Rethinking Religion and Politics in a Plural World: The Bahá’í International Community and the United Nations

J ulia Berger’s book, Rethinking Religion and Politics in a Plural World: The Bahá’í International Community and the United Nations (Bloomsbury, 2021), is the first book-length analysis of the Bahá’í International Community’s (BIC) United Nations office. While the Bahá’í Faith is a comparatively small world religion, Berger argues its engagement with the United Nations and other international organizations is worthy of close examination. The first reason she provides is that the Bahá’í Faith is centrally concerned with the task of building a peaceful and prosperous global order, and alongside its growth and development as a community it has also been represented at landmark meetings and processes shaping the emergence of the contemporary United Nations system. A second reason she provides is the benefit of expanding the study of religious NGOs beyond Christian organizations. One of the primary conceptual contributions of Rethinking Religion and Politics is the author’s development and application of the “organizational substrate” as a way of investigating the underlying rationality of a religious non-governmental organization. The political science literature, primarily due to the prevalence of liberal and democratic theory, generally conceptualizes interest groups as organizations that seek to shape policy debates in line with group values or interests. While Berger does not entirely reject this conception, she argues that the “substrate” includes a view of the world that generates a kind of rational agency. What can appear from the outside as interest group behavior may in fact be an organization that is engaged in a process of world-making: acting “as a creative agent of alternative formulations of progress and social order, a partner in the co-creation of the modern world” (p. 11). Berger’s focus on the “substrate” of the BIC is related to her engagement with the category of religion and its relationship to modernity. She frames her book as a contribution to thinking about the “conditions of possibility” for religion in the modern world—or, in other words, how religion can be studied as “a living, organic phenomenon... [rather than] a set of beliefs, rituals and forms of worship” (p. 127). Religion is not reduced or silenced by modernity, Berger asserts; rather, its role in society is one of the generative features of modernity itself. Viewed from this perspective, the study of religious NGOs —such as the BIC—is important because it offers insight into the generation of new concepts and ideas that find expression in collective life, and thereby present alternative futures for humanity’s social and political evolution.