U.S. leaders should use every available opportunity to distance themselves and the nation from any of these religiously driven attitudes, which should have died with the Peace of Westphalia. ~Paul Pillar

Pillar and I agree that nothing good will come from taking sides in foreign political contests for religious reasons. I think it best to urge Americans in and out of government to avoid taking sides in foreign political contests for any reason whenever possible. Even so, I found Pillar’s closing remark a little strange. Whether confessional identities or religiously-driven attitudes should have died with the Peace of Westphalia or not, the Peace of Westphalia was a political settlement that took for granted that the attitudes weren’t going anywhere. What the peace settlement determined was that as far as state policy was concerned it was a matter of indifference what the prevailing confession was in other states. This actually reduced the space for religious toleration within many post-1648 European states, and led to intra-state policies pushing religious uniformity, but that was seen as an acceptable price in exchange for maintaining the general peace. State interests had always been a major driving force in the “wars of religion,” but they now became the overwhelming factor in matters of diplomacy and war such that old confessional hostilities were entirely subordinated to strategic concerns.

That indifference was more easily managed in an era before mass democracy, and it was practiced among those states that were predominantly Christian. This official indifference vanished when it came to predominantly non-Christian polities, especially if they had Christian minorities as their subjects. Historically Christian powers had other reasons to take an interest in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, but the status of Christians in the empire became a useful pretext for interference and a tool for extracting concessions from the Porte. The status of Christians in the empire was regrettable, but it is worth remembering that the treatment of Christian minorities steadily worsened during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as outside powers used their grievances as occasions to interfere in Ottoman affairs and impose humiliating settlements. The greatest losers in the entire story of outside agitation on behalf of Ottoman Christians were mostly the Ottoman Christians (along with the Rumelian Muslim population). Sometimes the best thing that an outsider can do for a foreign group with which he sympathizes is to leave them alone.

As Western governments have become more secular and post-Christian, democracy and human rights have become a new quasi-religious cause that its advocates believe justify interfering in the affairs of other states and using as a bludgeon against them. In extreme cases, it becomes the justification for military intervention in other countries. American Christian sympathizers with Gbagbo are making the same fundamental error that democratists make all the time: they are supporting a foreign political cause because they believe it represents their beliefs or ideals, but it really has nothing to do with them and shouldn’t be their concern. Instead of being reasons to take an interest in the conflict, these beliefs or ideals become excuses to interfere in something that is not their business.

The Ivorian case offers some important lessons for practitioners of religious identity politics and democratic universalists. Gbagbo is a perfect example of how politicizing religious and ethnic identity can directly conflict with respect for basic democratic norms, and how politicians endanger their own communities by mobilizing these identities to maintain their hold on power. Christian sympathizers with Gbagbo show that they are no more discerning than universalist sympathizers with “color” revolutions and popular uprisings, and they rely on the same superficial markers of apparent similarity to base their simplistic accounts of who the “good” and “bad” guys are in complicated conflicts in countries they can’t begin to understand fully. Far from stabilizing some societies, electoral democracy can mobilize and intensify tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions, which in turn feeds the brand of identity politics that Gbagbo practiced.