Abstract
Amidst the global religious resurgence in the post-secular world, the field of international relations finds itself unwilling or unable to situate religion back to theoretical paradigms subject to the Westphalian–Enlightenment prejudice. Advocates of religion’s theoretical and empirical significance often turn to religious soft power, a burgeoning theory that gradually becomes the anchorage of discussion but still suffers from conceptual ambiguity and limited explanatory capacity. This essay endeavors to fill in this lacuna by presenting the interdisciplinary attempt to integrate soft power in IR with the three dimensions of power in sociology, which results in a typology of performative, discursive, and relational dimensions of religious soft power. The explanatory and predictive capacity of this model is tested in the empirical case of the evangelical group’s influence on US foreign policy of the post 9/11 Global War on Terror. A process-level historical account based on archival sources furthers scholars’ knowledge of transnational religious actors’ ability to seize both systematic transformations at the international level and contentious dynamics in the domestic environment, which generates a reorientation in norms, identities, and values that contributes to the outcome of foreign policy, thereby answering the un-addressed question of how religion influences domestic and international politics. The bridging of IR, sociology, and historical sociology, three fields often intertwined, suggests a future direction for not only the religious return to IR but also the overcoming of the “intellectual autism” of this discipline, which needs to be better prepared for continuous challenges of soaring populism, nationalism, and clash of civilizations in the twenty-first century.
Highlights
On 30 August 2021, US troops completed the comprehensive withdrawal fromAfghanistan, adding the final nail to the coffin of twenty years’ war with the IslamistTaliban, who had reseized power two weeks prior
How does religion interact with international relations? This essay approaches this question by re-examining the underdeveloped concept of religious soft power
Through an interdisciplinary attempt to integrate international relations (IR) with political sociology, it challenges the monolithic view of power and proposes a three-dimensional religious soft power model, hinging on its discursive, performative, and relational faces
Summary
Afghanistan, adding the final nail to the coffin of twenty years’ war with the Islamist. The finding suggests that conservative evangelical groups’ manufactured reality of the clash of religion and civilization, infiltration into political systems, and localization and politicization of top-down religious messages correspond to the discursive, performative, and relational dimension of the religious soft power obtained by the evangelicals, who seized the Grotian moment to inject their identity, ideology, and interests into US foreign policies on international human rights and the Global War on Terror This typology contributes to the project of power by recalibrating a model to integrate systematic shifts on the international level with the process-level ideological reorientations and political cleavages on the domestic level, all of which facilitate the creation of the new language of religion that transfers religious actors’ perception of their identity, stakes, values, and issues of competition. The concluding section evaluates the rigor and applicability of the theory at hand and suggests possible future research agendas for scholars of IR, political sociology, and historical sociology
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