By James Miller
An editorial in Friday’s Dallas Morning News argued that Hillary Clinton, the incoming U.S. Secretary of State, should move to “close our diplomats’ religion deficit.” The argument was that in order to succeed in international relations, it’s vital for the state department to understand the role religion plays in shaping the politics and culture of the world. This, in fact, was the theme of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and The Almighty: Reflections on God, Man and World Affairs.
In modern culture, religion is understood as something that belongs to the private realm, not the public realm. The consequence of this is that people involved in world affairs such as politicians and journalists are trained to deliberately ignore the role played by religion in shaping people’s values and attitudes. Religion, it is argued, plays a diminishing role in the world and is therefore best forgotten. World affairs are to be explained by economics, politics and culture, in that order. This results in a “religion deficit” or a lack of basic “religious literacy,” as the title of Stephen Prothero’s recent book put it.
The fact is, however, that we do not live in a modern world where democracy and science reign supreme. We live is a pluralistic, postmodern world, which lacks a single coherent narrative. We live in a fragmented world dominated by secular post-Christianity, Islam, East Asian values, and conflicts between globalizing traditions and indigenous traditions.
