Introduction - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 28

the extent that religion imposes an all-encompassing world of thought
and action upon its members and prevents them from associating with
outsiders or engaging in civic activity, it may be antithetical to civil
society. Religious groups may at other times be more closely aligned with
groups typical of civil society, volunteering their labour and capital to
social work, disaster relief, and education, and engaging along with other
civil society groups in debate on public policy of all kinds.
(Hardacre 2004: 394)

…

Any association, whether religious or not, could be considered within or out-
side the sphere of civil society, depending on the nature of the organisation
and its focus at a given time (Diamond 1999). Casanova (2001: 146) further-
more states that the church only becomes an institution of civil society

when it ceases being a church in the Weberian sense of the term: when it gives
up its monopolistic claims and recognizes religious freedom and freedom of
conscience as universal and inviolable rights

'…

.
At the same time, it is clear that the concept of civil society developed in
part through re

'

ections on the Protestant Reformation, which characterised
the Enlightenment ideal of separation of religion and state. The mixing of the
religious and political community became incompatible with the modern
principles of citizenship as seen through the eyes of the secularisation
thesis. This separation was meant to restrain both state and religion from
dictating orthodoxy of thought, and for both to capitulate to a tolerant and
pluralistic idea of truth (Gellner 1995: 46). A critique of religion became
part of dominant assumptions in theories of modernisation, which viewed
religion as on an inevitable course of demise (see Smith 2008 for a recent
counter-proposal). A process of secularisation and the privatisation and dis-
appearance of religion from most political discourse became a central tenet of
modern liberalism. There was a duality between state and civil society that
emerged out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to become the basis for
Western democratic and liberal institutions characterised by a civil society
guaranteed by the rule of law, civil rights, parliamentary democracies and a market
economy (see Casanova 1994; Herbert 2003 for a critique of the secularisation
thesis).
Such a political system was implemented in Japan after 1945. However
unwanted in many elite, right-wing as well as left-wing corners of post-war
Japan, this saw the beginning of a democratic systemwith new rights for citizens,
which gave rise to Western notions of civil society and freedom of religion.
The now supposedly secular Japanese state saw State Shinto, its previous state
religion or cult, turned into just any other religious denomination. These
modern structural and legal transformations, moreover, meant that religious
sects, deemed

or subversive by the previous Japanese military
establishment, became groups that received protection under the guarantee of
religious freedom. As the thesis of secularisation became the dictum of mod-
ernity in Japan, however,

' heretical '

it also meant that discussion about religion