Religion and Politics

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Religion influences politics more now than it did 50 years ago. To help explain how we moved seemingly backward from global secularism to increased religious involvement in public policy, Professor of International Politics Monica Duffy Toft explains the threefold story of failed modernization, democratization, and globalization, and how they propelled religious figures and ideas into the political arena once again. Monica Duffy Toft's work at the Center for Strategic Studies is made possible through funding from the Charles Koch Foundation. The Charles Koch Foundation aims to further understanding of how US foreign policy affects American people and societal well-being. Through grants, events, and collaborative partnerships, the Foundation is working to stretch the boundaries of foreign policy research and debate by discussing ideas in strategy, trade, and diplomacy that often go unheeded in the US capital. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org.

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MONICA DUFFY TOFT

Before joining The Fletcher School, Professor Monica Duffy Toft taught at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. While at Harvard, she directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs and was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. She was educated at the University of Chicago (MA and PhD in political science) and at the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA in political science and Slavic languages and literature, summa cum laude). Prior to this, she spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist. Monica’s areas of research include international security, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars and demography.

Her most recent books include: Securing the Peace (Princeton, 2011); Political Demography (Oxford, 2012); and God’s Century (Norton, 2012). In addition she has published numerous scholarly articles and editorials on civil wars, territory and nationalism, demography, and religion in global politics.

Monica is a research associate of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is a supernumerary fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, a Global Scholar of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board and the Political Instability Task Force. In 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence, in 2012 she was named a Fulbright scholar, and most recently served as the World Politics Fellow at Princeton University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Monica Duffy Toft: So religion has become more influential in global politics, and it really started taking off in the 1970s, Whereas people today, if you read contemporary newspapers and magazines and journals and stuff, you would think that it all started in the post-9/11 era—that as a result of 9/11 people started noticing or thought that’s where it really took off, but it actually really started taking off in the 1970s. And there’s a threefold story to it.

The first is the failure of the postcolonial regimes in the 1960s and '70s. So you understand these are states that got independence after World War II and they were given a chance at sort of directing their states, as running their states. These were people—you could think about Gandhi and others who were educated in the West, go back to their countries and bring ideas, Western sort of ideas, out of the university systems—Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Tufts—and tried to implement those ideas at home, and they failed.

And so by the 1960s and the 1970s you start seeing failed and failing states emerging and populations challenging their statesmen and saying, “Why is it you’re supposed to be the one providing for the basic goods and services for my society and for me, why are you failing?”

And so they started challenging political authorities and helping them to challenge them were church leaders and religious ideas. Because many religions are based on the idea of justice and equality, and there were some things that happened: in the 1960s the Catholic Church started talking about the equality of all people; all people deserve human dignity, not just Catholic...

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