religion

update: the BBC's North American editor Justin Webb has since blogged about this subject here 

Reports emanating from Italian sources earlier this week suggesting that the Vatican has effectively vetoed three of President Barack Obama's nominees to fill the vacant role of United States Ambassador to the Holy See--based on their liberal views on issues such as abortion and stem cell research--may signal the beginning of a cooling in US-Vatican relations under the Obama administration.

At a McCain rally in Iowa on Saturday, Rev. Arnold Conrad asked God to remember "that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November" because "millions of people around this world" - Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims - are praying to their distinctly non-Christian gods for an Obama victory. Conrad concluded: "Lord, I pray You would guard Your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than You." Video from TPM below.

Not content with setting up staff in every single state, the Obama campaign is branching out on the spiritual map. The Christian Broadcast Network previews the Joshua Generation, an initiative set to be rolled out by the campaign in the next few weeks. It will appeal to young "faith voters", amongst whom Obama is deemed to be increasingly popular. Can the great liberal hope win the hearts and minds of evangelicals normally left to Republicans?

As Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party / AKP) prepares to lay out its defence today against the Turkish constitutional court's attempts to shut it down, Ipek Kuran argues that the court case is a chance for the AKP to prove its secular credentials. Much of the western press has painted the ongoing legal wrangle as one pitting the politically-motivated secularist judiciary against the democratically-elected Islamists of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party. But in the eyes of many Turks, Erdogan's party has dallied too long in the controversial arena of symbols, playing majoritarian politics in spite of the law.

Professor Detlef Pollack presented the NEF/van Leer conference with some data on secularisation in Europe: are we becoming less religious? can it be measured? is it getting faster or slower?
He contrasted a basic "secularisation hypothesis" - we are getting less interested in all things religious - with two other hypotheses: the "market model", whereby competition for the supply of religious goods is hotting up, and that competition leads to less activity in established churches; and the much more radical "individualization hypothesis" according to which religion can be viewed as a bundle of goods which are now being supplied in all sorts of different ways. As Professor Pollack says:

I'd love to find lists of what that bundle might actually comprise - but one thing it certainly involves is the control of the calendar. The oldest archeological relics we have of priestly ritual involve calendars - machines to measure when the critical annual events of a primitive agrarian society should occur. Each religion defines its year dot just as much as its annual rhythm of feasts and fasts. The Ise Shrine in Japan has been rebuilt every 20 years, each time identically, since 4BC, to represent simultaneously both renewal and permanence. With modern individualization - in Northern Europe, at least - the secular birthday won out over the Saint's day as the sanctioned, private beat to the family's year. By telling us what the important, recurrent milestones of a year should be, a public calendar sets social priority - be they planting, harvesting and fasting, or forgiving, remembering, fighting or defeat.

I like the Individualization hypothesis - even if Professor Pollack found it hard to find evidence for it in his current work. It certainly makes sense of all the land-grab over the calendar that we can see today. The anniversary of 9/11 is coming back; the deca-versary of Diana's death made an attempted grab at the British calendar; the quinqua-versary of the European Union has been marked as a year dot for some ... and Ethiopia is celebrating its own millenium tomorrow.