The Religious Context in Political Place-Making

Abstract

Connecting religion and politics frequently opens up sensitive issues. Political authorities often try to benefit from religious adherence and seek to control tension. Issues include maximal religious homogeneity, church-state separation with limited religious autonomy, and religiously-colored secular ideologies oriented to political authority. In studying religious impacts on political centers three attributes have to be considered: location, layout, and decoration. Political centers have often been established in existing religious contexts and their locations, layouts and decorations adapted. This is a particularly salient issue when such contexts reflect religious creeds different from that of the newly established political authority. I consider the situation of the second Rome (previously Byzantium) which then became Constantinople and finally Istanbul as well as the case of (New) Delhi. Gottmann suggested an evolutionary model to account for emergence of political centers where previous religious centers existed. In his view original human centers were born at risky crossroads initially secured by religious symbolisms that were incorporated into political authority. Political and religious authority have often been merged in single persons (Chinese, Japanese emperors). Rome and Jerusalem are enduring examples of locational conflict concerning establishment of political and religious authority. The uneasy and evolving cohabitation of religious and political authority in London, Berlin, Dresden, Moscow and Amsterdam is detailed. I also discuss the expression of religiously colored secular ideologies in Rome during Fascism and in Hitler’s parade ground extravaganza in Nuremberg. While in most of the newly designed capitals of the twentieth century the religious element took second place, this seems to change. In Kazakhstan’s Astana, Myanmar/Burma’s Naypidaw and Senegal’s Yamoussoukro there is a return to a cohabitation of political authority with definite religious elements in different guises.