The Religious Background to Modern Political Opposition

Abstract

Political opposition not only signifies the respect given to diverse opinion in democracies, but also conveys an Augustinian sense that government, as human institution, is defective and requiring surveillance. The British idea of a constituted political opposition, leading to a settled dialectic between government and opposition, began to form during the American Revolution, especially under pressure of opposition to the war policy. It is a central branch of the secular apparatus of the state, and as such, a stumbling block to fruitful interaction between Islam and the West. Yet a recognition of the religious foundations of modern western institutions could open a path for meaningful dialogue between Muslims and westerners. As midwife to a theory of opposition, Edmund Burke worked under the aegis of the Rockingham Whigs, yet an inchoate notion of opposition was rooted in the uprisings of the previous century, during which one king was tried and beheaded and another deposed and exiled. The overriding motivation for the English Revolution of the 1640s was religious, when biblical sanctions on tyranny were levelled against the king. After the Restoration of the Crown the puritan impulse to revolution was dissipated, but some studies show that this passion was commuted to a 'Whig' politics when 'the Puritan became the Whig'. This paper explores how far religious passions of the seventeenth century were transformed into an impulse for political opposition in the eighteenth, when the modern institution of political opposition began to take shape.