III. Save Me from Yourself: The Statist Spread of Salvation Religions

“Adoption of the [state] model was tantamount to adoption of Christianity, which legitimized the political order of the state.” [54]

The parastatal Catholic Church had attached itself to the Roman Empire, using that structure’s last centuries to spread the religion considerably, converting the elites and then the peasants of barbarian societies. When the empire fell, the Church held on to the dream. Even where it was too weak to constitute an imperial state, it spread a common cultural language that favored state formation and preached obedience to authority. Over centuries, it served as a centralized network to mobilize resources for state formation, until the power of those states increased to a point where they either monopolized the resources of the Church or rebelled against it, creating their own autonomous churches with a doctrine modified to legitimize the transformed basis of their power.

What is often missed in the progressive telling of history is that the Romans came closer to the creation of capitalism than subsequent societies, up until the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of colonization beyond Europe. In the meantime, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, and the Arab states kept capitalist structures alive in the Mediterranean world system. A major cause of the peasant rebellions that began to occur in Western Europe in the Late Middle Ages was the restoration of Roman law by local elites, which allowed land to be bought and sold as a commodity. As a direct result and parallel, the condition of peasants—who were much better off in the Middle Ages or under the earlier German tribes than their Roman homologue, the slave—began to deteriorate gravely, as the worker was created, on the one hand, and on the other the institution of slavery was brought back—not from nonexistence, but from decline—and intensified and expanded immeasurably.

The epidemics, poverty, starvation, servitude, intolerance, witch hunts—basically all the features assigned to the stereotypical image of the Dark Ages—were in fact characteristic of the end of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the beginning of the Enlightenment. The Dark Ages were only dark for states, because their power, relative to their subjects, was greatly diminished compared to the centuries before and after. Many areas under Roman rule slipped from state control for a number of centuries, and as Kropotkin documented, many medieval towns freed themselves from lordly authority in the tenth and eleventh centuries. [55]

When state power was restored, it was accompanied by another Roman practice that might have slipped into obsolescence were it not for the diligence of the Catholic Church: usury. Contrary to its own doctrine, the Church encouraged finance—lending with interest—in order to fund its own power pursuits. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the most powerful financiers of Europe did business with, and were located close to the Vatican. Significantly, the promotion of usury was one major corruption of the Catholic Church that the Protestants did not consistently criticize. Only the Anabaptists, slaughtered by their erstwhile Protestant allies, harped on the sin of finance. (It is also curious how, nowadays, the frequent demonization of Islamic shari’ah law almost never mentions shari’ah’s prohibition of lending with interest, a detail that certainly worries the owners of Western media outlets more than questions of women’s rights.)

As both the Protestant Reformation and early Christianity demonstrate, salvation religions can subvert state authority and subsequently create new, more powerful authorities.

The extension of new state structures through the southern reaches of the defunct Roman Empire and beyond, riding the wave of Islam, was even more dramatic than the German explosion in the north. In many parts of the Arabian peninsula prior to Islam, the emergence of a state was impeded by the strong tribal organization of society. Tribal leaders would brook no other leaders standing over them, nor a bureaucratic organization diffusing their power; whereas tribal members typically considered submission to anyone but the proven leader of their own tribe an indignity (and the leader, in practice, won respect more than he enjoyed the a priori submission of his fellows). The exception to this dynamic had to be found in an exceptional and extrapolitical space: religion.

The solution to this impasse was worked out even prior to Islam by the evolution of the organization centered upon the sacred enclave, managed by an hereditary religious aristocracy respected and protected by the tribes. [56]

Islam, by being thoroughly monotheistic, could achieve the centralization of these enclaves; and by preaching the holiness of submission to God they could convince the tribal leaders to bow to a higher, apolitical authority in a way that preserved and even amplified their dignity, and left their own political authority symbolically intact. Religion broke the intense localism that often prevented state formation, and masked the emergence of a professional class. In the Yemeni highlands, the sayyids, who traced their decent to Muhammad, constituted the new hereditary religious aristocracy, and they were aided by a second-tier, the qadis, learned families who could not claim descent from the Prophet. Islamic shari’ah law also influenced the transformation of a collective property regime “towards the individual possession of the arable lands by all the adult members of the tribes.” [57]

In Yemen, which was to provide vital military power for the Arab expansion, a central state was integrated, in a common system, with surrounding non-state tribes through a number of economic, religious, and political links. Islam intensified this sense of unity, not only in the highlands but across the Arabian peninsula; influenced by Islam’s insistence on genealogies, the Yemeni quickly elaborated their own, thus joining the Arab ethnos, which previously had not included them. The militarily potent tribes each included 20,000–30,000 members, as well as tens of thousands of nonmember dependents with varying levels of status, from the sayyids and qadis, to the unarmed “weak” population under tribal protection, [58] butchers, barbers, heralds, merchants, horticulturalists, craftspeople, Jews, and lowest of all, servants. [59] (Interestingly, the tribal organization of the region has proven much more durable than the state organization, and persisted intact well into the twentieth century. It still remains partially intact today.)

Islam and the state model it linked to spread on the back of an Arabic population expansion, and also through the intercontinental trade expansion that was occurring in those centuries. The Islamic state already had some experience with incorporating into their social system non-Muslims and people who fell outside their Arab genealogies. When the non-Muslim population in their administrative purview began to increase exponentially with the first conquests, so too did the state apparatus. The social presence of non-Muslims, as well as non-Arabic converts to Islam, provided a solid social hierarchy as well as ready-made justifications and metrics for taxation and tribute (Arabic Muslims were the most privileged stratum, and then non-Arabic Muslims, and then non-Muslims). The well-known historical tolerance of Islam may be related to the fact that, by tolerating internal differences, they also provided a stable basis for the hierarchies on which their states relied.

Soon, Islamic states were at the scientific and commercial center of a nascent world system that spanned Europe, Africa, and Asia. However, the Arabic countries in the cradle of the Muslim world experienced chronic problems with state formation. Amin Maalouf speculates as to why the Arab states were so fragmented and ineffective just a couple centuries after the golden age of the Umayyad Caliphate, which had dominated an area extending from Persia to Spain. The Abbasid Caliphate that succeeded it lost most of its domain within half a century, and the caliph of Baghdad was soon little more than a religious figure bestowing symbolic authority on—and sometimes held hostage by—Turkish sultans or other warlords. The Turks, who themselves had recently been a stateless, nomadic people, also failed to achieve any lasting political unification (excepting a small portion of the empire, the Anatolian peninsula that would later come to bear their name, and not for another four hundred years). Charismatic war leaders like Imad al-Din Zangi or Salah al-Din would unify a large territory, but their deaths almost always led to civil war (or were in fact the first blow in a civil war, in the case of frequent poisonings and assassinations). A regular succession and institutionalized transference of power was a rare occurrence. In effect, the vast former empire was a disunified collection of city-states. Islam had, however, succeeded in destroying a stateless imaginary. With few exceptions, such as non-Arabic mountain populations in the Caucusus or the Rif, Islam had succeeded in centralizing symbolic power and creating a statist imaginary, such that state-building was henceforth the goal of nearly all political activity, ineffective as it might be.

Specifically, Malouf asks why the Frankish crusaders were so much more successful at building stable states in Syria and Palestine than the Arabs. After all, the Arabs perceived franj practices of hygiene, medicine, and justice as insanely ignorant and monstrous, and modern Western criteria would have to corroborate such a view. Beyond the typical culturalist explanations of Western innovation—the Arabs rested on their sense of cultural superiority whereas the Europeans actively sought to appropriate new knowledge—Malouf points out that Muslim political culture placed no limits on the authority of rulers, whereas a democratic spirit among the Franks limited the arbitrary power of rulers, encouraging peasant industriousness and the free development of commerce, as the undertakers of such labor could expect to enjoy a larger part of the fruit of their efforts. It should be noted, though, to prevent any excessive orientalizing, that the often celebrated “democratic spirit” was a militaristic fraternity and a shared identification with power that always relied on the enslavement or extermination of an Other. Likewise, Arabic absolutism was not much different from Roman absolutism at the height of that empire’s power.

Malouf continues: the “nomadic origins” of the Arabs and Turks might also explain “their inability to build stable institutions,” such that “every transmission of power provoked civil war.” [60] Malouf hints that the frequency of “successive invasions” in the Middle East made stable states an unrealistic objective for the political class. The elite culture of frenetic conquest may have been a rational adaptation to such uncertain circumstances. The Middle East was a hub of culture, trade, and other sources of power, and as a result, it was demographically unstable, to put it lightly. If you are unlikely to be able to establish a dynasty due to frequent invasions (which also put an end to the more stable Frankish states after little more than a century), then it makes more sense to live high on the hog, to pillage and despoil and generally create heaven on earth, rather than thinking of legacies and the stability of your political structures. In this respect, state builders on the European subcontinent may have benefited from inhabiting a backwater that no one in their right mind would want to invade.

Islam was an important force for state formation for more than a millennium. In recent times, Muslim fundamentalism has been an effective state-building movement in places like Afghanistan or Iraq/Syria, where Western, post-colonial states have failed. But for most of its history, a more tolerant form of Islam linked to global trade expansion was the active motor of politogenesis. When Musa I of Mali went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the sheer abundance of lavish gifts he brought with him noticeably reduced gold prices throughout the entire world system. It was Muslim traders who truly kicked off the cycle of accumulation linking Africa, Europe, India, Central Asia, China, and the East Indies, which Portuguese and Dutch merchants would later take over. With Islam and intensified trade came a number of new states in South Asia and North Africa that tended to be more robust than their Hindu or animist predecessors.

Trade expansions often go hand in hand with state expansions, as trade creates networks that states can exploit, and states create infrastructures and impose conditions of alienation that make the accumulation of wealth possible. While trade occurs anarchically and can be organized without states, a state may decrease its costs and risks, allowing it to be pursued purely in the interest of profit, and also create dependent populations vulnerable to exploitation. Traders, therefore, come together as a class to favor states and state formation, but this same process eventually allows them to become powerful enough to threaten certain forms of state organization and impel others. States, as they become more powerful, can be the greatest threat to trade, thus powerful states will enter into conflict with the merchants on whom they become increasingly reliant. If this conflict is resolved in a way that mutually increases the power of rulers and merchants, it is through the greater inclusion of merchants in state decision-making, and through the modification of production and commerce in order to favor state power, for example through war industries.

Because trade supersedes state borders, merchant classes will often come into conflict with the zeal and dogmatism of state religion; frequently collaborating with foreigners who perform other religions, and having the experience of operating in foreign countries, they develop a peculiar internationalism. Salvation religions, because they are universalizing, can flatten out the cultural differences that localized religion only enhances, and help merchants create a common culture in their transnational networks.

On the other hand, by expounding universal truths antagonistic to other truth claims, salvation religions may initially pose a problem to power-holders. The Roman Empire was hostile to Judaism and initially to Christianity, and the Mecca elite expelled Mohammed for his teachings. The chauvinism of power-holders would prevent them from taking full advantage of the transnational opportunities presented by the merchant class. Yet a ruling class can never adopt a true internationalism. They need a provincial chauvinism to mobilize and militarize their society when trade wars turn into hot wars, as the Arab expansion and the Crusades both demonstrated.

Salvation religions can spare elites this dilemma by fragmenting society into secular and ecclesiastical spaces, as Christianity did, or by practicing tolerance, as Islam did during the peak centuries of overland intercontinental trade, or as Buddhism did in its expansion through stateless parts of Asia. In the former model, certain religious rules are suspended for a specific class of people, which may eventually give rise to a power struggle between the Church and the semi-autonomous class (as happened in Western Europe); in the latter model, the claim to a superior truth is maintained, but the consequences are reserved for the afterlife (or reincarnation), with the authorities benevolently protecting infidels from punishment in this life. The former gives a competitive advantage to autochthonous merchants but sacrifices the primacy of the priests, whereas the latter model allows the national religion to maintain its dominance but also allows foreign merchants to gain dominance within the national territory. This is more or less what happened in the neighborly system constituted by Christendom and Islam.

Given that there are multiple solutions to the conflict between the chauvinism and universalism of salvation religions, such religions can complement trade and state expansions better than localized pagan spiritualities. Unlike pagan religions, salvation religions are mutually exclusive; therefore states can use them as a tool for war mobilization. But salvation religions bring advantages to state formation in other ways as well.

As salvation religions spread, they can prove subversive to preexisting states as commoners seize on them to rally popular rage and differentiate themselves spiritually from their rulers. However, salvation religions are easily recuperated and hijacked by forward-thinking states. The spread of such religions, therefore, serves to shake up the conservatism that often plagues states and to allow more potent, proactive governments to clear away defunct regimes and open a new path for state advancement. Just as the Roman Empire seized on Christianity to supersede the zero-sum imperial competition that was bleeding the Mediterranean world dry, a rekindled Islamic fundamentalism is reinvigorating the process of state formation in the stagnating, post-colonial states of Saharan Africa.

Fortuitously for them, a shared religion does not end competition between states, which would cause them to atrophy, but it does create a unified cultural field that establishes certain protections, shared norms, and informational networks that are invaluable to merchants in the absence of a unified state structure governing diverse territories. Merchants become key agents of the new religion, also increasing their connectivity to whatever progressive states have succeeded in recuperating that religion. The materially intense channels and networks created by merchants can then be used as paths for state expansion, as was the case with European colonialism in Africa and Asia. Incidentally, missionaries of salvation religions can also play this role, acting as advance troops to establish beachheads, collect information on the natives, and prepare them for occupation.

Because nearly all the states in Southeast Asia before the modern period adhered to Buddhism and one of their major struggles was the constant civilization and recapturing of subjects, who were prone to run to the hills, the universalization of Buddhism to all regional states deprived hill peoples and barbarians of the chance to use one competing salvation religion subversively against another. Buddhism and civilization were symbolically united, increasing the former’s allure and cultural sway. And even though the states of east and southeast Asia were in competition with one another, by creating, almost federalistically, a unified substrate of religion they increased their collective civilizing power, and all of them gained. After all, once subjects were brought down from the hills and put to work, they could be fought over, captured and recaptured by the competing states. It was easier to change their nationality than to civilize them in the first place.

Given the influence of the clergy (sangha) in Theravada countries like Burma and Siam and a cosmology that potentially made the ruler into a Hindu-Buddhist god-king, it was at least as vital for the crown to control the abbots of the realm as it was to control its princes—and at least as difficult […]

Despite their syncretism and incorporation of animist practice, Theravada monarchs, when they could, proscribed heterodox monks and monasteries, outlawed many Hindu-animist rites (many of them dominated by females and transvestites), and propagated what they took to be “pure,” uncorrupted texts. The flattening of religious practice was, then, a project of the padi state to ensure that the only other kingdom-wide institution of elites besides the crown’s own establishment was firmly under its control. A certain uniformity was also achieved because the larger abbeys were, after all, run by a surplus-appropriating elite that, like the crown itself, thrived best on the rich production and concentrated manpower available at the state core. [61]

Clearly, salvation religions advantage states because they provide a psychological weapon against the disorderly byproducts of exploitation and suffering, and they focus a people’s symbolic and spiritual attention on a domain that is both within state control (the publicly subsidized temples) and conveniently away from the ugly terrain of state effects (in Nirvana or Heaven), away from the fields, the prisons, the gutters, the battlefields. Unlike animist and pagan religions, which may also be used to awe and pacify subjects, salvation religions do not have a potentially subversive, anti-authoritarian attachment to the local; their god is omnipresent and their teachings are designed to be transported. Thus they alienate access to the divine while maintaining a mobility befitting an army.

However, all religions can be subverted by mystical cults or heretical movements. Heterodox believers claim the state religion, usually (but not always) protecting themselves from the full zeal of a holy war waged against them, and also benefiting from trade and other peaceful relations with their coreligionists. By propagating heterodox beliefs, they can subvert state authority and carve out a sphere of independence while claiming the privileges that attain to believers.

The trend is transcontinental. Peasant rebellions in Europe that challenged feudal authority frequently adopted Anabaptism, or one of many Marian or Manichean heresies. Heretical forms of Buddhism have long been popular among the highland communities in resistance to state encroachments in Southeast Asia. A similar pattern can be observed among the Berbers of Northern Africa.

When the Romans who controlled the province of Ifriqiyah [Africa] became Christianized, the highland Berbers (whom they never fully subjugated) also became Christians—but Donatist and Arian heretics, so as to remain distinct from the church of Rome. When Islam swept the area the Berbers became Muslims, but soon expressed their dissent from the inequalities of Arab Muslim rule by becoming Kharijite heretics. [62]

Heterodox and heretical sects were manifold in Christian Europe, being attached both to dissident movements among elites promoting alternative strategies for the organization of power, and also to popular, anti-authoritarian movements that contested the exploitative practices of power-holders. However, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, secular power-holders, particularly in certain French territories where processes of state formation were most advanced, began pressuring the Catholic Church to justify the purging of competitors. Under the guise of a war on heresy, whoever could secure the approval of the Church could humiliate or even eliminate their rivals, sometimes even when these had the favor of the king. In effect, this constituted the gradual abolition of the Peace and Truce of God, the result of a tenth- and eleventh-century popular movement that had pressured the Church to severely limit feuding by nobles, thus protecting commoners from the ravages of warfare and from the elevated tax burden that went with it. By demonizing their rivals as heretics, secular rulers could get around the prohibitions enacted by the Peace and Truce of God. But as feudal warfare gained steam, the war on heresy developed mechanisms of its own, under control of the Church. The earliest targets were elites, but Rome’s bloodhounds quickly turned their attention against the commoners. These two movements, the secular and the ecclesiastic, and their targeting of the upper and lower strata of society, found their maximum point of harmony in the crusade against the Cathars of the French Pyrenees. Subsequently, the renewal of secular warfare diverged to foment processes of empire building that ended in the modernization of the State, whereas the ecclesiastic purges later took on gender and class overtones and transformed into the witch hunts, a tool that municipal authorities quickly appropriated, together with the early enclosures and debt policies laying the groundwork for capitalist social relations.

Religious purification was an important motor for state formation among the Israelite tribes after they settled in the territories that would become their homeland. The tribes were organized in a loose confederation, but hostile incursions by bellicose neighbors encouraged them to band together under a common war leader or king (a common occurrence in stateless tribal confederations). Up to that time, Israeli monotheism (which in practice was still quite open to polytheism, Yahweh perhaps being viewed as a special god of the tribes rather than the only true God) proscribed the establishment of a single human ruler, since such a ruler was ostensibly usurping a power position that belonged only to God. Such a view shows how religious practices that later became important motors of state-formation were originally tactics of state-resistance (similar to how Christianity was initially a state-resistant practice). The implications of early Israelite anti-statist monotheism should have obvious subversive implications, given that its practitioners had been slaves of the Egyptian god-king, the pharaoh.

Contrary to the exaggerations in the Bible, the United Kingdom of Israel was not a state, and the level of unification it achieved was minimal, limited to the battlefield and a few acts of temple construction, the most famous being in Jerusalem, a city that at the time only had a few hundred inhabitants. [63] Perhaps only the last of the three supposed kings—Saul, David, and Solomon—actually exercised a leadership role over the whole of the confederation. Significantly, the conquest story of the origins of Israel was made up a couple centuries later by state historians who wanted to invent a militarist pedigree in which the country was founded on the slaughter of heathens. Archaeological evidence shows that in reality, the Israelites and the Canaanites peacefully coexisted.

The northern tribal confederation of Israel, which contained the majority of the Israelite tribes, rejected Solomon’s attempt to found a dynasty, so that his son only had authority in the smaller, southern Kingdom of Judah. Politogenesis actually occurred over the following century, as the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel fought each other and also waged wars against the Moabites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the neo-Babylonians. The Old Testament reflects the Kingdom of Judah’s disdain for Israel’s tolerance of polytheism, and documents Judah’s use of monotheism to legitimate the role of a supreme monarch supported by a priestly class. The Kingdom of Israel promoted polytheism—particularly the worship of the Phoenician god Baal—partly as a way to prevent their religious-cultural domination by Jerusalem (the capital of Judah) and partly as a reflection of their greater tolerance (or weaker control by a priestly class). Though the northern kingdom was more populous and architecturally more advanced, it can be argued that they did not develop into a state until later, under the Omrides dynasty.

Polytheistic states largely described the fickle, shifting fortunes of nature or geopolitics (e.g. invasions, declines in trade) as the result of wars or conflicts between the gods; in other words, society and the state were peripheral to extremely important changes in the world around them. Such a view, in which human society is at the mercy of fortune, created a crucial barrier to the expansion of state power. The monotheistic state of Judah, on the contrary, could develop a cratocentric worldview in which divine will and state interests were completely fuzed. Any misfortune, whether a plague or the supposed division of the United Kingdom, was a result of the wrath of an extremely demanding God. Any good fortune was the result of obedience to God’s will. The will of God and the will of the State, incidentally, were synonymous.

This new moral universe enshrined total obedience and also made sure that the priests always had a useful culprit every time things went wrong, given that total obedience is impossible in practice. Millennia before the prison-industrial complex would come to manufacture the crime and incarceration it profits off of, monotheists had learned to produce the sins that could create a demand for more monotheism.

Purification, in the Israelite case, went hand in hand with militarization, though it was the function of the priestly class in legitimizing and expanding state authority that was most highly privileged.