Revealing Religion: An Alternative Account of Religion and Politics

Abstract

A relational dialogist approach to religion, incorporating equally its institutional, ideational, individual, communal, irrational and rational elements, provides a means for developing a nuanced analysis of the relationship between religion and politics. The relational dialogist conception of religion transcends the limitations of dichotomous thinking found in dominant secularist approaches, which limit religion to its institutional, individual and irrational elements. The previous chapter discussed in broad terms the connections that exist across religion, identity and politics in the US and, to a lesser extent the West, emphasizing both the explicit and the subtle influences from religion. Building on these insights, in this chapter, I use the relational dialogist understanding of religion to reveal at a micro-level the ways in which religion influences politics in the USA and the West. In particular, I focus on how the connections between religion and politics within US national identity and Western civilizational identity and culture influence the construction of state identity and action. Using the relational dialogist understanding in a discourse analysis of six State of the Union addresses — Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — the case study highlights a number of implicit, embedded ways in which religion continues to influence civilizational and state identity and action, previously overlooked by scholars as a result of the secularist bias in International Relations.