431. Religion’s Hand in the Invention of Politics with Anna Maria Grzymala-Busse

(upbeat music) - You're listening to the Unsilord podcast with Greg LeBlanc, produced by university FM. Unsilord is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. So wherever you are, enjoy today's episode and here's your host, Greg LeBlanc. - Welcome to Unsilord. This is Greg LeBlanc and I'm here today with Anna Guizmauwala-Busa, who is a professor of political science at Stanford University. Also, the author of a couple books of the most recent book is called Sacred Foundations, The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, and your previous book was Nations Under God. How churches use moral authority to influence policy. Welcome Anna. - Thank you very much, great to meet you. - So it's interesting that these books, I mean they span an enormous range of time going back into the early Middle Ages and then spanning forward to contemporary politics. And you focus on the role of religion, institutionalized religion, and in particular, the Catholic church and how it has impacted history. And in the Sacred Foundations book, it's really about the rise of the modern state. Now, this is a debate that I think a lot of people, not just in history and political science, but in a bunch of different disciplines, I've been thinking about for as long as we've had, you know, the modern state. And most of the arguments kind of background religion, right, in religious institutions, they focus on either the role of war or the role of different economic classes and the need to forge coalitions. And you emphasize that the Catholic church has played an enormous role in influencing the trajectory of Western European in particular history. So I guess one question is, why do you think that is? It's pretty hard to look at European history and not notice the impact of religion in the Catholic church in particular, but why are historians and political scientists generally de-emphasizing that role, do you think? - I think there are two things to say about this. Why is that we are a secular discipline? I think academia in general tends to be relatively secular and so we don't look for what we don't know. I think the second answer is that historians have certainly looked a lot at the Catholic church and the Middle Ages. In fact, this book really rests on some foundational works by historians, but they didn't really connect it to the broader project of state-making. Whereas political scientists looked at state-making but they never looked at the role of religion, especially since so much of it played out on its very local level. And so I think what I'm trying to do in this book is really connect the two and connect the historians views on and the research on the Catholic church to what we know about state-making and the processes that unfolded that generates of state institutions like law, parliaments, and so on. - Well, Stalin famously said that who cares about the church? They don't have any divisions. And so how could the church have such a profound impact if it wasn't at any point really a military power? Obviously the Pope had the papal states, right? And so had a state, but it was relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things. So without military power, how can an institution really impact the course of events? - So I think the connecting point between the two books that you mentioned is that what churches have is moral authority. And this is the authority that they derive not just from being representatives of God, but also from them being able to make a claim that they transcend common petty concerns that they profoundly care about the common good, about the salvation of souls, and so on. And then that moral authority is undermined when the church is at it acting petty and corrupt ways. It's heightened when the church can actually make claims that it's doing something on behalf of the greater good. And that's the profound power that the church has always had, right, that it can make this claim that it transcends petty politics. In the Middle Ages, especially, I think it also had this enormous religious authority, which I think we've failed to appreciate today, because there are very few institutions that have that kind of authority, but the ability to deliver salvation, the ability to basically be able to promise people that if you do these things, you can have life eternal. And if you don't do them, we have the power to withhold this of path to salvation from you. It's an enormous authority that I think matter to great deal. There's a reason why all the kings wanted to be anointed with holy oils, where the Holy Roman Emperor would travel all the way to Rome to be anointed, why bishops played more such huge authorities and were trusted as authorities. And it has to do with the sort of ability to claim a road to salvation and to be able to deliver salvation to people. - Are you saying that the political authorities during this time would fear, since they feared their religious salvation, they would do what the religious authorities told them to do, or is it that the religious authorities were able to influence the more general public within these entities, which would then influence the political authorities? - I think it's a little bit of both the, I mean, you have to be realistic here, right? There are plenty of church issued commandments that were widely ignored, right? So priests continued to have children, offices continued to be sold, people charged credit left right in the center, all the sort of laws on chastity and you know, premarital sex were widely flouted. So it's not as if people didn't flout what the church told them to do. And it's certainly not that the, that kings would simply do whatever the pope told them to do. In fact, there's a huge clash between popes and kings throughout this period. But it's more that in so far as the church had power, that was its main source, right? It was this ability to say, "You need to do this because if you don't, you'll be damned." So there was plenty of conflict and those always contested and negotiated. But in so far as the church had power, that was the main source of its power. Well, maybe we can walk through the alternative explanations for the rise of the state. The ones that I'm much more familiar with, right? So famously, Charles Tilly is the most well-known advocate of the approach that says that war is the source of the state consolidation. And then the alternative approach, which is I guess the more contractarian approach, which is north and wine gas, and Margaret Levy and all of those folks. So one way to think about this is that there's the bellicest school of thought, which as you point out, is really spearheaded by Charles Tilly. And the argument that they make is that the state really arises in the early modern era. And this is an era where there's more and more military conflict in Europe. These are highly fragmented sort of territory with lots of small states constantly pushing for it against each other, just and for power, attempting to establish control. And so what happens in the early modern era is there's a whole new wave of military technologies that are very expensive. Cannons, armaments, the sort of Tracitaliens, sort of new defenses, they're all very expensive. And so these early modern rulers basically developed taxation to sort of extract resources from society to be able to fund this warfare. And the empower parliaments as arenas where these deals are struck. And the contractarians take this and say, it's the balance of power between the nobles and the kings that really matters. And insofar as the parliaments act as a source of executive constraint, and insofar as these parliaments act as a place where there's actual negotiation, you have state institutions arise that kind of put you on a more favorable path towards economic development and towards the possibility of democracy. And in this story, these institutions are basically incidental, right? This is a functionalist account. And so far that there's high military costs. So we need to basically find institutions that will allow us to meet those high military costs. But if you look more closely at the history, taxes and parliaments exist long before expensive early modern warfare. And parliaments don't serve this role of negotiation between the nobles and the kings. The famous North Wine Guests account of the glorious revolution comes very late in the game in the late 17th century. And until then parliaments were places where people met to give a scent to what the king wanted. Nevermind, it's certainly an absolutist period which coincides with the early modern era. So if you look at the sequencing and the timing, these institutions were all in place much, much earlier. They played a different role. And early modern conflict seems to have very little to do with how they were founded and why they functioned at all. So that's what the books try to do. The book basically tries to push back and look at what were the actual roots of these institutions. And where do they come from? And the answer I find has a lot to do with the Catholic Church and the templates that it provides. - Yeah, it seems like the process in England and France began with Henry II and Philip Augustus. I hear this seems like way before the early modern period, right? - You can't even earlier. What if they would, the amazing story in England is that even before the conquest, the fact that there were sections of England that had to paint the Dane Guild meant that very ornamentary institutions of taxation already existed, right? And then what William the Conqueror does, and this is brilliant move, is to make all these property rights conditional, right? So he comes in, he extropates the Anglo-Saxon elites, and he basically gives the Normans these all these lands, knowing full well that their property rights are conditional on them basically being willing to do some things for him. And one of the first institutions that starts to develop in England is this idea of a parliament, although it wasn't called that then, right? [BLANK_AUDIO] are noble, you come when the king calls you to discuss things in London and Westminster, and that usually sometimes I'm at taxation many times it meant education over disputes, but already you have these sort of initial sort of institutions come online in the 11th century and the 12th century, long before this sort of stylized account of early model warfare would have us. There also seems to be this split between places like Spain and France and England where you have these states which seem functioning over large territories, and then you have Germany and Italy, which never really consolidated until the 19th century. Why this split? What was the role of the church in either kind of facilitating the consolidation of these statelets or impeding the consolidation of these statelets? So one of the arguments that I make in the book is that the area you're describing Germany and Northern Italy is basically the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, always had a very tindentious relationship with the church, because on one hand it protected the church, local nobles and emperors owned churches and named bishops and people to clergy to offices, they funded monasteries, they funded cathedrals, but the whole time the church was chafing under this. And so in the late 11th century you have this start of what is known as the Investiture Conflict, where basically a reformist Pope comes in and initially with imperial support decides to clean house, he wants to basically get rid of sort of sale of offices, he wants to get rid of clerical marriage, he wants to impose a hierarchy within the church, and in the process of doing it the Pope's realized that one of the key aspects of this is to basically gain their autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire, and so the Investiture Conflict begins normally about the naming of bishops within the Holy Roman Empire. And it very quickly spirals into a much broader debate about what is the separation of roles between church and state, but in the process what basically winds up happening is that the Holy Roman emperors keep waging war, physical war with papal forces, and the pokes basically keep of course funding war against them. And what winds up happening is that every time that the Holy Roman Emperor leaves the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, every time that he fights another war he makes more and more concessions to the nobles, who basically govern their own little tiny statelets within the Holy Roman Empire, and this power vacuum also allows basic city states to arise in Northern Italy. So by the 12th century you have enormous fragmentation of territorial authority in the Holy Roman Empire across both in Northern Italy and in Germany, and as do entirely to this conflict with the papacy over who gets to normally name the bishops, but in reality sort of you know who gets to control him, and that conflict doesn't take place in France until the 14th century. It certainly doesn't take place in Spain, which is basically very busy reconquering the territory from the Caliphate, and it certainly doesn't take place in England where the papacy basically washes its hands and very rarely intervenes in politics in England because it doesn't want yet another big power to contend with. But the Holy Roman Empire remains as fragmented as it does precisely because it's in conflict with the papacy over authority. So how did they actually wield this power? Presumably they would broker alliances and redistribute funds and subsidize different forces that would support their interests. Was there this incredible kind of capacity to extract resources through kind of religious taxation, which was then used to purchase alliances and so forth? What was a fiscal nature of the religious institutions? So the fiscal nature, you can imagine, no one wants to pay taxes, right? And so there's constant conflict. Let us go flying back and forth between monasteries and cathedral chapters and bishops to the papacy, but do we really have to pay this tax? And so the papacy keeps trying to extract taxes, but the actual sort of payment rates are not that high, and that's a problem that everybody faces in this time. You can ask for taxes, but how are you going to get it out of people? Now you don't have the capacity to audit them. You don't have the capacity to go after them. And so instead you could jol and you persuade and you try to use other means to get people to pay taxes. And the papacy and the kings all face this. And mention these are not a huge 50-100,000 people armies, right? I love these conflicts where, you know, 5,000 soldiers would be considered a really big conflict. So these are much smaller conflicts, but what the papacy can do is to, for example, build alliances by saying, "I'll recognize your right to this land if you help me out with this particular venture." They build those kinds of coalitions. They try to encourage nobles to depose rulers who don't do what the papacy does. They excommunicate. They place entire communities under interdict. When it comes to excommunications, they actually are something like 150 excommunications takes place during this time period. The record holder being an emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire who gets excommunicated five times by three different popes. It doesn't really seem to hurt him that much. And of course, there is something with this extraction of rudimentary taxes, which really takes off with the crusades, where taxes become much more systematized. But again, this is all very rudimentary, right? These are not, I think it's a little misnomer, it's a real anachronism to think of these clashes as somehow a clash of two superpowers or even sort of the clash of the judiciary versus the executive. These are very rudimentary institutions. These are very rudimentary extraction mechanisms. And there's a lot of slippage. There's a lot of seepage through the cracks both of resources and authority. You talk a lot about sort of administrative technology or adjudicative technology. How should we think about that, right? Because there were these ecclesiastical courts everywhere that were presumably competing with the secular courts. What does it mean to wield power through administrative technology? So a lot of this has to do with justice, right? The number one expectation that medieval people had of their rulers is that they will provide justice. They'll provide order, security and conflict resolution. And this is why the courts become so important. But initially, again, this starts off with the church, right? The church basically develops this whole very familiar to us system of appeals and courts of appeals and going ever higher up the hierarchy, the legal hierarchy. That's pretty much a church innovation. And so what winds up happening is that initially, these are mostly four disputes within canon law. But this also serves for a lot of people from the borders are so porous between ecclesiastical and secular law. A lot of people start using that system as well to adjudicate property and disputes and so on. And King see this, right? And so they start to-- So with it competing for courts of first instance, so if you had a dispute with your neighbor or with a family member, did you have the ability to choose which court you went to or is there sort of a conflict's rule that divided up jurisdiction? There were definitely rules. A lot of, for example, property disputes have to do with family law, right? Who inherits what? Does the widow inherit or do the sons inherit? Did the daughters have any claim? And as soon as family law is invoked, the church can basically take a look at what's going on. And so there was one fantastic figure that I came across. And basically, in England, at one point, 40% of all legal cases were mistakenly assigned to ecclesiastical courts. People took them to ecclesiastical courts, even though that was not their domain, and they had no jurisdiction over those matters. But they still ruled, and those rules rulings were executed in a bid. So the entire, I think, story of the industrial conflict also has a legal side to it, right? Because during this time, what you basically have is the rediscovery of Roman law in the 11th century, as a weapon, basically, to be used in these conflicts to eradicate different claims. And Roman law is very much in the favor of powerful centralized secular authorities. So you can imagine how both sides wanted to claim that. And then about 70 years later in the mids, 12th century, you have systematization of Canada law. And you have these two bodies of law that are coexisting, that are very porous, and are constantly reinforcing each other. And what that sense into motion is also the founding of the universities, right? So the first university in Europe is in 1088. It's in Bolonia, and it's a law school. And basically, this is this whole, so perhaps not necessarily the most lucrative, but certainly a really fascinating field of study, where you have hundreds of young men going off to universities and popes and emperors vying to charter these universities, being able to exert some authority over who gets, who basically gets the graduates. And so there is that competition starting both, even at the level of the law schools, that gets replicated as who gets the lawyers, which courts they set up, who gets to adjudicate the disputes and so on. So there's always this competition between the popes and the emperors. I mean, the word cleric and the word cleric, they're kind of the same, right? So at one point, I guess the Catholic Church had sort of a monopoly on educated people, right? So if you wanted to hire someone to run a court or to run some tax collection office, you'd pretty much have to hire a priest. So not so much priest as the bishops. So this is why the Investiture Conflict obsessed about the bishops, because the bishops serve twin roles. Almost everywhere on one hand, they are basically very much spiritual emissaries of the pope. On the other hand, they're basically regional governors, and this especially holds in the whole of your own empire, where it gets to the point that you have these prince bishops that actually run entire states, like tree or amines and others. And so the bishops serve these twin roles that basically also allowed them to serve as judges, as serving your high ranking counselors, as officials. The chancellor in England was an archbishop all the way through Henry VIII, right? Up until basically the mid-16th century, that was always an archbishop. They just relied on that so much. So the church has this enormous storehouse of human capital, and it's basically sort of the market leader in human capital. throughout this time period. And of course, with the rise of the universities, that tends to diffuse more. It's now possible to be a secular scholar, even though you acquired ironically enough status as clergy while you were a student. So if you commit a crime as a student, you get tried in a canonical court and ecclesiastical court, not a secular one. But for the most part, yes, the bishops and the monks and the cathedral chapters really are the sources, the repositories of human capital in Europe. And so how important was legal celibacy to the maintenance of this institutional power, right? Because it would be very difficult to establish some dynastic power, right? And is that sort of the origin of the notion that the position is separate from the holder of that position? Whereas when you have non-celebrate individuals of power, then it really does lead to dynastic concentration of power and the erosion of these institutions, right? - That's right. So one of the very early church principles is that the seat does not die. So the seat is separate from its occupant, which means that you have served the first rudimentary notion of an impersonal office, not a hereditary one. But of course, the church is full of foulable human beings. So there are plenty of married priests, there are plenty of sons who basically willy-nilly reenter the service and so on. But it's very important also for the inheritance laws, right? If you have, for example, bishoprics or dioceses, this could be inherited from father to son, that means that all of those resources are not available to the church. And what's critical here is at any time that an office gets vacated, all those resources revert back to the church before being awarded to somebody else. That's another sort of really critical aspect of how the church basically holds on to its resources. In contrast, for example, the Holy Roman Emperor, in order to fund his wars, would get away pieces of his own private patrimony, the Fisk, and would get these little chunks, which very quickly then became hereditary and were lost to him forever. So again, it's this sort of new invocation of legal principles that keep the church basically going. And of course, what happens in the 15th and 16th century when the church is really strapped for money, it starts to sell offices. And that makes it, that's one of Luther's complaints, right? Is that the church is so corrupt that it turns to selling offices just like any other corrupt secular ruler would? - Now, I've done other podcasts on the rise of the corporation and how important the institution of the corporation is to the modern world. It seems like the corporation, the way we understand it, has its origins also in these religious institutions. How did the kind of legal system of the Catholic church at the time lead to the modern conception of the corporation? So this actually has a lot to do with representation as well. So what basically happens is that the pope's hold synods and councils, right? The bishop's hold synods, the papacy holds councils. But the important part here is that you have to send representatives, right? And so what you really need is kind of some kind of a legal fiction that would allow one person to represent a group. And before you can do that, you have to figure out who the group is. And so the notion of corporation becomes very quickly extremely useful, right? Because now you can have a cathedral chapter signing off on a property sale. You can have a monastery enter into a contract. You can have a university, right? That's one of the original corporations and your university tasks, right? You can have them sort of, you know, accept charters or reject them, move as an entity and retain the corporate identity. And so for the church, it's initially just an administrative efficiency, a way of making things easier. And so you can't, you know, the entire chapter won't be able to come to roll, right? 30 people are not going to come to roll from every single cathedral. But if they send one representative, they can represent that chapter. And so that chapter becomes a corporation, becomes its own sort of, you know, fictive legal person. And that kind of slight of hand that initially is just so useful and it's an administrative efficiency turns out to be incredibly useful in both canon and civil law. And they're full of references to corporations. They're full of notes of contracts and appropriates being assigned to corporations. And Timokron is a very interesting argument about how this differs from the kind of walks that you see in the Muslim world. So the corporations, for example, the individuals are not responsible for the actions of the corporation persona, right? If the individuals die, the corporation remains and so on. And those conditions don't hold with the walks where every individual might be responsible, for example, a debt incurred rather than the corporation itself. Or where a professor dies or a contract signer dies, so does the entire arrangement. And so what the corporation allows to happen, it's initially, again, administrative, helpful hand to the church. But it becomes the cornerstone of what economic development in the West looks like because you're able to sign, so if you durable contracts, you're able to acquire and enforce property rights. And you're able to do so while minimizing the risk to the investors. And all those conditions are missing in the Muslim world where basically the corporation is not authorized. - Now, if we fast forward to the modern world, it seems like the influence that the Catholic Church has in different countries in Europe, is due in part to these historical events and the role that the church played historically. In particular, I was fascinated by the story of Italy, right, Italy versus Ireland, where the Catholic Church served to keep Italy fragmented for a long period of time and really opposed Italian unification. And that seemed to have damaged its credibility in the modern world somewhat, right? - That's right. And this is a much, much later story, right? So this is a story of the nation state, which is fundamentally a 19th century story. And depending on which side the church takes in the rise of the nation states, it can either gain enormous amounts of moral authority or it can basically be sidelined as a religious, but not necessarily influential political player. And that's the story you're referring to, right? So in Ireland, the Catholic Church is very much on the side of the Irish people against what's seen as serving an overwhelming English rule. It's on the side of Irish independence. It basically acts as a representative of the common good of Ireland. And it gets amply rewarded for this. There are these amazing stories of basically Amen to Valera, the first prime minister of a free Ireland exchanging notes with the Cardinal in charge on what the Constitution up to look like, right? They're basically literally writing back and forth and crossing out each other's paragraphs. And so in Ireland, the story becomes of a church that's intensely trusted as a representative of the Irish people. And therefore, as a new Irish free state arises, is also entrusted with education, health care, and the provision of public services and welfare services. In contrast, in Italy, the church is very opposed to the reignification of Italy. It views that as happening at its own cost, that the people's states will not only be greatly reduced in size, but the people authority will be reduced as well. And so the Pope not only sort of is very strongly opposed to the reignification of Italy, but even says that anybody who participates in elections or as a politician in this new free Italian state, unified Italian state, is going to do so on the pain of its communication. So it's a very different attitude. It's a very hostile attitude. And what went to happening basically afterwards is that as the political parties arise, the Christian Democrats have this very uneasy relationship with the church. The church never has the influence that it does in Ireland. It never gets awarded all these sort of suites of the state. It doesn't have a role in writing the Constitution. It has some victories on abortion and divorce, but those have to do more with the Christian democratic politics than they do with church influence. And then it basically gradually loses whatever hold it had on Italian society. And so when it comes to churches as political players, the Irish story is one of basically a trusted partner. The Italian story is one of a very uneasy relationship with a highly skeptical population. And it's interesting because there in Ireland, they don't have any specific political party that they work with. They're seen as non-partisan, whereas in Italy, they were seen as there was a Christian democratic party, which was seen as their vehicle for power, right? - Well, so I think, yes, in Ireland, it's definitely the case that they kind of work through both parties. And what happens in Italy, it's not that the Christian Democrats are sort of conduit for the Catholic church. This is very much a marriage of convenience. They share the same kind of conservative values. But fundamentally, Christian Democrats hold on to power until the early 1990s through a series of basically all kinds of corrupt deals and of buying off southern Italy. Much more so than because of their alliance with the Catholic church. And what's remarkable is what happens in the 1990s, right? So in Ireland, there's a bunch of scandals that reveals the church not to have been at this trusted partner, right? You know, there are sexual abuse scandals, there are the mother and daughter, the mother and children homes and the scandals that went on there, the kind of abuse of the most vulnerable members of Irish society at the hands of the church. And the whole edifice crumbles, right? You have the Irish people basically voting in on a gay marriage to free up abortion, to introduce all kinds of laws that restrict the church's role, precisely because the church had broken the faith. And really, when the Christian Democratic party collapses, the church's role doesn't really change. It was never in that favorite position. And so it's still there doing its thing and becoming increasingly more and more irrelevant to Italian society. But in both cases, it's the initial relationship and the initial role that the church played in the foundation of the independent states that really made the difference. - And you also talk about Eastern European countries in the under the communists. And I think we all understand the role of the church. the Catholic Church to some degree in Poland. But what made Poland unique? It seems like Poland shares some characteristics with Ireland as being a colonized country. But as you point out, the Catholic Church didn't always have that role, right? And a lot of it had to do with how did the Catholic Church either support or oppose the kind of Habsburgs and the other colonists before the more modern period, right? Yeah, and I think you know, I would replace it even later than that. Because the Church plays an ambivalent role in the 19th century, a role that, of course, it rewrites as a record, an unblemished record of defending the Polish national good. But it's really after World War II, and as late as the 1950s and '60s, that what you have is the Church beginning to really articulate a very nationalist program that makes Polish identity separate from the communist regime, right? So the communist regime is basically trying to create this idea of the new poll, a poll that's comfortable in a socialist and communist world, who's a party member, who's secular. And the Church realizes that its position has imperiled. And so it has this an amazing series of symbolic projects that basically marry the notion of Poles and Catholics together. And that then gets picked up by the opposition in the '60s, in the '70s, and especially in the early '80s, with solidarity. And that's really the source of the Church's power. So the Church basically protects the opposition. It keeps articulating this notion of being the real Poland, as opposed to this kind of communist overlords that are imported from the Soviet Union. That message gets then amplified by the Polish Pope, who gets John Paul II, is elected Pope in '78. And then really intensifies basically this kind of marriage equation of Polish equals Catholic. And so when the fall comes and communism collapses in 1989, the Church really capitalizes on this, and basically pushes through all kinds of policy proposals that it already had brewing. That basically restricts our portion, and introduced religion in schools, create a much more favorable tax environment for the Church, and so on. And as a result of this, it's most recently, there's been a lot of backlash against this. And we see the sort of related secularization of Polish society precisely because it's seen that the Church is seen as having benefited too much and delivered too little for the Polish people. - So why didn't we see the same thing in the other countries in Czechoslovakia and Croatian, particularly you talk about? When it comes to Czechia, Czechia has always been extremely secular, and that has a lot to do basically with 16th century conflicts. And the fact that Czechs saw themselves as the sort of Protestant island against the sort of Catholic hapsburg onslaught, which then, you know, much as in the Netherlands, led to a much more secular identity. And when it comes to Croatia, Croatia is the bastion of Catholicism in a very religiously diverse federation in Yugoslavia. And it can never make this claim that it somehow represents the Yugoslav people. It can never really even make the claim that it represents the Croat people. Because what happens after the. When Yugoslavia is still Serbian identity, it's just one of the many religious authorities. And when Yugoslavia collapses, the real fear isn't of sort of retaining Croatian nationhood. It's of protecting security and of security issues with Serbia, who's very aggressive and controls all the former Yugoslav army resources. And so the Church is very little to offer people in post-Postfall Croatia. It doesn't have the opportunity to play the same role. Most of the people are much more worried about Serbian Milošević and the Yugoslav army, the former Yugoslav army. Then they are about building a new Croat national identity, quite the same way. - Now, you also talk about the contrast between the US and Canada. I found this story to be just a little bit different, right? Because in those other countries, you're focusing primarily on the role of the Catholic Church and in the United States, religion is much more heterogeneous, right? (laughs) Lots of different religions, Catholics only one of them. But America is, I think, seen as a highly religious country. American see themselves as highly religious and they see the American nationalism as wrapped up in a religious project, at least some subset of the population does. And so why do we say such a huge difference between the US and Canada? Is it primarily because of the founders of the US, right, the city on the hill, right? Why do you suppose we see such a difference? Because Canadians and Americans are so similar in some of the other ways. - So many Canadian friends would bristle at the notion of being similar to two people and heads. (laughs) We're very careful to point out that those are two different identities. But I think when I would say so in Canada, the mystery in Canada is really sort of a story of the Quebec Catholic monopoly and how that collapses. And of the rest of Canada being very sensitive to not bringing up religion as a sort of a legitimate form of national identity. Because if they do so, then Quebec basically has every right to basically being an independent country, a sovereign country and no longer be part of Canada. So there's both a political and a religious moderation that occurs in Canada that doesn't have to in the United States. From the very get-go, you're absolutely right. There's the language of severe religious exceptionalism of severe religious city on the hill, of in many ways a religious justification for the United States. And of course, that's only one of the many stories that are told by the United States from the beginning, right? This is the one that gets picked up by politicians the most. But of course, there's multiple contested identities that could have occurred for the United States. It could have been an entirely secular country. But I think there's always been a marriage between politics and religion in the United States that's used to justify both sides of the civil war that's used to justify both pro and anti-integration stances, that's used to justify severe entering the wars and isolationism. So it's always gets picked up. But it really starts to take on an enormous political significance after World War II. And specifically, it's really the rise of civil rights. And the fact that there are a lot of disaffected white Democrats in the South that leads the Republican Party operatives to realize that this is a huge untapped market. And they reach out to evangelical leaders. And their bargain is simple. You want tax-free status for your segregated universities. We will give you that, but you support us politically. And it's really over in the Southern strategy works. And so the evangelical leaders get the political concessions they want. And at the same time, they bring with them a whole swade of formerly democratic white voters into the arms of the Republican Party. And from that moment on, from the 1980 elections onwards, 80% of Southern evangelicals vote for the Republican Party candidate. It becomes this kind of marriage of politics and religion that proves-- until very recently-- very beneficial for both sides. Dominic, I think a lot of people are puzzled by the infatuation of evangelicals with Donald Trump, right? Is there something about the history that you just described that makes this more comprehensible? I think so. I think there's a sort of tradition within this electorate of a sort of grievance against the changes that have occurred in the United States. And what Trump does is to articulate those grievances often in the sort of crudest terms possible. And for them, that's even better than the deal that the GOP was offering. This is a sort of full-throated defense of what they see as unacceptable changes in American society, both economic and cultural. And so they view him as their sort of spokesperson, who says in often very crude terms, what they've been feeling all along. And then explains why his electorate is older, why the South are the strongholds, why it's not the poorest of the poor who vote for him, right, it's actually his, the people who vote for him have an above media income. It's basically people who feel they have a lot to lose and in the same way that they don't want to, they don't basically relive the 1960s all over again. And of course, there's the evangelical excuse that, you know, God, that we are all serving your earthen vessels, we're all highly fallible. And so his sort of blemished personal record has seen those terms. Well, I mean, there's no disputing the rise in secularism and decline of religion, particularly in Europe, I think in the last, even 20 years in places like Ireland and Spain and Italy, we've seen dramatic decline in church attendance and so forth. Yet it seems like there's still some residual moral authority that comes from religious figures. Is there a reason to think that too will fade as rapidly as the decline in religiosity? I think it'll fade just more gradually, right? Pope Francis is a highly controversial figure. There's a conservative Catholics who reject him as not a real pope. And she's embraced by secular liberals as speaking out in favor of climate as being much more tolerant of gay people than his predecessors. So I think, you know, these are still figures like the Dalai Lama, right? They have that kind of authority when they speak about the public good and when they speak out for sort of transnational concerns. When they get involved in politics as when Francis did, for example, by sort of wondering out loud whether, you know, Russia didn't have a point when it invaded Ukraine, that those statements are not taken seriously and their moral authority starts to crumble. So I think we still need sort of figures who will speak out on behalf of the planet, on behalf of the world and they serve that role. Whether anyone actually listens to them, whether they influence policy, whether they influence how people vote or what people do, that's a very different story. And I don't know of any sort of religious leader who is the power to command that anymore. Is American exception here as well? So I think part of the story is that your moral authority as a religious figure becomes tainted when you become too partisan. But the religious authorities in the United States don't seem to have the same reluctance to become partisan. And it doesn't seem to erode their capacity to influence people. Is there something? different about the way religion and politics relate in America? Yeah, and I think the critical difference is the one that you pointed out earlier about the diversity of religious offerings in the United States. So the countries you mentioned are mostly religious monopolies, Ireland, Croatia, Poland, Italy. Those are all religious monarchs, but largely religious monopolies where Catholicism was a dominant religion claiming over 90% of the people throughout. But the United States is different. It's a religious marketplace, which means that people can move within churches without actually leading religion. Or they can even continue to view themselves as religious, even when they don't attend churches. And in this religious marketplace, there are all kinds of superior individual religious leaders. There's no one central authority that speaks for religion in the United States, but there are multiple leaders all of whom are trying to maximize their market share, right? And when they do so, you know, some will claim the more conservative Christians, some will claim the more liberal ones. What you see basically is a lot of churn, where a lot of people move between a Christian, to some extent, Christian Catholic congregations, rather than leave religion altogether. And a monopoly, if you're disgusted with religion or disappointed with your religious leader, you don't have that choice, right? You're in or out. In the United States, you just move to a different church that you find more sort of acceptable and more attractive. And I think that's the reason why there's so much more resilience in the United States. Now, these two books, they cover very different historical time periods. And we're discussing before the podcast, it's rare for people who do deep historical work to also do deep contemporary work and vice versa. Is there a reason for that? Is there something about kind of the historical perspective that makes it difficult for you to look at the contemporary world with a detached view or is this a strength? Does this give you the capacity to do this perhaps better than folks who are specialized in either time period? Yeah, I certainly make no claims about being better. I think there's a trade-off. If you go deep into history that might make one less informed about the contemporary situation, it might also make one more able to draw certain analogies. I know the truth is that in both books, we're live very heavily on enormous amounts of historical work that's been done by historians. I really, very, very heavily on those histories and I basically translate them for a social science audience. So that certainly makes that aspect a bit easier. But I think if anything, doing both contemporary and historical work has taught me that humanity has changed very little. We know everything, things that we tend to think of as shibbolets now are contested much as they were back then. People have petty concerns, public opinion matters, the pettiness and unintended consequences and unanticipated consequences of decisions can make all the difference. And fundamentally, people were no better or worse than they are today. They were just as prone to violence, they're just as prone to love, they're just as prone to seeking justice and fairness. They just thought about them in different terms. Well, and I think another takeaway from both books is that ideas do matter and moral claims do matter. They do influence things, right? And I think for some people who take a more materialistic view, they would say that it's all about interests. And I think you're pushing back against that to some degree. Do you think that contemporary social scientists sometimes fail to appreciate the impact of ideas and moral arguments and religious beliefs? I think there's of course a very healthy subset of social science about religion and examining both the sources of religious belief and its impact. And there's been some fantastic work done that, for example, traces Western exceptionalism to the family marriage program. So there's been quite a, I don't think we shy away from this. I do think that we, as a discipline, tend to overlook religion because it's so unfamiliar. It's such weird territory. The idea that for many people, the idea that you can believe in God and for that to mean something is just so foreign. But I think we ought to remember that for the vast majority of people on this planet, both now and that this was actually really important. And if it's that important, it probably shapes how they think about politics, what they expect from politics. And we ought to include that. Well, thanks so much for joining me. The most recent book is called Sacred Foundations. And another one called Nations Under God. Thanks so much. Thanks very much. It's just up. Thank you for tuning in to the Unsiled podcast produced by University FM. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five-star rating review in your favorite listing app. To listen to our other episodes, please visit our website at www.unsiledpodcast.com.