Last week, the Institute for Social Concerns hosted their biannual Catholic Social Tradition Conference. The theme for this year’s conference was Interdisciplinary Responses to Religious Nationalism.
The conference had six keynote lectures, all of which centered around religious nationalism. Specific topics included the context of political perspectives, religious affiliations, Christian nationalism and European religious nationalism. The conference attracted national and international academic scholars whose research examines the various injustices that are promoted and upheld within societies around the world.
Ryan Juskus, assistant professor of the practice at the Institute for Social Concerns and faculty director of NDBridge, expressed the significance of the event, titled "Signs of the Times: Interdisciplinary Responses to Religious Nationalism."
“This topic was so important to the Institute that it was actually selected two years ago, after the last Catholic Social Tradition Conference,” Juskus said.
In the first keynote panel on Thursday, Gary Adler, an associate professor of Sociology at Penn State University, shared insight into his research on "hyperlevel" government relationships and religious affiliation. According to Adler, the connection is virtually nonexistent.
He explored the notion of government officials at the local level being highly uninvolved in religious conversations, in part because of the unrelated aspect of their job and because they do not believe they have enough of an impact to run on a platform associated with religion.
"Hyperlevel government officials, like mayors, stay out of religious discussions, largely because it is not part of their job description and is ultimately not relevant,” Adler said.
When asked specifically why this occurs, Adler implied that religion at this level is simply inconvenient, even if officials have their own religious views.
“Hyperlevel government officials do not feel like they have enough political power to exercise any sort of religious stance,” he said.
The third keynote on Friday explored the concept of ideology and Christian nationalism. Speaker Janna Hunter-Bowman, associate professor of Peace Studies and Christian Social Ethics and director of Peace Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, expressed the concern for conformity between religious affiliation and imposing ideology on the government, specifically pertaining to Christians.
She claimed that Christian individuals have begun investing their entire morals into political parties that are actively against the moral teachings of Jesus. According to Hunter-Bowman, individuals do this in order to remain consistent in their voting participation.
“This is an occasion in which it's useful to distinguish the ideology of the state from the state's claim to power as above, so that we have grounds on which to protest the brazen dismantling of federal agencies, corrupt money in politics and the executive branch over running the other branches of government,” Hunter-Bowman said.
She went on to say that the deep association between religious claims to political power, which are largely dominated by Christian political agencies, have a direct correlation with negative repercussions on minorities. She urged Christians in highly political spheres to proceed with caution in order to protect minorities.
“It means not erasing moral minorities from the narrative, but supporting the existence of moral minorities to contribute to collective political imaginations,” Hunter-Bowman said.
She expressed that faith should not be a mode to dominate minorities within societies, but instead offer a sense of collective support through a common identification of being a minority group, therefore upholding community through commonality.
“A profound pluralism, in which multiple ways of life negotiate and cooperate with one another, because each party understands itself as a minority amidst minorities,” she said.
Continually, she proposed that there is a feasible way to incorporate not only tolerance, but an active stride towards an increasingly equitable multi-religious society.
“I would argue four ways of peace, theology, non-resistance, transformation, reckoning and responsibility,” Hunter-Bowman said.
Through this, Hunter-Bowman stated that the implication of the “four ways” are not enough and highlighted the negative actions of religious groups that promote violence. She expressed that this violence advocacy is a moral inconsistency with the legitimate religious teachings of said groups.
“Initiative responses to violence born from God's refusal to conform to violence are contradictory,” she said.
The Catholic Social Tradition Conference acted as a promotional tool for religious-based equity in an increasingly polarizing political climate. Therefore, speakers were urged to remind attendees that there is an ultimate responsibility to promote religious diversity as a means for overarching social enhancement.
“To see the power of small movements of dissidents, refusing imperial, nationalistic framing of in group, out group opposition that does not absorb others and that is not absorbed by others, perhaps it helps us to think about the possibilities of creating new alliances and agonisms, to confront authoritarianisms,” Hunter-Bowman said.
