Let’s consider now Christianity and politics. Of course it’s impossible to speak of Christianity as a singular type. Christianity is made of different kinds of Christianity, and I would like to stress the opposition between Roman Christianity and Protestant Christianity, “Reform”. If we take into account the Roman Catholic Church, we observe that this kind of religion is probably the most centralized one, and this very strong centralization has historical, theological and cultural roots that we have to take into account, and which explain the role played by Roman Catholicism in shaping and organizing the world in giving meaning to political relations. Roman Catholic Church is strongly centralized when Protestantism and also Orthodox Christianisty are much more decentralized, and then closer to the nations, when Roman Catholic Church must be considered as a real transnational organization. Roman Catholic Church has to be analyzed as centralized because of this delegation given by Jesus to Peter: ‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church’, this means clearly that church is representing God on the earth, and is benefiting of a real and legitimate delegation. This delegation gives authority to the pope and creates a centralized organization which is considered as the delegation from God. This centralized organization is legitimate for dispensing sacraments, for dispensing salvation and dispensing sacraments and salvation on behalf of God. You can find here the first track of this culture of delegation which is deeply rooted in the Western history. This centralization around the pope, with the successor of Peter, the first pope who was delegated by Jesus, this centrality is probably the first inspiration of the nation state model. This conception of a centralized order around the legitimacy, is probably the background, the cultural background of the nation state. And, in fact we can observe in history that nation state imitated the Roman Catholic Church when it was built at the end of the Middle Age. If you take into account for instance the local administration of the state, it’s a copy of the local administration of the church. If you take into account the judicial institutions of the state, it’s a copy of the judicial institutions of church. If you take into account the conception of sovereignty, pope sovereignty, this conception of pope sovereignty inspired, influenced, the conception of the state sovereignty. If you take into account the tax administration of the state it was also an imitation of the tax administration of the church. There is an affinity, a very strong similarity, imitation between this original conception of religion around the centralized church and this political conception of centralization around the state and the state builders. Now, another aspect of this conception of centrality is the absence of protest, there is, in the centralized church there is no room for protest, and for expressing divergence of opinions. We can understand how it was difficult to combine the theory of democracy with the theory of church, and even pope Jean-Paul II stressed that the theory of democracy has no room inside the church. And that’s why one of the witnesses of the Roman Catholic Church is not to be able to take into account the diversity of opinions and of sensibilities inside the church. If for instance in Latin America Christianity is not conceived in the same manner than in Europe, there is no possibility inside this centralization for making these two opinions coexisting inside the Roman Catholic organization. Third aspect: when so centralized church was created, was built up, there was a strong chance of rivalry with the political power. How to conceive this division of labor between religion and politics, between church and state? And you know that this original rivalry between church and state generated the process of state making. The state, the western state was creating by trying to get emancipated from the tutorship of the pope and of the church. This duality – church and state – is an original feature of the Roman Catholic culture, inside the western world and is explaining the specificity of the western state. I will add also a last point, which is probably strongly connected to the Roman Catholic history, it’s the conception of representation and delegation, that’s to say the creation of the Roman Catholic Church is coming from this famous sentence that I defined in the beginning of my lecture, when I explained that Jesus considered Peter as his representative on the earth, and Jesus, when he said to Peter ‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church’ he meant that political action, political game inside the western world were shaped by this conception of delegation. God delegated his son to the earth and his son Jesus delegated to Peter, and then Peter, as a pope, delegated to the bishop and this pyramid of delegation is probably the main footprint of Christianity on the political order, that’s to say inventing this conception of representation, legitimate representation which is not accepted in other religions like Islam. And one of the reasons of the main differences between Islam and Christianity takes place in this strong opposition between culture of delegation like the roman culture and culture of non delegation as we will see about Islam. Now if we move to Reform, we are observing something quite different. Don’t forget that Reform was created, invented during the 16th century as a protest against church, pope and an excessive centralization. That’s why Reform was first of all a kind of rebellion against centralized power, against delegation, and against the state, as the absolutist state as it was during this period. And this implied something new and so important for renewing the western culture, that’s to say if state is contested, if state is delegitimized, so we have to go back to individuals, and reform is initiating a new kind of relation which is a direct relation between individuals and God, and this direct relation is now organized not by the state but by the law. And this is stressing the new role of culture of law, which is coming from the Reform as it opposed to the culture of the state as it is coming from the Roman Catholic Church. So in this decentralized model we say that there is now a room for differentiation of opinions, for debate, as the protestant church is a decentralized one and so is able to express this diversity, reform is also boosting individualism and takes a central place, for the first time in history, to individual inside the society and inside the political system, a kind of distrust to centralization, central power and state and a kind of valuing civil society against state. Individuals are associated as they are associated in the new decentralized church, and this association is probably the starting point of this culture of civil society which will take place when Reform was really rooted in the mind of people, in the culture of people. And at last I would say this is also initiating a new kind of relations between politics and religion, which are much more combined, as it is the case in the British and in the American culture, which are quite different from the culture of laicity we can observe in the roman culture.
