Religious organisations within civil society
ly in the role they can play within the field of social care and welfare. In the Dutch situation, this increased role is obvious through the fact that religious organisations are invited to fulfill a social and political role to minimise social problems and to work for improvement of the social environment. This article is based on literature research and discusses the theological pros and cons for taking on such a social and/or political role. It will discuss the English theologian O’Donovan and the way he offers inspiration to religious organisations as they try to find an appropriate attitude within civil society. The focus will be on Christian churches, though the arguments brought forward are also partly valid for other religious organisations. Legislative changes in the Netherlands Since 2007, the Dutch government has made major changes in its social legislation; the establishment of the Social Support Act is an important part of this. The Act implies a huge shift within the whole system of social care and welfare. One of the most interesting changes is the fact that the national and local governments are no longer the primary responsible parties when people are in need. This responsibility is instead shifted towards people’s natural social network, such as family, friends, neighbours or church people. Only if this network is not able to help in solving the problem(s), the government will step in.
The Church's Religious Identity and Its Social and Political Mission
THE MISSION of the Church is at the center of much contemporary theology. One basic theological issue is the relation between the Church's mission and its religious identity. How does any activity or ministry relate to the Church's religious identity? Unless its ministry expresses this identity, the Church fails to be church. The recent loss of membership within American churches has been attributed to their focusing on social issues rather than on their religious message. This essay will explore the specific issue, how the Church's political and social mission relates to its religious identity. First, it will raise the basic theological issue by analyzing distinct interpretations of the relation between religious identity and social or political ministry. Second, it will offer hermeneutical reflections on an adequate methodology and will propose how the interpretative nature of religion and the Wisdom development of Christology can provide a basis and guideline for elaborating the Church's Christian religious identity in relation to a social ministry. Third, without touching on the complex relations between morality and legality, church and state, policy and strategy, it will point to the basic correlation between the Church's tradition of a social mission and its political mission.
On Fascist Ideology
Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a modern political ideology was northern Italy, the year was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement was born on the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. The fact that fascism was born as a concept before its explicit birth as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment.4 This tradition was both European and, in the Latin American case, “non-European” as well. To be sure, the original ideology behind fascism was born as a reaction to the progressive European revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s). Fascism represented a post-revolutionary attack against equality. The ideology of the anti-Enlightenment is the major root of the longstanding ideological tradition that created fascism. Its branches constituted a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. And yet fascism did not oppose the market economy and put forward a corporatist organization that aimed to be functional to capitalist accumulation. Equally important, fascism is a philosophy of political action that ascribes value to absolute violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the