PENTECOST 2007 SPECIAL EDITION

ISSUE 10 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Dialectical Interaction of Religion abd Society: “A Dialogue with François Houtart”

Jerome Sahabandhu

Abstract:

This report has been the fruit of the interviews that I carried out as part of my ongoing Houtart Research. This is the second and the last of the series of interviews that I have conducted with Prof. François Houtart of Louvain. This was aimed at further developing of François Houtart’s intellectual genealogy plus his exposition of dialectical interaction of religion and society. The questions were also targeted in such a way the interviews would give substantial consideration to praxis and social ethics. This report facilitates us to revisit Marx, Weber and Durkheim and invite for a rethinking process on Houtart’s defence of Marxism as we engage in theological reflection and social praxis. Houtart’s affirmation of social commitment is part of Christian commitment plus his emphasis on the need to study religion as a social agent is central in the pages. Topics covered invite post-moderns, post-colonials and post-capitalists for a healthy debate.

Interview with Professor François Houtart, 16-20th  February 2006, at Louvain University conducted by Jerome Sahabandhu:

JS:  Could you describe your recent work based on your visits to the Social Forum in Africa?

FH:  Well, this year (2006) the World Forum was decentralized.  One Forum was held in Bamako, Mali, one in Caracas and the other in Karachi.  So that was a very important one for Africa, because it was the first time that a World Forum had taken place there.  They had already had two or three African Forums and one also in Bamako, but it was the first time that it was a World Forum.  There were about 15,000 and 20,000 attendees, mostly from Africa.  It really meant something for the Africans to be introduced at a global dimension.  The majority of those who came were from Mali and other parts of Western Africa, which is French speaking.  But there were also some from Central Africa and from East Africa. The World Forum will take place in Kenya[1] next year.

On the day before the Forum, Samir Amin, Rémy Herrera (a Professor of Economics at the University of Paris) and I organized a meeting.  We represented four organizations, the World Forum for Alternatives, of which I am the Secretary and Samir Amin the President, The Third World Forum of Dakar of which Samir Amin is the President, the Malian Social Forum and ENDA, an NGO that is very active in Africa.  This one-day meeting included about 100 people from all over the world, from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe and North America. There were two reasons for this: to reflect on the issue of how to move from a collective consciousness, which is really the work of the Forum, to collective actors.  The second aspect was to be more radical, coming from the perspective that capitalism should be changed and not just adapted. The present position must be radically anti-imperialist, especially against the military imperialism of the United States, and also against the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is an instrument of imperialism.  

The occasion also marked the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Conference.  So the idea was to make something outside the Forum but linked; outside, because it is not the task of the Forum to propose action, and also to publish a document.  The Forum must remain a meeting point, but not a place of action.  Two reasons exist for this, one very practical, which is that you could never come to a full agreement on a democratic basis with 4,000 organizations and with 20,000-100,000 people.  The second is ideological, since within the Forum you have people who occupy a reformist kind of position and think that you can humanize capitalism, while others think that you have to abolish capitalism, knowing that it’s a long-term process.  So it’s difficult to come to agreements on long-term proposals and thus the Forum is not the place for documents and decisions.   However, the Forum doesn’t want to become the Fifth International; there is a danger that it would become just a social Woodstock. 

So the problem is that the Forum should, of course, be an occasion to create collective actors.  There are already some initiatives in this regard. The assembly of social movements within the Forums always produces a document with some conclusions, proposing common actions or campaigns.  And so that is a very good thing.  But they say very clearly that it is not a document or the proposal representing the Forum itself.  It is a group of social movements agreeing together and proposing to all the others to join, which is a very good formula.  They were the ones who made the proposal in 2003 for a joint demonstration against the war in Iraq, which had the interesting result that in more than 600 cities in the world, with more than 15-16 million people in the streets, there was a big demonstration against war in Iraq.  But we thought that according to the general demand it was necessary to go further regarding the main issues of the Forum and what could be strategies for action.  So we organised this day, a study day.  We divided the group into 10 different commissions, on 10 main issues.  I will give you the document[2]. It exists in English and is called the Bamako Appeal.  We worked on it collectively. I wrote the introduction to the document, and then we worked in different commissions, each of which has come out with a report.  The Appeal of Bamako is a document with about 15 pages, giving a bit of a synthesis of what we think about the main lines of action against war and militarism, against the World Trade Organization and its logic. This also addresses issues of peasant agriculture, water, gender issues, etc.  There were 10 different issues on which there were some proposals for action, not yet very advanced, but  with the idea that next year we could meet again, see what has been done, and during the year try to work on the different 10 points to try to come to a more concrete strategy and purpose.  I think it is a step forward, in the sense that it contributes to the idea that we should continue with the Forum. It has been stated very clearly that it is absolutely necessary to develop a collective consciousness, because it’s not just a thinking process - collective actors is a new step.  This step is necessary because the reality of globalisation means that the law of capitalism is affecting all social groups in the world.  And that’s why we have to come together.  Because we all have discovered that we have the same enemy.

Of course the resistance against capitalism is not new. It has been happening for a long time…. since the beginning of capitalism.  But what is new is the convergence of all those groups or movements which had nothing in common before….women’s movements and peasant movements, workers’ movements, indigenous people’s movements, ethnic minorities, ecologists, etc. All coming together.  But the fact that they are coming together means that they are beginning to understand that they have the same enemy and that the causes are really rooted in the type of economic and political system which is dominating the world now.  So the question is how to come to this step of having collective actors, in order to build a new historical subject. Why a new historical subject? Because the main historical subject of the 19th century in the opposition to capitalism was the working class and the organizations of the working class, but today it is more than that because through the neo-liberal process of globalization now every human group is affected one way or another.  And the new subject is not only the working class.  The working class has a role to play, but always with others.  So we have to come to a definition of a new historical subject.  And that requires thinking, but also practice.  It’s not only a matter of thinking and theory.

JS: Could you explain the relation between theory and praxis in the process of the Bamako appeal?

FH: During the group discussions for the Bamako Appeal, it was very difficult to negotiate this relationship because most of the people there were intellectuals.  And the danger with intellectuals is that they begin to discuss very interesting things but in a more theoretical way.  I noticed how difficult it is for them to develop strategies.  They raise the problem very well.  They describe the problem very well.  But the question is, but what do we do with all that and with what strategy? So, I must say that the Bamako Appeal does not go very far in the way of actions and strategies.  But, anyway, it’s a first step. 

Now to create a new historical subject you must have a coherent project.  And that is another challenge. What is that coherent project? You cannot just think that the accumulation of all the alternatives proposed will result in the creation of a project.  At the same time this collective project should not come from heaven, or just from a group of enlightened intellectuals.  It is something that must be produced in the action itself by the people in collaboration with engaged intellectuals, who can provide the tools as well as some coherent framework for the interrogation of reality.   So that is another challenge: how to come to a common multi-polar project that will always be open to change and redefinition.  To answer that question we have to think about what kind of society we want to build.  Because you cannot build a new historical subject if you don’t know what it is for.  This is related to something I have often said about the role of the intellectuals, which is that in order to be credible you must be committed and if you are not critical, you are not useful.

So this is a critical approach to reality and also to social movements and political issues, etc.  The challenges sometimes inherent in taking such an approach were apparent during the last Forum.  The presence of intellectuals was very much resented by some of the people from the social movements, who saw the intellectuals as people who had good ideas but who tried to impose those ideas on social movements, leaving a little bit the impression that they thought they had superior knowledge to those who formed the base of the social movements.  I had to fight among my intellectual friends to avoid that.  Because even though they held no bad will, their way of expressing themselves and presenting things was not particularly diplomatic in relation to social activists.  And so my role was to make a link between the two knowledge bases.

JS:  Last time when we spoke I was trying to reconstruct the biographical aspect of your story. When I think of your intellectual development, it seems to me that ecclesiology was very important in your early social thought.  Can you comment on the evolution of your own understanding of the relationship between Church and society?

FH: I would say during the time surrounding Vatican II, we had such hope that a fundamental transformation would happen. We were thinking, perhaps a little too naively, that the institutional Church as a world institution would be able to exercise more moral power than it had in the past. We were thinking that with Gaudium et Spes and with the whole work of the Council, we would have a more prophetic Church and, in a sense, more radical; not only speaking for justice in an abstract way, but committing itself in a very concrete way.  And we were, of course, disappointed by the outcome, because it was perhaps too optimistic a dream. 

After the Council, even with Pope Paul VI and especially after that with John Paul II, a real work of restoration of the old Church was made, a little bit out of fear of the consequences of the Vatican II Council.  And based on the fact that the Vatican II Council did not fundamentally challenge the main centralized structure of the Church, this centralized structure very rapidly took over again.  Practically, this very much limited the whole perspective of the Council in the sense of this aspect of ecclesiology, meaning the relationship between the Church as an institution and the world… and society.  So I have given less attention to that in my more recent work, for practical reasons, but also for more theoretical reasons. 

On the practical side, I felt we had spent so much time and energy with the Vatican II Council to try to change the structure of the Church in order to have another Church, and we saw that the result was quite negative.  So I am not ready to spend more of my time just fighting against or within such a structure, knowing that it is perhaps a very long-term project; but I don’t abandon this idea completely, because otherwise I would just leave the Church. The main point of a certain vision of ecclesiology was to fight within society.  But I do that as a Christian, rather than representing the Church as an institution in an official capacity, because I think that if I were to do the latter I would be very rapidly disqualified.  In any case, the fact that I am a priest and that everybody knows that, and that I have taken up a certain type of position and that I am working in certain places, for me perhaps also has a certain ecclesiological meaning. Because for me social commitment is part of Christian commitment! But appearing as a member of the hierarchy of the Church, no; rather I am just one of the people struggling in the field of international justice work, international issues or local issues and showing that it is possible for a Christian and a member of the Church to be there, and that’s all.  But I think that that has a certain ecclesiological meaning because it is perhaps trying to realize what another vision of the Church could be, without pretension. 

Some of my friends became Anglicans.  But I thought it useless, because if you come from one structure and you go to another one it does not have very much meaning.  I would not mind joining another church if witness could be given more specifically in reference to the values of the Gospel.  But because I am a sociologist I am aware enough of what institutions are.  I know the institutions are necessary but I know also that when all institutions begin to be organized, they begin to contradict the values that they are supposed to fight for. That is a problem of all institutions.  We know that is true.

So for a Christian institution or religious institution the whole problem is how to fight against that, because it is not a kind of absolute condition, it is a social fact on which we can work.  It is possible to avoid that the institution becomes really the aim in itself rather than an instrument to bring certain values to human community and to society.  So that is a little bit the evolution of my position. 

I know that some of my good friends, who were also very active in the Council, were so disappointed after the Council that they joined the charismatic movements.  Because they thought that there was something that could give immediate results.  So they went down that path, but I cannot. I think that it errs too much on the side of the emotional, though I do think that in the Catholic Church and also some of the Protestant churches, even more sometimes, rationality has been so prevalent that all the emotional aspect has disappeared. That is why you have the reaction of the emotional church going in the completely opposite direction.

But myself, no, I think that the systems and institutions are necessary, that a certain rationality is also in the theology and in the practice of the sacraments, etc. A more emotional aspect than we had in traditional churches is probably also necessary.  But in the end that is not the main point.  The main point is to transmit values and, in my field, because of the fact that I have studied the social sciences, this has to do with values to be transmitted in society. 

JS: And how do you relate to liberation theology and Third World theologies?  What is your reaction or your response to these?

FH:     Yes.  Well…Liberation theology is precisely the theology and theological thinking which, like someone said, is not asking itself if God exists, but where he is.  So the main question is: in what kind of society do we live?  What is the meaning of the love of God in a society which is so unequal and unjust and where so much injustice exists? The problem of the theology of liberation is to see precisely where social groups are struggling for justice, which is one of the main values of the kingdom, and to have a theological reading of those events.  And so, in this sense, yes, this kind of ecclesiology that I have described is very much related to the history of the theology of liberation and Third World theologies. 

JS: But, even though you have expressed your disappointment concerning Gaudium et Spes in relation to the institutional Church, you have maintained the position that for the Church social science is very important and for social ethics, social analysis is very important.  Can you comment on this?

FH:     Yes, exactly, exactly. Yes, for me that remains absolutely fundamental, that social commitment is the way of expressing the values of the Kingdom. And social ethics, of course, is one of the specific tasks of religious institutions, but cannot be expressed except through analysis of society.  How can you make a judgment on society if you don’t know how the society is built and which are the mechanisms building unequal relations?  Otherwise you just condemn the effects, but you never go to the cause.  And that is what I always reproach, that is my criticism of the social doctrine of Christian churches (Vatican and WCC).  But it is the same with other religions.  With religions like Hinduism or Buddhism, social ethics are less developed because it is more recently that they were confronted with the capitalist system.  But yes, the weakness is the fact that, like I said before, the social doctrine of the Christian churches is based on a hidden type of analysis.  It’s only recognized in terms of stratification, social stratification, and not in terms of social classes.  On the contrary, liberation theology, at least a great deal of it, has accepted the mediation of an analysis, which is a class analysis, and that means that ethics is taking on a very different aspect. If you just describe the effects, well, okay, that’s good.  But if you don’t study the way those effects are produced, then you come to a position where you don’t say anything about the causes.  That is really the weakness of the Christian social teachings…. with a few exceptions.  In the main documents of the Holy See, for example, the Encyclicals, you don’t find very much around the causes of the problem.  Because they are afraid of other things: the mediation of social science, because they think if they go that far they would have to adopt a Marxist analysis.  And because of the amalgam between atheism and Marxism, immediately the reaction is to condemn the people using Marxist analysis saying it is linked with an atheist movement and if you use those instruments you will become atheist yourself, which is false argumentation. 

But for the social doctrine and the definition of the ethics, this is extremely important.  So liberation theology adopts more a class analysis in the sense of the fact that society is not just a superposition of social strata, but it is a structure.  And if you have people at the top, it is because you have people at the bottom. 

JS:  In today’s context where we talk about the globalization of capital and the alternatives, in that kind of context, what proposals do you have for the local Church as well as the global Church, when you talk about the mission of the Church today?

FH:  Yes.  Well, I think, of course, that the world Church exists only through the local churches.  So in this sense the role of the local church is absolutely basic.  The problem with local churches, like local action in any kind of field, is precisely that it is confined to the local.  And sometimes it is difficult for the local church, if we speak about social doctrine, to understand some of the mechanisms which are perhaps having some effect on the local church but which have a very considerable longer complex chain of causes.  And so, if we speak about local churches we must also see the link with global reality.  Because it is no longer on a local level that all the problems can be analysed and solved.   But at the same time it is dialectical situation.  It is a perpetual interchange between these two dimensions of ecclesiology.  And the two dimensions can become complementary.

The role of the global Church at this time is precisely to give to the local churches some instruments of thinking.  And that’s why it is important to have also the mediation of a certain type of analysis, knowing that it is, of course, not absolute.  It was never in the revelation, a method of analysis.  And that is one of the reasons why there is such opposition, especially in the Catholic Church, against the use of those social analysis tools.  Because they have to recognise the mediation of something other than the hierarchy and the authority and to accept that there is a relative element in the making of social ethics, because you depend on analysis and your analysis may evolve.  So it is a relative aspect.  Ethics is not only the things coming from above, from the revelation, that you have just to give and to apply.  No, it is something that is built within.  And, of course, accepting the role of revelation and accepting the role of a Church, which is not only the local one.  So it is an exchange between both dimensions. 

JS:  The last time[3], we reflected a little bit on how theological education should take a kind of social ethics approach.  You are seriously proposing this because it is important to prepare for the new generation of Christian thinkers, both priests and the laity, for the kind of thinking we are talking about now.  Can you elaborate a little bit on how theological education should take this kind of approach seriously in the future?

FH:     Yes, I think that this precisely is a very central issue now and I have seen that in many places in the world.  As a reaction perhaps against the territory of liberation and some other things like that, the accent in the formation of priests and perhaps pastors also in the Christian churches, has been very much oriented towards internal Church questions and has very little to do with a more prophetic kind of position.  We in the Catholic Church are now, I think, producing a new clergy all over the world that is extremely conservative.  And sometimes it is the same thing in higher education.  I saw a professor recently who was telling me that the problem of the students now is that they don’t challenge what the professor says.  And he said, “Sometimes I say to my students, ‘well what a funny situation, you know, I am the rebel and you are the conservative.’”  Well, this general conservative movement is also present in the seminaries all over, and even in Latin America.  Priests want to go back to their normal collar and the cassock, to return to a visible institution with respectability and with high status, etc. But what I fear is that there will be many losses among them.   Many will leave the priesthood before long, because it’s not a solid base.

JS:     Do you have any knowledge of some of the theological education institutions who take this approach seriously, maybe in South America or in Asia?

FH:     Yes, there are some.  And strangely enough, you see in the theology of liberation and this kind of thinking cannot be exercised anymore within the institution of the Catholic Church, because it is forbidden to speak about that in Latin America, in the seminaries and the faculties of theology, except those that are more autonomous from Rome.  But otherwise the control is enormous.  So what is happening is that this type of thinking is now in some specific centres, which are ecumenical.  That is a good status for them because they don’t depend from any church.  But that gives more liberty, which also exists in secular universities.  Leonardo Boff is now Professor of Ethics at the University of Rio de Janeiro, but it’s a secular university.   An exemplary centre is DEI in Costa Rica, DEI, that is Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, Department of Ecumenical Research.  They are training people in pastoral work of any kind…Catholics but also Protestants, because it is ecumenical.  And it is aligned with liberation theology, adapted to all the new problems.  That is a very interesting place.  Interestingly enough they are supported by different sources…. some Catholic sources, some Protestant sources, but also by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany which is a foundation of the former Communist Party.  And they were intelligent enough to understand that the Christian dimension in social commitment is important in Latin America.  So they are supporting that also.  It’s very interesting.  And they have a good reception among non-Christian people and intellectuals in Latin America. 

Another point of importance in Latin America is the Faculty of Theology of the Jesuit University of San Salvador.  Some members there have been killed by the military regime. But, happily, a very good theologian, Jon Sobrino, is still working and teaching there, and I sometimes participate in some of his courses, if possible.  So there are still places independent from the direct control of Rome.  In Asia, I don’t know enough, but there is the theology faculty of the Jesuits in Delhi[4] and also Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary.

JS: How do you understand your movement from the church and society discourse or religious sociology to kind of professional sociology of religion?   How do you theologically justify your move from that kind of approach to professional sociology of religion? 

FH:     Yes.  Well because I think that sociology of religion is a discipline in itself.  We had discussions here at the university and the Director of the university, when he was a priest, always told me that sociology of religion in a Catholic university should be in the Faculty of Theology, because it must be in service to the Church.  I always defended another point of view, saying, no, it is a discipline.  It has been and still is a discipline in the field of sociology.  It can be useful for the Church, but it cannot be just an instrument for Church activities.  And there was a big fight, and I lost finally, because they closed my Institute the day that I retired. They closed the Institute, which had worked during 25 years on various continents for two reasons: first, this idea that sociology of religion should be in the direct service of the Church.  And second, because, of course, they did not like my form of sociology of religion.  I don’t deny the applied function of sociology.  Sociology has an applied function in society, of course.  But in order to exercise this role it should be independent from any kind of institutional control.  So this is a condition of its usefulness.  That is why I try to develop as much as possible some fundamental of thinking in sociology of religion using, of course, first a Weberian approach, but after that a Marxist approach.  I think it is an essential condition to be useful for applied purposes. 

JS: If I may ask, what are the basic concepts involved in your Weberian stage and the Marxist stage?  What are the basic concepts you have used in your own sociological approach?

FH:     The Weberian approach was, as a matter of fact, an anti-Marxist approach, historically speaking.  Of course, Weber was a giant from the point of view of sociological thinking.  I don’t deny that.  But his whole approach in sociology and also in sociology of religion has been against Marx.  In a certain way he has complemented the Marxist approach.  But in another way he was fundamentally against it.  And in a certain way he has been one of the inspirations of Fascism…. not intentionally at all, of course. Not at all.  But in some of his thinking. …well, because of the centralist approach to a certain extent, you see. 

In one of his major books, Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is extremely interesting and is based on empirical material, there is one question that Weber does not ask except in one very small phrase.  Where do Protestant ethics come from?  He does not develop that.  Because it does not come from heaven.  It was born within an urban merchant bourgeoisie that developed an ethics in the religious field according to their own situation and interest, in order to fight against a social ethics of Catholicism that was linked with the medieval structures of land and landlordism, etc. That’s why Protestant ethics developed and why it was functional for capitalism also.  But Weber starts with the existence of Protestant ethics just as if it was almost an act of God. 

What Marx would develop is this - the origin of Protestant ethics.  And that’s why when I wrote my thesis[5], I began with a theoretical approach which is Weberian in the book but I finally ended up using more the concepts of Marxist analysis, trying always to ask which ways human groups organize their material life. 

This is not to take the simplistic approach that religion is just a fruit of material life; no, it is much more complex.  Rather, it is to say that if you don’t look into the connection between the two elements, you will never have the final explanation.  So I use the concepts of Marx, seeing the economic factors in the last instance, and not as a dogma, but as a tool to interrogate reality.  Because what we have to see as sociologists is that reality does not speak by itself; you have to interrogate reality and, therefore, you must have theoretical tools.  When I was using the theoretical tools of Weber, especially for the analysis of the pre-capitalist society in Sri Lanka, I finally came to the conclusion that with a Marxist approach I could go much further towards an explanation and understanding.  So that was the way of transforming the perspective.

JS:     Yes.  You said Weber raised the issue of culture.

FH:     Yes.

JS:     This issue of culture certainly has some relevance when we think about today’s context.  Can you comment on that?

FH:     Yes, of course.  The Marxist approach was developed in the 19th century and the approach of the 20th century has been extremely reductive, basing itself only on the existing books on capital, thus reducing the Marxist vision to a purely economic perspective.  And generally people ignore two main works.  One is called the Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society.  And the other one is the Grundrisse, a very important contribution of Marx, which was published for the first time in the 30s, and was ignored by most of the Marxists, especially those linked with the Communist parties. In the Grundrisse, Marx analyzes pre-capitalist societies and the importance of cultural aspects is only partially developed, but is not ignored.  But it has been ignored by many Marxists reducing the Marxist approach to a rather economic type of approach.  So the element of culture to which Weber brought more attention is, of course, a very central one.  But my position is to say that within a Marxist approach you can include that element.  It is not excluded at all.   But it is true that in the Marxist literature it has been neglected. 

Now with the events of May ’68 in France and in the whole world, especially among students, the importance of culture was brought to the forefront, because it was a kind of cultural revolution, which failed to a certain extent because it did not change the political structures and social structures, but which has had a tremendous influence over the last 30 or 40 years.  So the aspect of culture and the role of culture in society is a very important one.  And in the Social Forum, for example, it is also emerging, sometimes aggressively, against what they call the old social movements linked with material reinvestigation, like the trade unions, etc. It is also an issue with the so-called new social movements where values are not exclusively economic.

There is a certain evolution in this aspect.  But to say that it is not possible to analyze that within a Marxist framework is wrong; that’s what I deny.  Of course, it does not include itself in the sense of culturalism.  That means thinking that culture is the main element to transform society and that culture is what is fundamental in building societies.  No, but like Maurice Godelier, who is a Marxist anthropologist who wrote a very interesting book called The Ideal Part of Reality, I say that the cultural aspects are extremely important in the construction of social relations.  And that’s why also religion may be able to play a role - like Buddhism in Sri Lankan society[6].  In Sri Lankan society it has played a very fundamental role in shaping the whole culture and also, of course, the cultural aspect of constructing the political field, but also the economic field.  So there is a dialectical function, but where I think again - and this is what Max Weber refused to see - that finally we can explain the role that all the elements are playing only if you finally ask yourself how they organise themselves to produce their own means of existence.  Because that will be very important conditioning factor for the role that culture will play in the building of society.  Not to say that this excludes the place of culture or not to say that it is an absolute determinant. 

You see, it opens like a fan of opportunities.  It is not determining a certain type of role that culture will play, but at least it defines what the role of culture can and cannot be.  And that is conditioned by the fact that you have an agricultural society or an industrial society that you produce with the law or value of capitalism, or that you are in a tribal society.  The same thing holds for the exercise of power, because that is also what Max Weber raised: the whole problem of power and the exercise of power and the role of the state, etc.  Of course, Marx spoke a great deal about the state.  But Max Weber went further in the analysis of the state and of power.  But the exercise of power is conditioned also by the material basis.  Because in industrialized developed society you can have a parliament, but you don’t have a parliament in a tribal society.  So the forms that power takes are conditioned by the type or the mode of production.  So you see the relation between the different elements of society.

JS:     In this context, it seems relevant to raise the issue of the ideological function of religion.

FH:     Well, first I think we have to be very clear about what ideology is. Because, of course, this word is used differently and bears many different meanings.  And for me, from a sociological point of view, ideology is the explanation and justification for social relations.  Explanation and justification: justification is the ethical aspect; explanation is the rational aspect, of social relations, which may be social relations of production, of power, or even of gender.  So in a specific society how do you explain social relations?  How do you justify them?  That is ideology.  Now in certain societies religion is the main ideology, because, to a certain extent, it provides an explanation and, to a greater extent, supplies the ethical aspect of the symbolic representation.  And so we have to try to see in which conditions religion is serving an ideological purpose and in which conditions it is not.  That is the thing.  And then again you cannot define that just by studying religion.  You have to study the whole.  And you have to study how social relations of production are explained and justified.  For example, the Catholic social doctrine before the French Revolution, well, the justification of the main social relationships, which were rural, is that God created earth, and that the landlords were indicated by God to be the owners of the land.  The King is the ultimate owner of the land and it is he who is the owner of the land and King of the country by the grace of God or by the will of God.  So there religion was the ideology.  And that’s why also Protestantism came into being, as a protest against that kind of ideology.  Because they were then living in another kind of society where the real power was held not the landlord but by the merchant. 

What I developed very much is the whole study of religion in the tributary societies.  I’ve changed a little bit since my study of Sri Lanka.  I hope to publish my new book on this soon.

But as to the tributary society in the second phase, the power of the King and the absorption of the surplus produced by people are such that you need another justification.  It is no longer the exchange of the tributary society, between the villagers and the King.  It is so much centralized power, prestige, goods, that you must build another justification.  And immediately the other justification is religious.  And then you transform Buddhism or you transform Christianity or Islam, transform any kind of religion in a justification for the social, economic and political relations.

JS:     A question coming to my mind is that, in that sense, is religion a neutral phenomenon?

FH:     Well, no, it is never neutral.  Because neutrality does not exist from the cultural point of view, ideological point of view, or religious point of view within society.  It’s never neutral.  You can only use the concept neutral if you just don’t want to see reality.  Then you see it as neutral.  It is never neutral.  It has always a certain type of meaning within society.  And the whole problem is to analyze what kind of meaning.  But in this sense you can see that religion can be used for any kind of purpose.  And it’s true.  Because it can be used in a conservative way.  It can be used in a progressive way.  So in this sense you cannot say that it’s neutral.  I don’t like the word neutral because it suggests that neutrality exists, but neutrality does not exist.  So that when they pretend to be neutral, they are refusing to see the reality. That is a problem.  But religion is multi-functional, yes.

JS:     So, it is on this basis that you argue religion can be infrastructure for social revolution, social transformation[7]?

FH:     Yes.   Exactly.  And that’s why when I gave a course in Cuba in ’86 to about 30 intellectuals, Marxist philosophers generally, teachers in the main universities and schools also the army. They asked me to give a course on sociology of religion in a two-week intensive course.  In the course I asked, “Well, what is the Marxist approach?”   The Marxist approach is to study and analyze societies. So about religion, we cannot just start from the affirmation that religion is the opiate of the people.  The reason they asked me to give this course was that the Cuban intellectuals had discovered the commitments of Christians to the revolutionary movements of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala; they discovered the theology of liberation.  In view of this, they asked themselves how they affirm as dogma that religion was the opiate of the people when they experienced the contrary.  So after a few years of discussion they finally convinced the central committee of the Communist Party of Cuba to help to organize that course.  During the course I looked at a variety of society and analyzed the role of religion in each such society.   The conclusion was that, in some cases religion is the opiate of the people.  In some cases it is just the opposite: motivation for commitment to social change.  So it is not a matter of dogma; it is a matter of fact. The Marxist approach should not be dogmatic.   

And the next year the session of the Congress of the Communist Party abolished the texts that said that no believer could be a member of the Communist Party, because they understood that that was not the problem.  And, of course, it was very easy to recall some of the writings of Marx when there was a discussion between Marx and the people following Feuerbach, a German philosopher, known as the radical atheists, who claimed that you could not be a socialist if you were not an atheist.  Marx wrote to them saying that they were foolish, that they still had theological thinking, but in reverse.  And Marx says, “I am not interested in the fact that you are or not atheist.  I am interested in changing society.”  It was very interesting that he was himself a critic of this.

I went to Moscow many times and once I had a meeting in the Institute of Scientific Atheism in Moscow.  That was…well, it was incredible, because, of course, they had developed this whole idea that atheism was scientific.  And, of course, religion was not scientific so finally they made of atheism the new state religion.  This has been a very great obstacle to socialism.  Now, of course, most of the Communist parties have abandoned this idea.  But in the Soviet Union it was terrible.  In ’86 there was the beginning of the reaction in Cuba against Soviet ideology.  And they had begun to transform.  I saw the manuals they were using at that time….I saw also the school books, which were translated from Russian.  It was awful and simplistic and Cubans, who have a great culture, were almost ashamed that they were using those things.

Let us go back to religion in Russia. In Russia, religion was considered the opiate of the people.  The Communists had to fight against religion because religion was the ideology of the previous system. But, this must be considered within the framework of an empirical research.  In Russia it was terrible, because the orthodoxy was completely linked with the power of the Empire and with the landlords, like in Europe in the Middle Ages.   So it is true the revolutions had to fight against the religious institutions.  But, of course, they went too far when they considered that religion was, philosophically speaking, the opiate of the people. So they institutionalized a specific situation and developed their whole thinking around that.  By institutionalising their dogma, they behaved in the same way as the Church.

But then the price that they have to pay is what is happening now in Russia, where, of course, religion has not disappeared and now the Church as an institution is trying to recuperate all the power they had before.  They are building hundreds of churches all over Russia they have rebuilt the Cathedral in Moscow and priests are everywhere. 

JS:     I understand that in your approach to sociology of religion every religion’s language is expressed in a social context.  This is something we have been talking about throughout our conversations.  Could you kindly elaborate a little bit on that?

FH:     Yes.  Well, from a sociological point of view we can define religion as a part of culture that makes reference to a supernatural reality.  And, of course, the sociologist does not have to define what a supernatural reality is, because that is outside of his field.   But he can observe that people or groups of people are making reference to a supernatural reality and that they orientate their behaviour in function of that.  So in this sense, the sociological approach to religion is studying the collective behaviour of people making reference to a supernatural reality and that of course can only happen within the context of their social existence.  What does that mean?  That means that they will use a language for example, a language that is a social and cultural construction, and they cannot do anything else than to use that to express their belief or the way that they want to relate to the supernatural reality in which they believe.  So, in this sense, all discourses about God are always expressed in a specific cultural context.  That is a fundamental idea.

Now this is true not only for language. It is true also for gestures, for symbols….if in the Catholic religion or in Christian religion we have the symbol of bread and wine, it is because Jesus was living in the context of a society where bread was the main basis of life and wine was a normal drink of that time.  I remember a discussion in South Korea where some Christians were asking themselves if they should not use rice and a local drink.  So that means that every religious language, even the theological language, is always conditioned by the social and cultural construction of its social environment.  And, like I said, it is not only the language; it is also the whole expression in gestures, liturgy, behaviour and the whole symbolism.  That’s why also it is sometimes so difficult to understand from one religion to another what the meaning of the symbols is, because the meaning of symbols is a social reality, depending on the construction of the culture in which this religious expression is taking place. 

JS:     In your opinion, what new challenges should the sociology of religion as a discipline take into serious consideration?

FH:     Well, there are several.  For example, in all western society it is a fact that the religious phenomenon of life has taken on a new dimension.  You see, for example, the fact of what is called secularization.  Secularization in the sense of separation between state and religion, but not in the sense that religion has no meaning in life.  But also especially after ’68, which was a basic cultural crisis in western society, religious practice no longer has the same meaning.  And you see a very great disaffection about, for example, the Sunday mass, even some of the sacraments, by people who are not necessarily non-religious.  But it is no longer the way of necessarily expressing a certain religious belief.  That was a fact for the working class in Western Europe and I would say especially the Latin part of Europe, where the working class was still religious, but expressing its religion through religious practices.  Institutionalized practice in the Catholic Church was completely out of the question, because that was related with the bourgeois culture. 

Today even the bourgeois culture has lost this and all the churches are empty.  So that is a challenge, to try to study this phenomenon.  What does it mean?  On the other side we have another phenomenon, the fact that the institution is becoming more and more conservative.  And that the new clergy, not only in Europe, but also in Latin America, even in Asia, the new Catholic clergy at least, is more and more conservative.  So the question is why?  Why when facing the institutional crisis you see a more conservative reaction, which may be a kind of defence mechanism of the institution. 

Another phenomenon from the point of view of sociology of religion is the increase of the Pentecostals. The proliferation of the Pentecostal movements all over the world, I think, is due to the very fundamental social and cultural changes, where people are lost to a certain extent in many popular milieus because they lose their fundamental primary social links.   And they try to reconstruct other links.  And, of course, the Pentecostal communities, with a very, very strong emotional expression are a certain answer to this dislocation of social links.  But it is also the sign of a search for meaning…meaning in life, meaning in ethics.  So that is another phenomenon, which is quite important. 

Another challenge is to see what the impact of globalization on religion is.  Yesterday I had a visit from a Belgian doctor who is working more as an anthropologist and psychoanalyst in Nepal.  He is working on Tibetan Buddhism and he told me about the extraordinary transformation of Tibetan Buddhism, which is becoming more and more a business in Nepal. The so-called poor refugees, monks from the Chinese Colonial Empire, are becoming the richest sector of the population in Nepal. The monks in the temples are more and more just engaged in enterprises because so many people come from outside, etc. Not to say that it is only that.  There is also the increase of Tibetan Buddhism in Western Europe with the presence of the Dalai Lama.  And he says there is a more and more a gap between the original Tibetan Buddhism and the outside Buddhism, where the original practioners see more and more the proselytising of Tibetan Buddhism in Europe as a business enterprise.  And he says it is really a business enterprise.  When you see the Dalai Lama going from one place to another it is with extremely great mass media organization….television and papers, etc. and with a tremendous financial apparatus.  So he says that is a result of globalization. 

Well, this is also a phenomenon that we should study.  The same thing the Falun Gong[8] in China, this new religious movement…more or less religious, but coming out of the failure of Maoist ideology, and against which the government is reacting strongly, because they attract especially retired people, especially from the army and some of the cadres of the party.  And it is linked with Buddhism and Taoism and strange beliefs in extra-terrestrial people.  It’s a really strange mixture.  But that is also a very interesting phenomenon from the point of sociology of religion.  How is that happening there and why? 

I see in Vietnam the revival of Catholicism and Buddhism and again the institution’s strength to retake cultural hegemonic society. Catholicism has never been hegemonic in Vietnam but it has been very powerful and has linked with power.  And now Vietnamese Catholics are, of course, regularly in conflict with the authorities of the Communist party.  But now that they have a little more freedom they are beginning to build enormous churches, trying to build great statues of Mary, of Sacred Hearts in public places, etc. to reaffirm their power.  So all those phenomena show that religion is very much present, though in another way than it was before.  So we have to try to study very profoundly what is the explosion of the religious attendance and meaning in the western world and what is happening in the so-called Third World, but affected by the present day globalization and the imposition of the logic of capitalism in whole sections of the world population.  So for me these are some very fundamental issues for sociology of religion today. 

JS:     Do you think that in order to analyze and understand these phenomena we, as a discipline, need new tools or new approaches?

FH:     Yes.  I think, of course, that every new situation requires not necessarily new tools, but new approaches.  Indeed, there are some new approaches.  For example, the postmodern approach in sociology of religion has been very important in the last few years.  However, I think it is completely unable to explain those problems, because it refuses to be explanatory; that is the fundamental approach, just to describe, in order to help perhaps each one to understand the other one, but claiming that a social science approach cannot be explicative.  So, of course, that I cannot accept.  But that is one kind of approach to the new reality.

Another approach is more comprehensive.  For example, a good friend of mine, a French sociologist named Danièle Hervieu-Léger, is one of the main producers of sociology of religion in France today, and she has a very interesting approach of trying to explain this complex reality which makes the institution of the Christian churches have less and less control of the faith and religious behaviour of the people. 

However, I am convinced of the Marxist approach in the sense of a triple type of interrogation of reality.  The first aspect is a global approach.  That means that you cannot isolate religious reality from the whole context.  The second aspect is a historical examination for the purposes of understanding the evolution of that reality.  And the third is dialectical.  That means that every kind of behaviour is always a reaction, be it individual or collective, facing action.  It is always dialectical.  It is not a linear evolution.  It is dialectical, because we are social actors in interaction.  That means that when you see a religious institution react in such and such a way it is because some religious actors have acted in such and such a way.  So it is a permanent dialectical process.  So that’s why I think that a Marxist approach is adequate, because it takes those three aspects.  Of course, this is on the condition that it is an open approach, not defined by a dogmatic view of a situation.  So in this sense I think this a good methodological way to approach reality, a tool for interrogating reality so that the whole richness of this reality really comes out. 

JS:  Going back to the concepts of social convergence and the collective consciousness, I found these ideas are very much co-relational with Teilhard de Chardin’s thought and mentality.

FH:     Yes.  That’s right.  Of course, the main idea of Teilhard de Chardin is a dynamic vision of the history of humanity, and the history of the world, because he was a palaeontologist, as well as a philosopher and theologian. And so what I retain more from Teilhard is primarily this dynamic vision of human history.  And that with a theological vision of the future, you know, which he sees as from alpha to omega.     

So the finality of history, which I think is an interesting vision, should not be too rigid.  Because otherwise you can fall again into a kind of deterministic view of the evolution of the world or a simplistic approach, which sometimes has been the case with people following Teilhard de Chardin; that is, not seeing precisely enough the dialectical aspect of reality, a rather too linear type.  But what I like, of course, in Teilhard de Chardin is the fact he has a vision.  And, of course, there is a teleological dimension of his vision, which can be challenged perhaps also from a scientific point of view.  Because now it is after Teilhard that this whole theory of complexity, theory of chaos, this uncertainty of science because there are so many ways that things can go, this has perhaps limited a little bit Teilhard’s scientific approach.  His theological approach, of course, is interesting because it gives a meaning to the history of the universe and of humankind that I think is quite in line with the Christian approach.  So, in this sense, yes, I think that it is quite interesting.  

JS:     How do you approach the issue of collective consciousness and convergence that we have been talking about with regard to non-violent democratic social change? This has been the subject of a debate within the movements. What approach do we take? 

FH:     Yes.  Well, I think that fundamental vision of the social organization of humankind should be fundamentally democratic in the sense of a full democracy, not only in the political field, but also in all the other fields, especially in the economic field.  Because capitalism is the most anti-democratic economic organization.  So the fundamental idea is, yes, it should be fundamentally democratic.  In this sense, of course, it means that all conflict situations should be solved by democratic means.  And that means non-violent - not killing, not threatening human life.  That is a utopia. 

This is also the very fundamental value of the Kingdom of God.  In this sense it is a fundamental value.  Now we are living in a violent world.  That is a reality.  And the fundamental contradiction is between those two things, that the values of the Kingdom, or if you speak as humanist non-believer, the fundamental democratic way of solving collective problems is really what we should have as a utopian aim - utopian in the sense, not that it is impossible, but that it is a fundamental aim.  And there is a contradiction with reality.  We are living in a violent world.  Even Jesus was the victim of a violent world.  Now he chose, I think, to be a witness of the fundamental value of the Kingdom and, therefore, he refused absolutely to take power, to become rich or to use violence.  And it is probably because of that, that his witness has a universal value also in history.  If he had been just a freedom fighter for a cause of the poor people of his own society, he would have been, of course, a much respected person, but one of the many in history.  But I think that it is because his choice, conscious or not, I don’t know, to be a radical witness of the fundamental values, that his message has lasted throughout history.   But that is not the only option. 

I had to reflect on this question three weeks ago when I gave my speech at the University of Bogotá about Camillo Torres, who as a priest chose to join the guerrillas, the armed revolution.  So I said, “You have the option of Jesus, but you also have some other options for Christians.”  This is to see that we are living in a violent world and that sometimes you can be pushed to such a situation that you have to make a choice, which is not a choice between good and bad, but a choice where both choices are ambiguous.  And most of the time, that is the case.  And the whole problem is to know how to choose this ambiguity.  So like I said, at the programme with Hugo Chavez, [9] a good year ago, sometimes Christians are only ready to join a revolution on the condition that the revolution is made by angels.  But no revolution is made by angels.  So the problem is not to expect that the revolution is made by angels, but to choose the ambiguities.  And you choose the ambiguities of the poor or the ambiguities of the rich.  And to be faithful to the Gospel it is to choose the ambiguities of the poor.  Now that does not necessarily mean armed struggle.  But the problem of armed struggle is also raised.  So what are the ethical principles about that?   I myself faced this problem, when as a seminarian I joined the guerrilla movement against Fascism, against the Germans.  And nobody had any objections to that.  Why?  Because I think there are two conditions.  The first one is political.  Is this politically wise?   In other words, is that an efficient way of changing a political situation or not?  And that was a question I raised now in Colombia In Camillo Torres’ time, 40 years ago, this could be discussed, perhaps because we saw that in Nicaragua they were able, with an armed movement, to take power and to change society.  So you could discuss that in Columbia. But today, in Columbia, politically speaking, what kind of political results did the guerrilla movement have in the last 50 years 40 years?  And how many chances do they have to change the political situation with armed struggle now in Colombia.  I don’t think that the political conditions are realized. 

But a second condition is ethical.  Ethics says that not only should we have ethical aims and goals, but also means.  And when an armed struggle seems to be inevitably linked with criminal action, terrorism, or narcotics traffic, etc., then it loses its credibility and we cannot accept it.  So why was there no objection when either a seminarian or a priest would join the guerrilla movement? Because politically everyone agreed that the guerrilla movement was a useful thing for the purposes of bringing freedom to the country.  And secondly, ethically, I don’t say that they always used ethical means, but as a whole the means which were used were ethical, respect of the prisoners, etc.  So that was accepted.  Now in the Colombian situation. …well, today, at least, there are some questions about the legitimacy of an armed struggle to transform Colombian society.  But it is not a matter of principle; it is a matter of context.   Now I must add one thing.  When you have an armed struggle for a national purpose, that is commonly accepted.  Because it is for the common good of the nation.  When you have an armed struggle for class reasons, then, of course, it is not accepted.  Because the ruling class will immediately condemn it.  They don’t accept the legitimacy of an armed struggle of the oppressed class.  But they would accept the legitimacy of an armed struggle for a national purpose, which is really a bourgeois type of ethics. 

But to come back to the question, I also think that whereas non-violent action is the normal action, I don’t exclude in concrete situations an action using armed struggle.  Because of the fact that we are not living in the Kingdom of God, but in a violent world.   But that that is linked with a political judgment and an ethical judgment. 

JS:  Can you elaborate on your thesis on the de-legitimization of capitalism?

FH      Yes, the de-legitimization of capitalism means to come to the idea that capitalism is not justified, not only that it is responsible for abuses and excesses, but that it is not justified and that the laws of capitalism are completely against humanity.  The whole reality of pure competition, pure logic of the market, is to reduce humankind to an economic game.  So you see that the abuses and excesses are a fundamental part of the logic and not just an accident.  And that’s why it has to be de-legitimized.

JS:     I would like to ask what your views are on the situation today around the world, the religious fundamentalism, and at the same line more and more poor people joining these types of movements. Maybe we can start with Muslim reactions to the cartoons depicting Mohammed.

FH:     Yes.   Of course, it is extremely clear that this reaction is fundamentally a reaction against what they feel to be a cultural destruction, the destruction of their identity, and a cultural destruction linked with political, economic and military domination.  And, of course, there is the fact that it is so much against their own religious conception.  However, the images were used by certain Occidental media in part because they are completely ignorant of the Islamic or Arab Islamic culture.  It is precisely a reaction against that.  So this is an incident but a very significant one, because it is precisely expressing that phenomenon.  Now it is not only a question of economic inequalities or of social differences, because it is more a cultural aspect.  Because it is not only necessarily the poor Islamic who are reacting.  So it is really a more complex phenomenon than only being linked with poverty.  Now the fact that the Islamic movements are very powerful among poor people is linked with the social inequality.  Because they are almost the only ones in the Arabic world trying to do something for the poor.  And in this sense they exercise, of course, a strong influence and generally link their social action with their cultural and religious conceptions. 

Now, that this also would be used as political ammunition is sometimes difficult to accept….from analytical point of view, it is also true.  But to do like the French papers is absolutely horrible.  Some of the French papers claimed that what happened was a planned reaction because those caricatures were published three months ago and the response was organized by the Islamic movement and by some of the Islamic states to fight against the West.  So that is completely …not only stupid, but really wrong… a reaction which is linked with this cultural hegemony of the West, and which will just make the matter worse.  So that’s what I think about that.

JS:     So how do you address the confusion arising from the fact that, on the one hand, if you look at the Islamic and Arab world there is a link with poverty and cultural identity; but, on the other hand, if you look at Christian fundamentalism it is indirectly or directly linked to so-called capitalism? 

FH:     Oh yes.

JS:     Maybe you disagree .

FH:     Well…not necessarily.  Some of the fundamentalist groups are developing what they call the theology of success…the theology of prosperity. Prosperity, which, of course, is then extremely functional for capitalism.  But that is important for the people who are living in poverty that they see that and, truly, through the fact of belonging to those religious groups, they begin to have some behaviour which enables them to grow materially.  They don’t drink; they don’t smoke; they are more normal in their family life, and enter into a set of circumstances that mean that they are also rising socially and economically.  So in this sense the theology of prosperity is also linked with this reality.  But the theology of prosperity as a direct contribution to capitalism is rare, I think.  Indirectly, yes, in the sense of Max Weber.  It’s true.  Therefore, surely for capitalism it’s not a danger at all.  On the contrary, they should encourage that whole perspective.  So I don’t see that it is purposely done, but it is one of the functions.  But the function at the higher level of the real capitalist system, there I don’t think it is very important because the capitalist system is functioning on its own logic.  Sometimes they use religion because it gives certain credibility to the actors of the capitalist world.  But today it no longer needs religious justification, just its own logic. Present capitalism does not need religious support for the very function of it.

JS:  I would like to continue our discussion related to what you are doing with the Social Forum, especially regarding the issues of compensation and reparation which you were very much involved with in Colombo, Sri Lanka[10]. Why is it important and how relevant is it to the discussion we have been having?

FH:     Well, it is linked with the so-called debt of the Third World.  And, of course, it is linked with history.  The problem is that today there is an enormous debt which is growing every year.  As a matter of fact, as we know, the countries of the Third World have already reimbursed at least four times the debt they had 20 years ago.  And still their debt is almost four times greater today and they have reimbursed hundreds of billions of dollars.  Organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, are putting as a condition of credit the reimbursement of debt.  And that is, of course, a very serious issue. 

So the problem of the debt of the South to the North has been raised in two ways.  Firstly, historically, which means, what has been since the beginning of capitalism the massive exploitation of the South, slavery, the exploitation of colonial period. In Latin America it has been calculated, in a somewhat humorous manner, how many tonnes of gold and silver and other resources were extracted from Latin America during the colonial period.  And if this were to be paid at a normal price, calculating the interest, that would mean billions and billions and billions of dollars.  But also the fact that the South is considered to be on the periphery of capitalism, and is thus exploited by capitalist logic.  That means to try to get the raw material as cheaply as possible, to exploit labour, and to try also to sell manufactured goods from the North.  So this all results in an unequal relation where, of course, the more powerful exercise their power to their own advantage. 

And so for those two reasons the debt of the South to the North has been spoken about so much.   And so there has been discussion-surrounding reparation, especially for slavery, but also for unequal exchange, which in a normal relation between two individuals would be judged by a court.  I must say that the concept of reparation has not been so much developed in the context of the World Social Forum, where the focus has been more on the abolishment of the debt and reparation in the sense of transforming the present day situation.  I think also that when we discussed that in Sri Lanka we came to the conclusion that, of course, reparation in the strict juridical use of the concept would be just an impossible thing, but reparation in the sense of changing the existing structure of exploitation, that, yes, realistically should be pursued. 

So, of course, it is an ethical question that is very serious.  And there is a tendency in the North of just forgetting about that.  Because, of course, that would be too costly.

JS:     Coming back to the biographical, I would like to ask more about your career as a teacher.  When did you start at the university and what have been your achievements and disappointments as a university teacher or professor?

FH:     I began to teach at the university in ’58.  I was asked to give a first course, which was called The Sociology of Pastoral Work.  And that was in the Faculty of Social Sciences.  There was already a course of Sociology of Religion.  And they created this new course and I was asked to give that.  And it was open, of course, to the Faculty of Theology, and especially for the students studying to become teachers of religion.  Then, later on, I gave some other courses in the Sociology of Religion, which were open, especially when I came to Louvain, to the university, with my research centre.  For six years my Research Centre of Sociology of Religion was linked with the services of the Bishop’s Conference in Brussels.  But in ’64, if I remember well, we were attached to the university.  And for a while I had only three or four courses.  And each time that I asked for more it was refused.  And for quite a bit of time there was quite a strong opposition against my teaching.  It was, I think, because of my conception of sociology of religion, which was not accepted by some clerical authorities in the university.  Another part was, of course, because of my commitment against war in Vietnam

My main purpose was not to have an academic career.  I wanted to do a serious job.  I like teaching very much.   I have good relations with the students and for me it was very interesting work, especially also the supervision of theses.  But finally I was appointed as a full-time professor.  That I did not expect, because I had accepted an assignment in Germany as Director of the Missiology Institute at the University of Münster. But the same day that I got the letter from the Minister of Education of Germany that I was appointed, I received a letter from the University of Louvain that I was appointed also….totally unexpected.  I was appointed because the head of the Board of Administration of the university, who was also the President of the Christian Workers Movement, appreciated my work and my positions and said that he would resign if I was not appointed.  I never knew that except after his death.  So I was completely astonished.  It was very fortunate because my nomination in Münster was cancelled because of veto of the Holy See since in a Faculty of Theology in a Germany university the Holy See had to give its approval for the appointment of new professors and they rejected my appointment. It was quite a scandal; for the first time in the history of the theological faculty in Germany the students went on strike.  It was almost a case of bad diplomatic relations between Germany and the Holy See, because the Minister had appointed me. 

I was not sad because, of course, I preferred to remain in Louvain.  It was more interesting; there was not the issue of language and Louvain was a good place for international work.  So like I said, my main purpose was not an academic career, even though I wanted to do normal work in the academic field.  But, of course, the university was an extraordinary place to do many other things, too.   The academic research network was a very important one because I had the responsibility for the International Journal of Sociology of Religion, Social Compass, which I brought from about 100 subscriptions to more than 1000 in a few years. It was an extraordinary platform for international contacts, international work.  I was interested in work in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa; not only academic work but also the work of training, of research and the service of the social movements and social NGOs from the churches, etc.  Now after I had been appointed, I finally I got some other courses, especially in methodology.  So I gave courses in Sociology of Religion and in qualitative methodologies.  I was very interested in that because it was quite coherent in the way of teaching and also I supervised many theses.  For 20 years, I supervised or co-supervised almost all the theses in Sociology of Religion, and I had students in the three continents.  No one in Belgium, except my assistant,[11] because who would do a PhD in Sociology of Religion in a country where there is no job for that.

And now there are even less jobs, even in other countries. When I reached retirement I still had ten theses underway, which took me five more years to finish.  I liked that very much.  I did a weekly seminar with the students doing a thesis with me.  It was a very rich experience, because it was an exchange between them.    So in this sense I was very happy with the teaching.  But at the same time the teaching was kind of constraining, because I had to be here. 

JS:     And what was the approach you took in the course on the sociology of pastoral care?

FH:     Well, I was studying the sociology of the parish especially, and the sociology of the Catholic action movement: specialized Catholic action, workers, peasants, etc.  At the time I was also concentrating on religion in the cities.  So my course was based more on that.  I was examining how to organize pastoral work in the cities and a critical approach to the parish as a institution in the city, what kind of pastoral work to do in the cities.  It was mostly that.

JS:     Even at that time, did you take a Weberian Marxist approach?

FH:     No, at that time it was more a functionalist approach.

JS:     Was it Durkheimian?

FH:     Durkheimian to a certain extent, but because I had been at the University of Chicago it was borne of the American Chicago school of Urban Sociology. Ernest Burgess, of course, was my main reference for urban sociology.  Talcott Parsons also influenced me, but only to a certain extent because he was too complicated. So it was more along the line of the American functionalist sociology, because of course I studied there and I found it very interesting as a new approach facing the traditional European sociology, which was more philosophical or more juridical.

At that time the social sciences were in the Faculty of Law. So there was a very big emphasis on law in the teaching, which I don’t regret because after that I worked a great deal with the Peoples’ Tribunals.  And this training in law was for me a good thing.  But now this is no longer the case.  I think it is good that sociology has taken its autonomy from philosophy and from law, not to say that those things are not important or useful. 

JS:     Which other institutions or faculties have you been associated with?

FH:     I have taught in quite a few faculties.  The first one was in the University of Montreal, where I gave two courses during one semester on sociology of religion.  Then I taught at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.   For two years I gave a course there.  I also taught at Sherbrooke University in Canada, for one course, sociology of religion.  Then I was an associate with the faculty in the University of Buenos Aires, where I gave a course in the Faculty of Architecture on urban sociology.  I taught in Nicaragua, in the University of Central America of the Jesuits, where I gave courses of methodology and of sociology of religion.  Then I taught two years in Haiti, at the National University of Haiti, where I gave a course in sociology of religion.  Then I gave a course in sociology, methodology, and sociology of religion at the University of Hanoi. That is all for the formal courses.  But for conferences then I have been in about 50 universities from China to Peru and also in Africa and in Algeria, in Senegal, in Mozambique, etc. 

JS:     Looking back over your longstanding contribution to Social Compass, how do you see its evolution or development into a very scientific professional journal?

FH:     At the beginning it was founded in the Netherlands by an institute that was founded by a Dutch professor[12] precisely to put sociology at the service of the Catholic Church.  Something similar existed also for the Protestant church, but it did not have the same impact and development there in the Netherlands.  I was closely associated with them…and so they began this journal in Dutch, but with sometimes with some article in English or even in French.  Let me comment on two aspects.  First, it was very much applied sociology…. serious work, good work, but very much applied sociology, without too much interest in theory.  And secondly, it was confined to the Netherlands.  So when I took over the journal, first I changed the language and we made it bi-lingual in English/French.  We maintained the title, which was a very strange title: Social Compass. Why Social Compass?  But in the mind of the founders it was very meaningful, because it was sociology as a compass for Church action.  A tool to have a better action

JS:     So, the direction the ship is going….

FH:     Exactly…exactly…. exactly.  And it would have been very difficult to change the title of a journal because then you lose the readership so it is just like beginning again.  So then when I took over I began to change the language.  I kept the title in English against attempts to translate it into French and Italian and that was a very good move because later on when we began to be a more scientific journal it was adopted by the American universities, and because the title was in English we got more than 300 subscriptions in the American universities.   So that was the first step. 

The second step was to try to open the journal to a more scientific approach.  So we did that little by little, especially by transforming the journal with thematic issues.  And finally it has become one of the main journals in the field.  There is another one, a French journal. It was Archives de Sociologie de la Religion, and is now Archives de Sciences Sociale des Religions because they also have psychology, history, etc.   So those two journals are the main ones. And when I retired, in order to save the journal, because I was not sure of what the attitude of the Louvain University would be, I made an agreement with SAGE in Great Britain . They are one of the two or three main publishers of sociology journals.  So they took it over and it is still going on. It was a very good agreement that also permitted the journal to be almost self-sufficient from the financial point of view. 

JS:     So it has been under new editorship for a few years now. What is your impression of its direction?

FH:     Well, it is doing well from the point of view of publishing interesting material.  We made an agreement just before I left with the International Conference of Sociology of Religion, which meets every two years that this would also be the journal of the International Conference, which immediately brought quite a few subscriptions, because membership to the Conference includes a subscription to Social Compass, and this also which the Conference to publish its proceedings.  Now every year one issue is on the International Conference.  So that is perfect right.  Now my impression is that in the last few years the whole trend in sociology of religion has been very much influenced by postmodernism.

JS:     Do you see this post-modern approach to society and religion as a critique to your own approach?

FH:     Yes, definitely, definitely.  Because I find that in this trend there are two main defects.  One is that they rarely put the religious phenomenon in its global context, in its general social context.  It’s too much studied as something in itself.  And second, it is also very much related with the immediate aspect.  And, okay, they have interesting tools to describe that and to analyze that.  But, from my point of view, they do not go far enough toward an explanatory dimension.  How do you explain what is happening?  And for me to go along that line you must have a good knowledge of what the social mechanisms are and a good sociological vision of a society in which those phenomena are arising.  Those are my main critiques. 

JS      What is your reaction to Zigmund Bauman[13] and his approach?

FH:     Well, he is, of course, postmodern - very strongly.  He has a very good knowledge of it and describes what postmodernism is very well.  But, of course, I have the same critiques as I do against any kind of postmodern type of approach.  I understood his position better when I met him in Barcelona one or two years ago.  We were there for a meeting, I don’t remember what.  But anyway, he had to speak and I had to speak.  I heard his speech and then I noticed, first that he was a Jew, second, that he is of the generation that has known the Shoah. And for him the Shoah is the extreme expression of modernism.  So his position of a post-modern approach is linked with the fact that modernism brought barbarism. 

JS: At this point I would like to ask if you could recall your specific contribution to Sri Lanka, especially in the post-Vatican II period. 

FH:     Yes, the first time I came to Sri Lanka was in 1968 and at that time the Vatican Council had been taken seriously by some.  True enough the Asian countries were perhaps less involved in that transformation.  Because, of course, for very obvious reasons they were considered as missionary areas and in this sense had relatively little contribution to the Vatican II Council.  The Asian episcopacy was relatively recent, and still very dependent from the theological point of view. Vatican II Council was essentially a European achievement in a certain sense.  So sometimes it was not very well understood in some of the churches because they didn’t see the necessity for such changes.  For example, the identification of the Christian faith with things like the Latin language or specific devotions, especially popular devotions, was relatively great.  And just to abandon all this was sometimes seen as a loss of identity.  And so it was not easy to understand from Asia what the meaning of the transformation of Vatican II Council was, from the liturgical point of view, but also from the theological point of view. 

Part of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka was quite open to certain transformation, especially from the point of view of social commitment, such as Father Joe Fernando and all those people.  Then I began to work with Tissa Balasuriya OMI.  I met him for the first time in Kenya, through a meeting of Catholic students and he invited me to go to Sri Lanka to do the same kind of work that I had done in Latin America.  I had completed a great deal of work in Latin America and I was forbidden to assist in the Conference of Medellín for the application of the Council to the Latin American Church, so I accepted this invitation and I went to Sri Lanka.  My first work was with the SEDEC, the Centre for Development of the Catholic Church, directed by Joe Fernando, who was an extremely intelligent person who understood the necessity of research for the betterment of the work.  So they ask me to make two types of research, one on specific social action of the Church in Sri Lanka, and a survey of the Catholic minority of Sri Lanka.  That survey was published, and was used also for training.  It was about the situation of the Catholic minority in Sri Lanka, but also the type of religious mentality prevailing at that.  My colleague, Geneviève Lemercinier, and I completed the survey in one year.  Then we came back and discussed the results. 

 Another aspect was the training in social analysis.  We conducted many seminars, not only with the Catholic Church, but also with other churches…Anglican and Protestant churches and ecumenical meetings, to train the people in social analysis, trying to better understand the situation they were in.  We also developed an instrument of social analysis in Sri Lanka , which later on was used all over.  It was a structural analysis that enabled people to analyze their own situation and try to understand it better, in order of course to take action.  It was used especially with the tea plantation workers, and the methodology was very simple.  We had meetings with the common people asking them to express their problems and then we tried to classify those problems as economic or social or political or cultural or religious, etc.   But it was nothing other than what the people themselves were saying.  We were not inventing anything except the process of classifying.  When they saw the whole thing classified they understood better, of course, what the general problems were.  Then we asked them to make the links between all those questions.  You know, if there was a link between the economic situation and the political situation, the culture or religion.  So little by little they were analyzing themselves….their own society. 

And then the last aspect was to know well how to solve those problems and on what level they could be that solved.  What could they do themselves?  What should be done to place pressure on the government, etc.  This method has been used in the Philippines, in India and in Bolivia. So that was the training aspect.  It has been used for many years, each time that we went to Sri Lanka, some seminar was organized. 

Then the other thing was that I had to do a PhD in order to be appointed Professor here.  So I decided to work on Sri Lanka because we were so interested, and to profit from all the work that we were doing too. At the same time more theoretical work and more scientific work was necessary for a PhD, and I was really fascinated by the whole history of Buddhism.  So that’s why I began with the collaboration with Geneviève Lemercinier to work more on the sociological approach of history of Buddhism in the Ceylonese society to see what was the role and function of Buddhism in shaping Ceylonese society and the Ceylonese political structure.  So we published that in India, but also with co-edition with Hansa in Colombo (Religion and Ideology in Sri Lanka).   I had been asked to publish it in the States also, but I said, no, it should be published in Sri Lanka  And, as a matter of fact, it was relatively well received.  I remember that I got a visit of the President of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress.  He was extremely interested by the study and that was astonished that a non-Buddhist could write about Buddhism like that. Then after that, of course, I continued to have some contact with Sri Lanka, but more for participation in seminars on such topics as colonialism, neo-colonialism and globalization, as well as work with MONLAR for the post-tsunami reconstruction.  So that is a little bit the history. 

JS:     When you talk about a sociological approach to Buddhism, was Sri Lankan academia theoretically prepared for such kind of thing at that time?

FH:     I would say there was nobody who had worked on the topic with th