Clericalism

State religion

Description

Gaining a significant political role for established religious groups and leadership in political and public affairs.

Context

The drive to social power is characteristic of most religions, especially in time of social change and upheaval. There has been a tendency in reaction to social change for established public religious leadership to legitimate the existing social order in terms of religion, giving it unchanging significance and thus curbing, slowing or defeating forces of change.

Implementation

Active proponents of this strategy tend to come from established religious leadership and sympathetic members of the current or former ruling class in aristocracies or dictatorships. Leaders of the religious establishment through various religious and social organizations become involved and influential in the political sphere. Clericalism involves mustering support for reactionary forces in election by pressuring believers. Religious authority interferes in political issues concerning family, marriage, upbringing of children.

Claim

1. Leadership in all aspects of society must be responsible to maintain stability and established values. 2. Disorder and chaos are morally degenerative. 3. Morality must have a voice in the running of society.

Counter-claim

Clericalism has been a tool of monopoly capital and a force of reaction; weakened by the world revolutionary process; and encountering growing opposition from believers and part of the clergy themselves.