Values and Politics

• The lecture discusses values and religion in the context of politics, society, and individual behavior.
• The announcements include information about attendance, noting that QR codes are available on slides for check-in, but physical attendance and promptness are essential.
• The link between values and politics is explored

Values

• Values are shared beliefs, norms, customs, and principles.
• Values guide behaviour, decisions, and daily interactions within a society, providing a social compass.
• Values, and changes, are crucial for explaining social change, drawing from the works of Durkheim (1897), Weber (1905), and Du Bois.
• Schwartz Theory of Values (1992, 1996), includes: Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence, and Universalism.

Values and Politics

• David Easton (1953) defines politics as an authoritative allocation of values for a society.
• Gabriel Almond & Sydney Verba (1963) suggest that a stable and effective democratic government depends on the orientations people have toward the political process.
• Political culture is a system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values that bear on political actions, but correlation is not causation.

Political Culture (Almond & Verba)

• Parochial political culture has no cognitive orientations toward the political system.
• This traditional system leads to alienation.
• Subject political culture sees cognitive orientations toward the output aspects of the system.
• This authoritarian political culture leads to apathy.
• Participant political culture includes cognitive orientations toward both the input and output aspects of the system.
• This leads to democracy, allegiance, and participation.
• Civic Culture is an optimal balance of passivity and participation, with civic virtue, responsibility, shared values, trust, confidence, and freedom.

Postmaterialist Society

• R. Inglehart and Ch. Welzel argue that as societies modernize, cultural shifts lead to changes in individuals' values and priorities.
• A shift occurs from materialist values to post-materialist values, focusing on self-expression, autonomy, and quality of life.
• A shift also occurs from survival values (traditional norms and authoritarian attitudes) to self-expression values.
• This increases political participation.
• Generational change, with security and economic stability achieved after 1945, shifts people's priorities from economic survival to non-materialistic concerns.
• The "Scarcity hypothesis" suggests that generations born into scarcity tend to be more materialistic.
• Modernization theory posits that as societies modernize, they tend to liberalize.

Operationalising Values: World Value Survey

• The World Value Survey explores two dimensions of values: traditional-secular and survival-self-expression.
• Traditional values include the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, traditional family values, rejection of divorce/abortion/euthanasia/suicide, and high levels of national pride and nationalism.
• Survival values focus on economic/physical security and a relatively ethnocentric outlook with low levels of trust and tolerance.
• Secular-rational values involve less importance of religion/tradition/family, acceptance of divorce/abortion/euthanasia/suicide, and lower levels of national pride with cosmopolitan outlooks.
• Self-expression values prioritize environmental protection, tolerance of foreigners/gays/lesbians/gender equality, and rising demands for participation in economic/political life.
• Traditional and Survival values are common in Bosnia, Egypt, Armenia, Jordan, Georgia, and Montenegro.
• Traditional and Self-expression values are seen in most of Latin America, Poland, and Portugal.
• Secular-rational and Survival values are found in Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, North Macedonia, and Greece.
• Secular-rational and Self-expression values are common in Sweden, Norway, Japan, Estonia, Benelux, Germany, France, Switzerland, Czechia, Slovenia, and some English-speaking countries.

Cultural Backlash

• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019) discuss the rise of politics based on traditional values in postmaterial societies.
• Generational, educational, gender, and urban transformations after 1945 led to a growth of post-materialist values, spurring a socially conservative reaction.
• A response to growing demand for socially liberal policies led to a traditional conservative cohort mobilized against this trend.
• "Authoritarian populism" rises as a cultural backlash.
• Economic shocks and grievances matter but are secondary to cultural transformations.

Challenges

• The question remains whether value change is solely a generational effect and if values can be instrumentally shaped top-down.
• Illiberalism presents a top-down strategy – majoritarian, nation-centric, or sovereigntist – favouring traditional hierarchies and cultural homogeneity.
• Political discourse can change values across the board, including among the young.
• Resonance of official narratives through education, media, and the public sphere can lead to shifts in values.

Religion as a Value System

• Religion involves cultural systems of beliefs, values, and rituals.
• Religion is often tied to ideology and morality.
• Religion gives a sense of meaning and purpose by creating an idea of reality that is sacred, all-encompassing and supernatural.
• Religion provides order and predictability.
• Religion originally had universal applications, which later became national.
• Socially constructed meanings differ across contexts, such as Shintoism in Japan or Buddhism in China.

Religion as Socio-Political Control

• Religion in the Euro-American context is linked to traditional values focusing on piety, traditional family roles, security, and continuity.
• Religion can reinforce inequality, social identities, and stereotypes.
• Religion played a role in slavery, traditional gender roles, colonialism, and the subjugation of "missionaries."
• Christian denominations tolerated or endorsed slavery.
• Some religions have blurred boundaries between state and society, such as eastern Orthodoxy.
• Institutions of religion, especially churches, play a key role in politics and policies, acting as neutral arbiters of political conflict.
• Religion has played a key role in education, national emancipation, and even the fall of communism.

Religion and Politics

• Opposition to religious influence on politics is shown in surveys across various countries.
• The percentage of those surveyed who believe religious leaders should not influence government is: Ireland 72%, Italy 70%, Poland 78%, Croatia 79%, USA 50%, Canada 71%.
• The percentage of those surveyed who believe religious leaders should not influence votes is: Ireland 78%, Italy 70%, Poland 83%, Croatia 84%, USA 71%, Canada 78%.

Religion and Social Change

• Religion has a 'double function': maintaining social order and shaking it (Berger, 1967).
• Religion gives grounds for resistance against the dominant social order/ideology.
• Max Weber’s "The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904-5) offer a critique of Marx's materialism.
• Protestant work ethics influence society to value work, reinvestment, and the spread of capitalism.
• Protestantism (Calvinism) emphasizes predestination and the doctrine of calling, which encourages discipline and hard work as a means to prove one's worth to God.
• Business success is seen as an unofficial sign of God's approval, which results in the spirit of capitalism.
• Marianne Weber argues that Protestant ethics reinforced patriarchy.
• These ethics favoured "homosocial interactions" (men accepting other men) and re-approved women's subordinate roles within the family.

Du Bios on Religion

• In "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903), religion is portrayed as a key institution in the South.
• Religion provided spiritual solace (hope and community) during slavery, racism, and discrimination.
• It served as a platform for social and political mobilization, particularly during the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement.
• There was criticism of white-dominated Christian communities due to their hypocritical approach to faith.
• Church leaders acted as advocates for justice and equality, turning the church into a political space during the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Three Perspectives on Religion

• From a functionalist perspective, religion has the function of bringing society together, providing purpose, meaning, and mental therapy.
• Ritual is seen as an act of the society worshipping itself (Durkheim).
• Durkheim's work on suicide (1897) shows that it is more prevalent among those less anchored in society.
• Religion provides social cohesion and order through moral codes, though this can lead to conflict if there is no shared religion.
• From a conflict perspective, religion reinforces social inequality, creating social conflict.
• Religion serves as an "opium of the masses," maintaining the unequal status quo for the bourgeoisie by making inequality seem inherent to testing people's faith in God.
• It's purported that religious figures think if a person is poor, it is because their faith has been tested or violated.
• Religion diverts attention away from pressing social issues by emphasizing an afterlife.
• From an interpretive perspective, negotiated meanings of sacredness result in the need for agreement a symbol/ritual/practice is sacred.
• Religious beliefs and practices contribute to the formation of social and self-identity.
• This can sometimes lead to stereotypes on how we see other religions.

Secularisation and Modernity

• Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Du Bois foresaw religion as waning as society modernized.
• These individuals used science to explain the social world
• Secularisation is partially from Enlightenment ideas.
• Functions of the church have been taken over by secular institutions (schools, army, civil service, therapy services).
• Secularisation exists as a product of advances in the major scientific disciplines that explain phenomena previously unexplained.
• Inglehart/Welzel suggest that when countries reach high levels of existential security in addition to having less pro-fertility ideology, religion is not needed as a stress-reducing mechanism
• 61% believe in God.