structured in departments with familiar disciplinary names that are placed within schools, faculties or colleges in recognizable groupings. There are academic courses of study and others that are geared toward specific professions (such as medicine or engineering). There are deans and chairs, provosts, professors and those studying for their doctorates. And, more broadly, there is a set of degrees and credentials that can generally travel beyond the institution that produced them and be recognized.
But they all handle religion differently. Some avoid it altogether. In France, no state school allows religious symbols, much less religious teachings — except in Alsace, where religion is part of the official curriculum. At the level of higher education, the Sorbonne, founded with a strong mission to develop and teach theology, abolished that very subject more than two centuries ago. All other state universities eschew the subject, except the University of Strasbourg, which offers a degree in Catholic theology and recently elected a priest as its president. The exceptions are easily explained — when the modern state was constructed, Strasbourg (and Alsace generally) were in Germany, where religion and education were handled quite differently. What was laid down a century and a half ago is very hard to change today.
So is religion to be exiled, to be explored academically, to be taught as doctrine or to be a field where credentials can be earned? Each country seems to have a different answer. In Germany, the state’s commitment to religious neutrality and long-declining levels of religious observance have not stopped state institutions from taking on the task of training members of the Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis — and now Muslim religious teachers as well. The Sri Lankan state devoted considerable effort to building up an official educational system to edge out missionary schools and has more recently begun encouraging the inclusion of Buddhist perspectives — and some training for Buddhist monks — in state universities. In the U.S., religion is often an academic department as if it is to be treated as a scholarly discipline; in the post-Ottoman world, it is scattered all over the university in various faculties.
The diversity and complexity simply cannot be collapsed into any easy secular West vs. religious rest dichotomy. The roots of particular arrangements are historical, though still of fairly recent vintage. Two and a half centuries ago, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Al-Azhar would have seemed like similar institutions in that they focused on giving students a broad education with a curriculum that included a range of subjects (with the line between the religious and nonreligious parts of the curriculum not always clear). Their graduates went on to serve a variety of governmental and religious roles. The question of whether they were official institutions or purely private ones would have puzzled their leaders.
Things are less different in the U.S. than is generally noticed. The porousness of the religious and nonreligious spheres persisted for centuries in ways that have been forgotten, but it has also left very strong traces, since the state that emerged hardly built a fixed and insurmountable wall between itself and religion. Footprints of past practices remain. A clause in the Massachusetts Constitution written in the late 18th century but still on the books today lauds Harvard for its “encouragement of arts and sciences, and all good literature,” since this “tends to the honor of God, the advantage of the Christian religion, and the great benefit of this and the other United States of America.” Harvard was not alone in having such an origin. What is now the University of Michigan was established in part because of a promise made by treaty by U.S. officials to support the desire of some Native Americans for Catholic education.
Today, religion survives in American higher education in one of three forms. First, some institutions — though only private ones — are explicitly associated with a religious denomination or approach. All public institutions, by contrast, are nonsectarian. (Even the meaning of that term has changed; in the 19th century, it suggested a generic Protestantism, whereas now it means not associated with any religion at all.) Second, religion is a basis for private association among members of a university community, one that the institution might regard with some kindness. Third, religion is a department, like chemistry, accounting or mechanical engineering.
But those institutional forms arose gradually in the 19th century and into the 20th, and they were generally constructed on top of a foundation that looked like the Harvard (or Al-Azhar) of the 18th century: what we would now see as an odd hybrid of a religious seminary and an undergraduate “liberal arts” college.
The disestablishment of state-supported churches in the U.S. — a development led by those who wished not to keep religion out of public life but rather to keep state authority out of religious doctrine — led to a gradual (but only gradual) diminution of state support for training of the clergy.
The U.S. state undertook land surveys on a continental scale and drew up treaties with Indigenous peoples, allocating them “reservations.” The remaining land, much of it now owned by the state, was used in small but significant part to support institutions of higher education that would move beyond the liberal arts and religious study to add practical subjects like military tactics, engineering and agriculture. Professional education in fields like law and medicine was also gradually added to many institutions, and the “university” began to emerge from the liberal arts college base throughout the country.
The model of the German research university attracted attention (and emulation) as this was happening. That effort was sometimes supported by the state but, at first, was far more the domain of private donors in the late 19th century (such as John D. Rockefeller, who was persuaded by a group of Baptist educators that they should have their own such institution, leading him to endow the University of Chicago). The massive funding of the central state for research, which came in the second half of the 20th century, persuaded many other institutions to join the club of research universities.
The American university system as we know it was born from various features: a growing Catholic, Jewish and then international presence; a new, 20th-century understanding of the First Amendment’s provision on religion (applied to the states), leading to a definition of nonsectarian or nondenominational as religiously neutral; and a growing legal distinction between institutions that are “public” (i.e., part of the state) and those that are “private” (that is, often officially recognized, incorporated or licensed but outside of the state). The new system was a mixture of public universities that had no religious affiliation, private universities that also had no religious affiliation and private universities that did have a religious affiliation, but often opened admission to all. But what to do with all the resources and personnel that had been preaching, teaching and organizing religious life in the first two categories of universities? They were rounded up and placed in departments of religion. Religion thus became a subject to be studied; students were welcome to believe whatever they liked and to worship, pray and assemble, or not, as they wished.
In Ottoman and post-Ottoman states, universities arose at a similar time, albeit through a different process. The U.S. and Ottoman paths diverged over a century ago, but neither drove religion out of higher education. The emergence of universities was spearheaded by the Ottoman state just as much (if not more) than elsewhere, but it was a process that was faster and much more centralized than in other regions. As was common in the early 19th century, the Ottoman state presided over a society with advanced educational institutions that had a thoroughly religious coloration. Since those schools were largely supported by endowments (themselves increasingly regulated by the state, as we have seen), they were hardly beyond the state’s reach. But perhaps because of their semiautonomous financial basis, they did not present themselves as appropriate places to graft on advanced training in new fields like military sciences, engineering, medicine and law. Instead, the Ottoman state constructed freestanding academies for each of these. These institutions were not seen as repudiations of older educational institutions and indeed sometimes drew on them for some faculty. Nor were the new institutions “secular” — their curricula hardly excluded Islamic subjects. But they were built quickly to meet the needs of a state apparatus that was rapidly expanding in public works, provision of social services, regulation of public life, economic management and military capacity. Proposals to bring these institutions together under a single rubric — that is, the creation of a university dedicated to education, scholarship, professional training and credentialing — were mooted and sometimes pursued.
But it was not really until the post-Ottoman era that full universities emerged. Again, structurally, they looked very much like universities elsewhere. Admissions officials perusing transcripts or academic advisers working to transfer credits generally need only a straightforward translation to understand a student record that travels from one society to another.
Initial forays were generally made in professional fields, such as law, medicine and engineering, and indeed helped create those fields as credentialed professions. But sometimes the biggest expansion (and, in a few places, much of the impetus to create a university rather than a set of freestanding academies) came in education. As free primary and secondary education spread quickly, especially in the mid-20th century, faculties of education were constructed and grew quickly.
And where is religion in the post-Ottoman university? It is everywhere and nowhere.
It is everywhere in the sense that it can be found in different faculties — those studying law take a course on Sharia; those studying Arabic study a language whose classical form is anchored in sacred texts; and there is a heavy interest in Islamic history. Those who wish to practice law or teach secondary school will be expected to have some familiarity with Islamic aspects of their subject. And, of course, the religious bureaucracy — those who administer mosques, preach sermons and adjudicate cases (in societies with Sharia courts) — will be expected to show their degrees, giving evidence that they have mastered the requisite material and passed the associated examinations.
But religion, as religion, is almost nowhere. It is Islam that is studied; sometimes other religions might be discussed, but most often from an Islamic viewpoint. There is no generic subject of “religion,” in which content may vary from one “faith” to the next but retain an essential continuity. There are occasional exceptions of universities that do treat “religion” as a subject matter, but those are themselves instructive. In societies deeply divided by sectarian strife (such as Lebanon and Iraq), an occasional comparative religion program has sprouted. And a different kind of exception — an Islamic educational system that has flourished without being folded into the state — has also arisen in Iraq, where the “hawza” (Shiite seminary) so jealously guards its autonomy from the state, with the consequence that those who emerge from its courses of study have no degree suitable for state employment. (An odd effect of this is that some Iraqi state universities have now taken it upon themselves to offer such programs, giving a pious pupil a choice of pursuing a degree with more religious prestige outside of the state or a less prestigious one that might be more helpful in securing a position in a government ministry.)
Religion is virtually ubiquitous in modern states, but its presence is expressed in many different ways, some of them easy to overlook. General constitutional clauses matter, but they are hardly definitive; to understand how religion operates within the state apparatus, it is often better to look into the agencies and processes that inhabitants encounter regularly. Is religion a mandatory subject in schools and, if so, who teaches it? Does a state see “religion” as a well-defined and generic field and, if so, what are its borders and how is it regulated? Or is “religion” a matter of a specific set of recognized creeds and, if so, what are they, how are they defined and who speaks for the members of an officially licensed religious community? Religious freedom is often promised, but what is the fine print of the promise — does it protect ritual, belief, assembly, property or family life, and how do states define, protect and regulate such fields of activity? Most of these questions arose only in limited ways before the 19th century, but with the emergence of states that register, regulate, enumerate, educate and conscript most of the people, places, things and processes within a territory, answers are unavoidable. Once set down in institutional form, they are very hard to change.
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