God Terms and Activity Systems

• Author: Saul Allen,Ira Allen
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916654014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 557 –570

© 2016 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916654014

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Article

What do political scientists study when they study “reli-

gion?” Is everyone studying the same phenomenon? In

recent years, political science has devoted increasing

resources to studying religion’s entanglements with poli-

tics, but religion itself remains undertheorized. This is not

due to a shortage of available theories. Rich conceptions

emerge in works by Asad (1993), Connolly (1999),

Mahmood (2005), Taylor (2007), and others, and in the

essays filling de Vries’ compendious Political Theologies

(de Vries and Sullivan 2006) and Religion: Beyond a

Concept (de Vries 2008). Many political theorists have

responded to older definitions’ inability to account for

“things one intuitively wants to call ‘religion’ . . . that are

oriented less toward ‘belief’ and the status of the individ-

ual believer, and more to embodied practice, discipline,

and community” (Lincoln 2006, 1). At the same time,

some theorists (e.g., Cavanaugh 2009; Sullivan 2005)

express doubt that a single analytic object religion can be

isolated in the first place. Although these latter may be

correct in a philosophical sense, there is clear heuristic

value to defining religion. “Religion” names an important

site for cross-case and cross-cultural comparison, without

which our maps and models of the world would be empiri-

cally much impoverished. Naturally, some subfields

within political science have and should continue to pro-

duce internally useful models of “religion.” Still, it seems

clear that some concordance of definition is necessary if,

for instance, the vast literature on religion in a U.S.

American context is to usefully be set in conversation with

work on religion in Central Asia, China, and other locales.

To the extent that political science has properly scien-

tific—that is, conceptually encompassing—aims, the dis-

cipline needs well-grounded definitions that admit of

good conversation among subfields.

Political science has yet to engage widely, however,

with the cross-culturally aspirational, materialist defini-

tions of religion offered up in recent years. Drawing

implicitly on the intellectual heritage of Marx, Weber,

and Durkheim, many comparative political scientists help

themselves to “secular modernity,”1 taken as neutral epis-

temic grounds, as the conceptual backdrop for their work

654014PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916654014Political Research QuarterlyAllen and Allen

research-article2016

1American University of Beirut, Lebanon

2University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ira Allen, American University of Beirut, P.O. Box 11-0236, Riad El-

Solh, Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon.

Email: ia55@aub.edu.lb

God Terms and Activity

Systems: A Definition of Religion

for Political Science

Ira Allen1 and Saul Allen2

Abstract

Political science struggles, sometimes more than it knows, to study religion’s relationship with politics, democratic

and otherwise. The difficulty is in part theoretical. This paper synthesizes diverse strains in recent scholarship on

religion to propose a theoretically attuned definition well suited for empirical political science. Religions are defined

as systems of shared activity organized around transcendental signifiers. Transcendental signifiers are readily identifiable in

public discourse and are “god terms” that organize (or rest at the center of organized) systems of shared activity. This

parsimonious definition admits both belief-oriented and practice-oriented phenomena and allows political scientists to

study religion as it shapes political acts, interventions, and possibilities. For illustrative purposes, the paper examines a

key speech delivered by Sukarno at Indonesia’s founding moment, in which naturalistically observable transcendental

signifiers mark the mobilization of religion. Revising older histories that discover a contest between “secular” and

“religious” actors, or that are keen to determine the sincerity of Sukarno’s own belief, we contend that Indonesia’s

founding is best understood in terms of competing religious discourses that merge in the development of a new civil

religion.

Keywords

religion, political Islam, founding moments, Indonesia, secularism, methodology