Of Presbyterians and Whiskey: the role of religion in Scottish independence

In the coverage of the Scottish independence referendum news agencies have taken just about every imaginable angle, from whiskey to sport to pop culture icons such as James Bond and Harry Potter. 

Yet, in the midst of all the economic, cultural, and political discussions, precious view pundits have addressed the question of religion.

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood

On Thursday September 18, 2014 the Scottish people will vote on the question, "Should Scotland be an independent country? -- voters can answer 'Yes' or 'No.' Amidst the political wrangling and fits of nationalism, what is the role of religion in the vote for Scottish independence? Is there one to speak of? 

After all, religion has featured prominently in shaping, and dividing, the United Kingdom throughout the years. From the Druid queen Boudica who led a Celtic rebellion against the Roman Empire to the War of the Three Kingdoms and the Protestant-Catholic bloodshed in Northern Ireland, religion has always produced great conflict in the British Isles. 

Specifically in Scotland, religion has played a significant role in fashioning "the greatest country on Earth." Although precious little is known about religious practices before the arrival of Christianity, the Picts (traditional Scottish tribes) most likely observed a form of "Celtic polytheism" with Druid elements. Christianity seeped into the country even before the momentous events at Hadrian's Wall in 367 C.E., but its official arrival in Scotland took place thirty years later when St. Ninian founded the first Christian Church in Scotland. Despite massive efforts to convert the native Scots, there were still some in need of conversion when St. Columba arrived shortly after 563. It seems likely that Celtic Christianity was firmly planted across Scotland by the end of the 600s.

Scottish Christianity had an independent flare throughout the Early Middle Ages. Celtic Christianity in Scotland was distinct from Roman common Catholicism, with the monastic movement playing an outsized role and abbots being more authoritative than Archbishops in the land. The wee Scottish church also firmly entrenched its independence from England, even constructing a clear division between its diocesan bureaucracy and that of England. However, by the Later Middle Ages, England was firmly in control of the church in Scotland and would continue to exert its influence over Scots through ecclesiastical channels.

Religion did not play a key role in the famous "Braveheart Battles" of the 13th and 14th centuries led by William Wallace. However, Wallace's Catholic faith is often overlooked. Wallace received a Catholic education and according to Vatican sources, his career was originally church oriented being schooled by Augustinians and Benedictine monks. A series of violent events led him away from the Benedictine cloister and into the bloody battlefield. His faith continued to shape him however, as he recited the Psalter as he disemboweled and quartered for his sedition.

During the 16th-century, the Scottish Reformation took a decidedly Calvinist turn thanks to the influence of James VI's preference for Calvinism. Presbyterianism was birthed through the reformational bloodshed and battles of the Scots (see the Bishops' Wars and the Scottish Civil War of 1644-1645) and Scottish Presbyterianism remains the most potent religious force in Scotland today with "the Kirk" -- the Church of Scotland -- claiming a third of the Scottish population's allegiance.  

However, Scots are by and large very secular these days. The largest "religious" category, according to the 2011 census data, is "no religion" with 36.7% of the population and 200,000 more adherents than The Church of Scotland. Still, when Catholics (16%) and Other Christians (5.5%) are combined with Presbyterians, Christianity is still the "majority religion" (54%) even if it is largely cultural devotion rather than religious fidelity. Other religions are on the rise in the country, with sizable minority populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs on the rise over the last decade due to immigration and second/third generation faithfulness. Despite its roots in the country, Paganism (and its antecedent, Neo-Paganism) is relatively hard to find in Scotland, with Shetland being the only destination where it is common.

With such a sundry religious landscape, what role could religion play in the Scottish independence referendum? How could religion, in any significant way, unite Scots behind self-government? 

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Will Scots declare their independence on Thursday? Will religion or whiskey play a larger role in their decision? 

Some backers of the Better Together campaign (the supporters of the "no" vote on the referendum) spread rumors on the blogosphere that an independent Scotland would see a decidedly Protestant leaning nation that might very well turn on its Catholic constituents. There were even talks of renewed persecution of Catholics and perhaps bloodshed on the streets akin to that which was seen in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. 

However, the data seem to say that Catholics are not that worried about Scottish independence and Church of Scotland faithful are not even that keen on the entire project. In a 2012 poll, 30% of Catholics supported independence with just 16% "worried" about the prospect of a separate Scotland. Compare this to the 26% of the "nones" who support independence and the 17% of Church of Scotland members and it seems that Catholics are by and large the biggest supporters of Scottish sovereignty.  

Even so, to guard against any potential persecution or state church scenario in an independent Scotland, churches and faith groups held an interfaith conference in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire in July calling for the role of religion to be recognized in any written constitution for Scotland. The Scottish government has promised that it does not plan to change the legal status of any religion -- Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Jewish -- if the referendum were to pass.

Nonetheless, the reality is that religion plays a decidedly minor role in the debate concerning Scottish autonomy, even if it has shaped the democratic ideals and autonomous spirit of the nation's subconscious. Whereas religion played an outsized role in the historical battles between Scotland and England, it has faded into the background in an overtly secular Scotland and generally areligious United Kingdom.

Markedly more important than faith and religious ritual are discussions of oil reserves, currency, and yes -- Scotch whiskey. 

The danger of crafting Muslim identities for our own purposes

*For more on religion & culture follow @kchitwood

The situation with ISIS/ISIL (Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya) continues to heat up. ISIS continues to post videos of atrocious beheadings of their Western prisoners (two U.S. journalists and a British aid-worker). These digital demonstrations have provoked the Western military powers into intense discussions of reprisals and concrete conversations about constructing a coalition.

*Read "Five Facts You Need to Know about Iraq, its Religious Minorities, and ISIS."

Amidst the flurry of emotion and geo-political crusading an interesting, misleading, trend has re-surfaced: the crafting of Muslim identity by non-Muslims for the latter's own purposes.

President Barack Obama's comments to this effect did not go unnoticed. He said on September 10, just a day before the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

“...let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state.”

POTUS's comments echo those of George W. Bush who famously quipped in the aftermath of 9/11, that Islam "is a peaceful religion" (Nov 13, 2002) and that:

“Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.”

— October 11, 2002

Obama used this language before moving on to say, "Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy."

British Prime Minister David Cameron joined in with the ISIS ≠ Islam prose. In the wake of the execution of British aid-worker David Haines, Cameron remarked that ISIS "are not Muslims, they are monsters." He branded the ISIS killings and subsequent videos as acts "of pure evil" and vowed that the UK, "will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice." 

Cameron, and Obama, made comments about what Islam is, and what it is not, that allowed them to justify their actions. Realizing that the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric (the "West" versus "Islam") is not popular sentiment, nor is it conducive to building a coalition that would include Muslim-states and Muslim majority nations, the two Western leaders made sweeping statements about what Islam is, and is not, in order to vindicate their aggressive, military-based, retaliations. 

Response to Cameron and Obama's comments has been mixed. Many from progressive Muslim communities praised them for drawing a line between their peaceful faith and practice and the brutal extremism of ISIS. Many on the far-right of the political spectrum (and even some from among the ranks of the "New Atheists," including Sam Harris) in the U.S. lambasted POTUS for his "ignorance" concerning ISIS and Islam, saying that he "isn't qualified enough to say what is and what is not Muslim." 

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Photo: Shibli Zaman, Loonwatch.com

At the same time, a Twitter handle by the name of "Ahimla Jihada" (@Ahimla2), which spouted seemingly supportive superlatives for ISIS from an "American-Muslim woman" was found to be a fake. Before the account was shutdown, the tweets of @Ahimla2, which declared her devotion to ISIS and love for terror (from within the United States no less!) produced strong responses calling for her death and the killing of many more Muslims in the U.S. Shibli Zaman at Loonwatch.com lamented:

“There are dubious forces from an increasingly belligerent political Right who are out to brainwash, by hook or crook, the American public into hating their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith and to justify a foreign policy in the ‘10/40 Window’ that has tarnished America’s reputation globally and needlessly puts our men and women in uniform in harm’s way.”

While Cameron/Obama/Bush may be lauded for trying to distinguish between ISIS and global Islam and this Twitter scandal may be mourned as an attempt to justify Islamophobia in the U.S., they are both examples of the same error: Western politicians or popular pundits cannot be the ones to say what Islam is and is not. 

*Read "Does ISIS = Islam?"

At issue here is the question -- who has the right to define what Islam is and is not? 

Language has power to shape opinions and to galvanize people to action. These leaders and culture shapers understand this. That is why they use essentializing terminology to declare what Islam is and is not. By becoming arbiters of Islamic identity, Western leaders seek to make essentialist claims in order to provide powerful, and useful, rallying-points for their own agendas. In these cases, attacking and destroying ISIS on the one hand, turning on Muslims in the U.S. on the other. 

While artlessly defining Islam may prove useful for political purposes, it is not conducive to helping non-Muslims understand what Islam is. Concepts such as 'Islam' are not static. There is no fixed form of Islam that can be found or defined, especially by non-Muslims. Instead, Islam is a diverse stream of various forces, persistently in process, forever in flux, consistently contingent on changing cultural, political, ethnic, religious, and economic realities. Really, the language of Obama, Cameron, @Ahimla2 and others who want to say neatly that ISIS is Islamic, or it is not Islamic, is hegemony at work again -- colonial powers attempting to define the "other" in order to exert their own influence or power in the Islamic world. 

My concern here is not political, it is not militaristic. Instead, it is one of religious literacy. Islam is one of the most multi-cultural, multi-generational, multifaceted, and misunderstood religions in the world, especially in the West. In order to understand Islam, we cannot apperceive it according to uncluttered constructs or uncomplicated categories. Instead, the messiness and miscellany of the Muslim world must be explored. This will often mean meeting with local Muslims, observing regional dynamics, and listening, and learning, their perspectives on global Islam. Especially in the West, we need to listen to Muslims speak about their own community, from all sides, before we begin crafting Muslim identities according to our own motivations -- be they benign or malevolent.  

If Western powers or Islamophobes want to say what Islam is or is not for their own political ends, so be it. What I don't want to see is the general population getting carried away with a vision of Islam that is founded more in Western hegemony than it is global Islamic reality. 

Does ISIS = Islam?

Does ISIS = Islam? Does Islam = ISIS? 

In the wake of rising violence and thuggish rhetoric, many are re-visiting the common accusation that terror groups and rogue states such as ISIS are Islam and that any discussion about the varieties of Islamic belief and ritual throughout the world is smokescreen. The assumptive claim is that if you prick Islam it always bleeds terror, hate, and violence. 

Dr. Terje Østebø, whose perspective on global Islam helped inspire this post, is involved in the launch of the University of Florida’s Center for Global Islamic Studies. After The Gainesville Sun published an article on the center’s launch, Østebø suffered vitriol via comments, phone calls, and e-mails. Although Østebø said, “There is an urgent need for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the rich diversity and the complex dynamics of contemporary Islam," many of his critics found the need to point out to him — the scholar in Islam — that Islam is clearly typified by ISIS and that ISIS is at the core of this world religion.

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood

Unfortunately, these verbal assaults are too often accompanied by physical attacks as well as just last week, a man chased a Muslim American woman into oncoming traffic in Brooklyn while threatening to behead her and her companion. Every time I post an article, like this one, I will undoubtedly receive comments like this from Cowboywill46:

“Once and for all, will someone with a grain of sense admit to the world that Islam is nothing more than a mind-control, anti-social cult bent on world domination. ”

— Cowboywill46

To be fair, Islam is a world religion with a unifying foundation. It may be the Qur’an, or the holy book’s common language — Arabic. The shahada, or profession of faith that “there is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet,” is universal in form — all Muslims confess it, it is what it takes, and means, to be Muslim. Mecca, perhaps, as “the capital of Islam” serves as, in the words of Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, as “[t]he organizing principle of Islamic ritual and imagination.” As such, this Saudi Arabian city is “the defining node for a worldwide community of believers who are linked to the Prophet Muhammad and to Mecca and to one another through networks of faith and family, trade and travel.” Whether knit together by language, profession, text, orienting metropolis, or something else there is a unified, integrated, sense to global Islam and a shared cultural history. To be sure, there are not several, or even two, Islams, but one Islam. 

At the same time, Islam is, in the words of scholar Talal Asad, “a discursive tradition.” There is an ongoing debate, what Reza Aslan calls, “a civil war,” raging over what is orthodox Islam and where the boundary lines of Islam can be drawn. Islam, as a world system, is not static, but is always changing according to the various lines of its own “discursive traditions.” The tone of these various streams of thought about Islam are determined by local realities, Islamic networks, and by external global forces of economics, politics, religion, and culture. 

What do these localizations and various discursive traditions do to Islam’s shared cultural and textual heritage? Local Muslims, sharing in "global Islam," interpret Islam differently according to their socio-cultural, and historical, context. Sometimes accusing the other interpretation or lived religion as not “authentic” or “orthodox” Islam. This is why ISIS, along with killing Yazidis and Christians, also targets Muslims they deem kafir (unbelievers, or apostates) because of their extreme definition of takfir— those who claim Islam but are outside the strict boundaries of Islam that ISIS puts in place. 

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood

Today is the 13th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11. Certainly, it is a somber remembrance and one with potent emotions and visceral reverberations in our cultural psyche. 9/11’s effect on our the U.S.’s interest in Islam has been a double-edged sword. While more solid, scholarly, work has been done on Islam in the U.S. than ever before, we have also been seeking to essentialize Islam in an effort to have manufacture a clearly defined enemy to combat. We want a clash of civilizations — Islam v. the West — but it’s not that simple. Seeking a “clash of civilizations” we usually end up with what Edward Said called, “a clash of ignorance” wherein “unedifying labels” such as “Islam” and the “West,” “mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that.”

So, is Islam to be represented by ISIS? In one sense, yes. ISIS = Islam. However, ISIS ≠ global Islam. ISIS ≠ Islam everywhere. Not every Muslim living in the U.S., in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, or Southeast Asia is a secret jihadi with ties to ISIS, Boko Haram, or al-Qaeda. Instead, ISIS is an expression of Islam in its locality (Syria, Iraq, the Levant) forged out of a combination of contextual concerns, socio-cultural realities, and translocal forces of politics, economics, and religion. As such, it is competing to be the authoritative voice of Islam and, in many ways, wants pundits and cultural commentators to say that ISIS = Islam. 

Yet, to say ISIS = Islam is too simplistic. There are too many other Muslim communities and expressions of glocal (localized forms of the one global faith) Islam throughout the world. Islam is a diverse global faith, which takes on a different form, with varying interpretations of the Qur’an and the tradition of Muhammad where the local Muslim community deals with dissimilar concerns about local realities and contrasting views on religious violence and Westernization. This is why it is unsophisticated to simply posit that ISIS = Islam with no further discussion or clarification. 

After all, many Muslims claim that ISIS Is un-Islamic. Muslims in South Africa who fought for equality of all races after mistreatment and misrepresentation for centuries under Afrikaaner nationalism and apartheid and Muslims in Houston who advocate anti-gang initiatives and are actively engaged in inner-city education programs would not want to be lumped in with ISIS. They are engaged in a struggle, they share the same Islamic faith, but they are not ISIS. As Jaweed Kaleem reported for the Huffington Post, there is widespread disappointment among worldwide Muslims in how ISIS is often equated with Islam in popular media.

Even so, without any right or proper understanding, many will continue to try and declare what Islam is and is not. They will pipe up and declare that “ISIS is Islam” or ignore progressive understandings of Islam by countering, “but doesn’t the Qur’an actually say _______?” What the Qur’an says, not to be crass or offensive to my Muslim friends, is irrelevant. What is more relevant in this discussion is what Muslims say the Qur’an says. What ISIS says about what Islam is or what the Qur’an says is going to be different than a Muslim community in Miami or a Muslim organization in Indonesia. Muslims’ interpretation of their shared holy text is defined by their local context, their historical moment, their transnational networks, socio-cultural realities, and interaction with global forces.

If we are to understand Islam — and ever since 9/11, 7/7, and other terrible terrorist attacks, it is evident that we must in some way endeavor to do so — our shared starting point cannot be solely those groups that engage in terrorism, persecution, and barbarous bombast. Instead, we must approach Islam as a global phenomenon, with a certain sense of interconnectedness and unity. At the same time, we must come to appreciate and pay attention to its various localities as they wrestle with the shared international socio-cultural forces of Westernization, globalization, and transnationalism. 

Does ISIS = Islam? 

Yes, but it’s too superficial of us to say “yes” unequivocally. It has to be a nuanced affirmation, one that appreciates that as much as ISIS is Islam, it is also equally not Islam. In the end, we must listen to Muslims, and their various discourses about orthodoxy, Muslim boundaries, and authenticity, before we can come to any strong conclusions or make any serious political or religious decisions about Islam as a whole based on the actions of the few who take part in the violent actions of ISIS and its counterparts.  

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood

Now writing for The Gainesville Sun

I was honored to write my first piece for The Gainesville Sun, the local newspaper here in "The Swamp" -- Gainesville, FL. 

My first piece focused on the installation of a new parish pastor -- Rev. Marek Dzien -- at St. Augustine Catholic Church. 

READ IT HERE.