Defining "Bad Religion"

Book review: Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) and Jolyon Baraka Thomas’ Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-O

Torii, eric gill style, black and white and orange, mediaeval border, parallel wavy lines

“Charles III D.G. Rex F.D.” Such is the motif surrounding the portrait of our new monarch on my country’s new coinage. It proclaims that he is King (Rex), which seems straightforward enough; though if the recent census on religious affiliation offers any credible window into people’s souls, many of my fellow countrymen will dispute that he is so “by the grace of God” (Deo gratia, DG). Fewer still would wish to admit the import of the final initials, FD: Fidei Defensor, “Defender of the Faith,” a title bestowed on his ignominious forebear Henry VIII by the Pope of the time, before that relationship somewhat soured. The faithless may question why any faith needs particular defence from a head of state; the resolutely heathen majority in today’s educational, journalistic and cultural sectors consider even the least degree of faith indefensible; and even the faithful of sundry religions might question which faith, exactly, the King is supposed to be defending, and how that relates to theirs (not least if they are Catholic and possess any sense of irony). Despite the existence of established churches in England and Scotland, and the fact that the British people have never been asked for their view on the matter, Britain is proclaimed by the opinion-making classes a progressive, secular nation; and secularism is supposed to “defend” everybody equally, with no reference to faith, except when it is one of the things from which people need to be defended.

But what do we mean by “secularism?” Generally, we understand a secular state as one in which the public square privileges no particular religious position, or even actively excludes the articulation of religious claims as a basis for any public policy decision. Beyond that, we might refine the definition in various ways. For instance, pace Alistair Macintyre among others, we might understand secularisation as the process whereby religions are “privatised” as a matter of conscience for individuals, to be chosen from among others in a way analogous to products on a free market. We may go further, with Pope Benedict, and decry this marketisation of religion as a “tyranny of relativism,” where all claims of universal truth, goodness and beauty are relegated to a contest of wills. The late Pope had, after all, seen first-hand what happened in his own country when the will to power alone became the measure of all things. Not far from this, we might follow John Milbank, who sees secularism as a mask for violent coercion into the realm of free market capitalism.

Surely there is truth to each of these positions. But more pointedly, recent work on the imposition of Western “secularism” on post-war Japanese may led one to question quite what that concept means. Secularism may in fact prove a self-contradictory delusion, since for all their claims of religious neutrality, secular states seem as concerned as their religious counterparts with the definition and regulation of faith, defining what constitutes “good” or “bad” religion. Whether they admit it or not, they are engaged in an inevitably theological enterprise, however sharp or dull their tools for that endeavour. Take, for example, the atheistic extremes of Communist China or revolutionary France, where all religion is proclaimed “bad religion” on the basis of Marxist doctrine. These secular regimes are just as concerned as any Islamic theocracy, Holy Roman Empire or 16th century Calvinist canton to delineate orthodoxy from heresy, and to condemn citizens who do not visibly comply with the prevailing cultus to exile, reeducation, imprisonment or death.

Communist regimes and absolutist theocracies alike make these definitions on a zero-sum basis: one way is good, all others are bad. Yet we do not have to resort to such extreme cases. Nations occupying the softer middle ground still bear comparison. Tony Blair’s neoliberalism, in conjunction with that of George W. Bush, very clearly drew the line between good and bad religion. On the basis of his readings of the Qur’an in translation, Blair considered himself an authority on what constitutes “good” and “true” versus “bad” and therefore “false” Islam. His conversion to the Roman Catholic Church came with similar caveats: namely, that insofar as any religion promotes liberal values, including those in the realm of family and sexuality, it is good and true. But insofar as it protests against those, it is bad and false, and needs to be corrected, if necessary by mendacity, imprisonment without recourse to legal trial, or by aerial bombardment. That, at least, is how foreigners’ “bad religion” is dealt with. Domestically, the violence is more subtle, constrained by the politesse to which nations self-identifying as “civilised” must at least pretend to subscribe. The infamous French “burka ban,” in which women were forced to strip on public beaches by armed police, is an example of a secular state judging what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable religion at home. One might rather live in France than in Iran. But if “secular” states arbitrate over religious belief and its public expression and enforce complicity by the threat or use of violence, then their treatment of unauthorised religious practice differs from that of their theocratic nemeses in degree, but not in substance. For all their denial of their past, ex-Christian nations may have learned a trick or two from the despised papal inquisitors and Protestant witch-burners of yore.

Two recent books on the recent resurgence of Shinto-influenced nationalism in Japan help to highlight the problems which arise when the assumptions of modern Western secularism, itself dependent (however unwittingly) on its Christian heritage, are imposed on a culture which has never historically been Christian. These are Mark Mullins’ Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) and Jolyon Baraka Thomas’ Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Despite the chronology of their dates of publication, Mullins’ reads as the older book, perhaps because it is written by an older scholar and under what feel like older sociological presuppositions. Somewhat surprisingly, given the considerable thematic overlap and even word-for-word use of identical sources, it does not refer to Thomas’ book, but then, it is natural that authors working on the same historical narrative should read the same texts without necessarily reading one another. Both draw attention to how the US Occupation under MacArthur explicitly defined democracy as a product of Christian culture, which they thought needed to be imposed on Japan in order to foster religious freedom. Both make much of Lt William Bunce’s role in effecting this policy, and his insistence that “State Shinto” (kokka shintō 国家神道) must be abolished to secure this end, while preserving the freedom of individual Japanese citizens to embrace Shinto privately as a matter of conscience if they so wished. Neither, I think, would disagree that the Occupation defined “State Shinto” as “bad religion,” Christianity as “good religion,” leaving “religious Shinto” (shūkyō shintō 宗教神道) and Buddhism as acceptable options within the wider good of “religious freedom.”

Where Mullins and Thomas differ, however, is over the issue of “State Shinto” itself. Before the war, the Japanese government insisted on compulsory acts of worship at Shinto shrines. However, by designating Shinto as “non-religion,” they were able to maintain that this compulsion did not compromise religious freedom. Compulsory participation in Shinto rites was presented not as an imposition of cultus, but rather as part of the civic duties demanded by the secular state. Neither Mullins nor Thomas denies that minority religious groups, including many (but not all) Christians resisted this definition. Yet Mullins more or less accepts the thesis of American-imposed secularisation at face value, namely: first, there was such a thing as State Shinto, therefore pre-War Japan was not a secular state; second, the government’s designation of this was duplicitous and an unacceptable restriction of religious freedom; and third, the Occupation secularised Japan, albeit under certain Christian presuppositions, and thereby granted a real religious freedom which the Japanese state had hitherto obstructed. He argues that although modern Japanese conservative politicians, among them the recently assassinated Prime Minister Abe, do not seek to go so far as to restore Shinto to state governance, they nonetheless hark back to pre-war ideals of Shinto nationalism, veneration of the Emperor and the flag, and through state education aim to inculcate a Shinto-oriented sense of patriotism in the young. Mullins regards such attempts as unacceptable impositions on Japanese individuals’ freedom of religion. Drawing on the name of the controversial Tokyo shrine where, among others, war criminals are enshrined as deities, and a notably revisionist museum of the Second World War is housed, Mullins calls this movement “Yasukuni Fundamentalism,” of a kind with its American Christian and Middle Eastern Islamic namesake. It is, in other words, a universally applicable example of “good secularism” being compromised by “bad religion.”

Thomas, however, casts doubt on all three of Mullins’ presuppositions. First, he questions whether the notion of “State Shinto” (kokka shintō 国家神道) was really so widely propagated before the War. While Mullins devotes six pages of his introduction (pp. 10-16) to defending the use in pre-War history of what he acknowledges is a “controversial term” (p. 10), Thomas devotes the second half of his book to the denial of the same. His very different answer yields likewise very different conclusions to the second and third points above. Mullins insists that the term “State Shinto” was in common use as early as the 1880s (p. 11), and featured in Japanese scholarly work albeit under a different name (kokutai shintō 国体神道) in the 1920s, but Thomas argues that the term really proliferated only postwar. Moreover, this was due to foreign influence. Lt Bunce was pressured to publish a memorandum under direct orders from the US State Department to eliminate “National Shinto,” which was based solely on Anglophone religious studies scholarship, and riddled with “fundamental inconsistencies,” “basic factual errors” and “residual racist tendencies” (pp. 146-7).

In Chapter 5, Thomas succinctly summarises the basic orientation of the Anglophone scholarship of which Bunce availed himself. It can be characterised broadly by the introduction of the Western phenomenological category of “religions,” a word which did not exist in Japanese until the late 19th century, and the subsequent practice of drawing of lines between them. W.G. Aston and Basil Hall Chamberlain, writing in the early twentieth century, adopted the basically evolutionary model prevalent in religious studies at the time. Particular, ethnic religions were understood to be “naturally” superseded by universal ones. The most universal and highest form of all was demythologised Protestant Christianity. For them, the adoption of Shinto by the otherwise educated elite of Japan was an act of deliberate mendacity, the politically-motivated fabrication of a national cultus on a basis which they rationally knew to be untrue. Aston and Hall’s Japanese contemporary Anesaki Masaharu, who taught briefly at Harvard, categorised Shinto as “a religion,” to be understood in contradistinction from Buddhism much as Christianity should be distinguished from the paganism which came before it. Again, the indigenous met the universal, from which it was delineated with that typical scholarly neatness that so sparcely corresponds to reality, and with the implicit prioritisation of the civilised universal system over the ethnic heathen cult. Katō Genichi was responsible in his 1926 A Study of Shintō for a further categorical division, this time within Shinto, as he distinguished “shrine Shinto” (jinja shintō 神社神道) from “national Shinto” (kokutai shintō 国体神道, mentioned above by Mullins): however, Katō argued against the aforementioned scholars that the latter had the potential to be just as universal a religion as Christianity or Buddhism, and was rightly to be considered the national religion of Japan. Katō’s former student D.C. Holtom, an American Baptist missionary and theologian in Japan, was broadly sympathetic to his teacher’s interpretation until Japan began to militarise, upon which he moved to outspoken hostility. Convinced by Katō that Shinto was indeed a religion, Holtam could not accept the State definition of it as non-religion, and instead reinforced the binary between national religion (bad) and universal religion (good). By 1945, he was arguing that the imperial system should be abolished entirely and the “false gods” of State Shinto overthrown, though he apparently nuanced these points after witnessing Bunce’s attempts to put them into action.

Yet these Western-influenced scholarly discussions of national Shinto and the religious status thereof in pre-War Japan were never effected in law. According to Thomas, Bunce’s proclamation of Japanese state-Shinto relations as illegitimate therefore flounders on the fact that Japan never legally designated Shinto, or anything else, as a state religion. Under the Japanese definition of Shinto practice as “non-religion,” the separation of state and religion was already at least a legal (if not a social) reality. To accommodate MacArthur’s pre-decided verdict that Japanese militarism was “basically theological,” Thomas writes, “State Shintō had to be created to be destroyed” (p. 150). The bad religion had to be defined in order to be exorcised. Its relation to the state also had to be proven misguided, for just as secular states presume to define good and bad religion, they can likewise define good and bad secularism. So, Thomas opines, “State Shinto” was manufactured, as the title of Chapter 5 puts it tellingly, as a “heretical secularism.” The Japanese state-religion relationship, which is to say secularism under Japan’s own definition, was “bad,” and so had to be replaced with the “good” secularism of the USA. The “good” secularism of the USA was defined in terms of “freedom of religion,” which, MacArthur thought, was guaranteed and underpinned by Christian roots.

The difference in tone and methodological perspective between Mullins and Thomas can be judged by their conclusions. Mullins makes no secret of his political commitments. An Anglican himself, and one born at a conservative estimate three decades closer to the end of the war than Thomas, he is understandably sympathetic to claims of religious persecution by his coreligionists. The Japanese government did really coerce Christians into a limited number of state-sanctioned churches. But is being demanded to stand and sing the national anthem in school assemblies really, as one Christian schoolteacher recently objected, the modern-day equivalent of fumie, the trampling on an image of the Cross or the Blessed Virgin Mary demanded of Christians by the Japanese authorities in the 1700s? And is the newsletter of the Japanese Communist Party, which Mullins cites several times, really likely to provide the most representative sample of Japanese public opinion on religious freedoms, given that it boasts only 12 out of 465 seats in the House of Representatives? On these rather selective bases, he concludes:

“There is clearly a clash between the values of global civil society, which give priority to individual rights and freedoms, and those values embraced by the religio-political coalition supporting the LDP proposal, which regard the rights of the individual to be secondary and subservient to the needs of the nation of group” (p. 192).

In short, Mullins sees human rights as a done deal, an achievement which the “fundamentalists” of his book’s title are trying to reverse. For Thomas, a black man who recounts experiences of been treated as less than human in his home country of the United States, the very nation which sees its duty as imposing human rights on the world, the issue is far less clear-cut. The assumptions that in Japan, “the Allies introduced religious freedom to a place where it was absent” and that “postwar conservatives are launching coordinated assaults on a fundamental human right” are, he says, flawed (p. 259). Conservative projects “related to public school education, the emperor and Yasukuni Shrine” are rather grounded in claims about national character and its erosion, not least because of “population decline, the prolonged effects of devastating natural and artificial disasters, significant changes in the traditional structures of the family and the workforce, and real and perceived security threats from Asian neighbours” (p. 259). Thomas certainly is no apologist for conservative projects, but finds “a new sympathy” for the postwar Japanese position on “democracy, religion and freedom that is one legacy of the Occupation” (p. 259). In short, he concludes that it is up to the Japanese to decide what Japanese secularism should look like, and whether the Western term “religion” offers a proper frame of reference for their spiritual tradition. The greater global danger that Thomas sees is what happens when “religious difference is weaponized” to the extent that it segues into “racist propaganda” through words like “Terrorist. Militant. Extremist.” (p. 267). Perhaps “fundamentalist” should be added to the list.

Thomas shows that the opposition between “secularism” and “religion” is forced. It does not work even on American suppositions of separation between church and state. Indeed, if secularism means irreligiosity, then Britain, despite having a state church and an anointed monarch adorning its currency, is considerably more “secular” than the United States. In reality, both Britain and the United States have always defined what counts as good or bad religion: first, Catholicism was bad and Protestantism good, then more recently Christianity was good and Islam bad, and now the leftist secular establishment deems atheism or even Satanism as good in comparison with bad Christianity. Bad religion is that which fails to conform to the current middle-class liberal consensus, and those who espouse such religion are “fundamentalists” with a “mediaeval” outlook. It is quite right for anyone expressing such bad religion to be removed from political office or teaching positions in schools and universities or to be fined or imprisoned for praying or reading scripture in public. In other words, “secularists” have ventured a new definition of what constitutes acceptable religion in the public square: the old Victorian conformity tests have simply replaced the old Anglican religion with a new doctrine to which academics, statesmen and civil servants must assent.

But what is teriyaki for the goose is gravy for the gander. Just as it is up to the Japanese to decide what constitutes the proper relationship between their national institutions, governance, education and their spiritual inheritance, so it is for Americans and the British, and for everyone else, too. There is strong public support for those in the prevailing Liberal Democratic Party who seek spiritual reinforcement for the harmony of their nation in the face of powerful forces, often market-driven via the internet, which are dividing and unleashing chaos on American and European society. This results, no doubt, in anti-immigrant rhetoric, shoddy treatment of asylum seekers, and corrupt relationships with more extreme right-wing bodies, some of them new religions and cults. But to decry those who genuinely seek the spiritual improvement of their people by raising phantoms of anti-Japanese wartime propaganda – that is, by portraying them as an evil, anti-individual hive of fundamentalist emperor-worshippers – is at least verging on racism.

Obviously, I do not share their Shinto faith, but given the track record of materialist creeds such as consumer capitalism and Communism, I can at least understand why young Japanese are being encouraged to go back to the shrines for inspiration. I can certainly understand the desire to build a stronger sense of national unity and to instil pride in the best of one’s nation’s history, though the Japanese have not always been best at repenting of its flaws and failures. Certainly, this recent history of Japanese secularism should challenge zero-sum attitudes towards state and religion prevalent in the West. An imperial theocracy is not the only alternative to the US model of strict State-Church distinction. In the face of the devastation of the world by the politics and technologies of modernity, pre-modern and non-Western ways of governing our societies are surely worth exploring rather than simply explaining away on our own terms. Certainly, Mullins’ book raises real problems which should be of concern to any Christian. Thomas’ book, however, is more sceptical of the apparent solution to these (namely, more liberalism and harder secularism), and while even he is uncomfortable with his own conclusions, they provoke thought pertinent far more widely than to Japan alone.