WHEN the United Nations was created after the second world war, it was "an era of secular international relations and few if any anticipated that religion would ever again be an important international actor." However, as Professor Jeffrey Haynes of London Metropolitan University goes on to show in a recent paper, the end of the cold war ushered in some new planet-wide conversations about "values" and "behaviour" along with cultural and economic globalisation. And that created an opening for "faith-based organisations" of every kind, from religious charities and lobbies to churches to supra-national bodies like the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC).
Once the cold-war logjam was broken, more people remembered the lofty language of the UN charter which speaks of the "economic and social advancement of all peoples"—in other words, bettering the lot of the human race in just about every way. That gave religions a new entree, and the list of religious NGOs which gained a consultative status at the UN grew longer and longer; but to put it mildly, they did not all speak with one voice.
Mr Haynes looks at the UN system (defined broadly to include the World Bank) and faith under three headings. First, sexual and reproductive questions which have been bitterly contentious. Whenever touchstone issues like abortion or homosexuality have been discussed, conservative alliances have sprung up, cutting bizarrely across denominations and faiths. "Campaigns at the UN in pursuit of "family values" bring together Christian actors—Mormons, Catholics, Protestants and the Russian Orthodox Church—as well as conservative Muslims." Moves by Brazil to introduce resolutions in favour of gay rights ran into a wall of opposition ranging from conservative American groups to the governments of Egypt and Pakistan. But liberal religious lobby groups also exist, and they team up with secular liberals.
Second, the paper, part of the ReligioWest series published by the European University Institute considers economic development. It recalls that as president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn (an agnostic himself) hoped that religious bodies, and in particular the World Council of Churches, would act as partners against poverty. But that hope foundered, perhaps because of ideological differences and the lack of enthusiasm at the top of the bank. On the other hand, when help of a more targeted kind was needed, things worked better. The UN Development Programme worked successfully with Christian and Muslim leaders to combat AIDS in the Middle East.
Thirdly, the paper looks at the campaign by Islamic countries to establish, through a series of UN votes, the principle that the "defamation of religion" amounted to a violation of human rights which should be outlawed. This campaign horrified most Western governments, as well as secular-humanist and Christian lobby groups; it seemed to validate the "blasphemy laws" which are enforced with extreme harshness in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The campaign was dropped in 2011 after some careful US-led diplomacy; the State Department agreed to support language that denounced discrimination and violence against religious believers, in return for the dropping of the defamation-word.
As the paper shows, the UN has retained a secularist jargon and ethos, so that even religious bodies have to use secularist language when they make arguments on the East River. They speak of "family values"—not of serving God. You might say that one of the purposes of secularism is to provide a language in which people of very different metaphysical views can communicate, and it served that purpose in the early years of the UN, even though some of its pioneering heroes, like the Swedish Lutheran Dag Hammarskjold (pictured), were deeply religious people. In the "post-secular" age where some forms of religion are on the rise again, nobody knows what the common language will be.