Publications

Recent political conflicts have highlighted the influence of religious actors and organisations in the public spheres of Latin American countries. The Pentecostal Evangelical movement in Colombia was crucial to the success of the ‘No’ campaign in the 2016 plebiscite, in which citizens rejected the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In Brazil, evangelical congregations played a central role during the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and in the subsequent rise of Jair Bolsonaro. In Bolivia, evangelical leaders and conservative elements of the Catholic Church alike supported the 2019 coup against Evo Morales. In Mexico, the 2018 rise of left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been accompanied by criticism of his proximity to religious actors, and his moralising political rhetoric. Some authors have even described the Mexican leader as a politician with messianic overtones. Against this background, it is worth asking what the implications of the recent convergence between politics and religion in Latin America are. To answer this question, we must avoid the oversimplification of suggesting a singular process of religious advance in Latin American societies. It is important to instead highlight the complex interaction of: 1) the process of secularisation (involving both secularism and secularity) in the region, 2) the trend towards pluralisation of the religious field, 3) the concurrence of counter-secular expressions in the public space, 4) and the occurrence of conflict in the political arena. Although secularisation in Latin America historically emerged as a process of distinction of the political sphere, I argue here that it is currently expressed as a democratic ideal through the process of the dispersal in society of certain secular notions favouring state autonomy, especially in those countries that maintain the secularism legally established in the nineteenth century. My approach raises the question of how the boundaries between religion and the state in Mexico have been defined historically, and what the current status of this differentiation is. I also advance the analytical notion of sacred secularism, as a principle and expectation in the public space.

Vom Studienfach Islamische Theologie, vor elf Jahren gegründet, erwartete man sich politisch die Ausbildung integrationsfördernder Imame. Die Autorin geht empirisch der Frage nach, wie die Studierenden mit diesen Erwartungen umgehen. Die Sinnzuschreibungen der Akteure, so zeigt sich, sind eng verknüpft mit dem Umgang des Staates mit Religion wie auch der akademischen Disziplin mit dem Islam. Im Ergebnis zeigt

sich das Konzept der biographischen Islamizität, einer zentralen Erfahrungsweise von Muslimen in Minderheitsverhältnissen. Die Fachbeteiligten institutionalisieren das Bild eines pluralen Islams. Das Buch liefert einen religionssoziologischen Beitragzum Verständnis religiös-säkularer Konstellationen in der Gesellschaft.

Dreier, Lena. Der Islam als akademische Praxis. Von der biographischen Islamizität zum pluralen Islam. Religion der Gesellschaft 51. Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2023.

With the assertion of Buddhism as the dominant religion at the end of the 16th century, a new reflection on the relationship between the secular and the religious commenced among the Mongols. They adopted the Joint Twofold System of Governance formulated in Buddhist Tibet, and adapted it to the Mongolian cultural context. This system of governance is described in the work “The White History”, written in the late 16th century, with the epistemic distinctions between the religious and the secular discursively negotiated in the work. Although the impact of these distinctions on the social differentiations of Mongolian society during the Qing period (1644–1911) remains to be investigated, the “White History” nonetheless provides a valuable insight into pre-modern Mongolian notions of the distinction between the religious and the secular.