POLITICAL AND MORAL POWER: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STATE AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES
POLITICAL AND MORAL POWER: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STATE AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

Summary/Abstract: The author agrees that the problem for all three religious communities in BiH is the use of religious persuasion as a shibboleth of identity, and thus as a means of justifying political separateness. He argues that the solution is to uncouple the religious from the mundane: "for the contemporary state to be as secular as possible,and [...] religion to be as spiritual as possible". "There has been a kind of renaissance of religion in former Yugoslavia as regards its involvement in public life. There is an interconnection and even a direct link between the religious (predominantly moral) and the political (predominantly impregnated with social power). When clashes within society arise, religions - some to a greater, some to a lesser extent - do not hesitate to manifest their power by legalizing the use of violence in the areas dominated by politics. It is hard to refute the argument that every developed religion has at least three constituents: ideological, interpretative, and normative-directional". (...)

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