Religious Reformation in Game of Thrones

From Game of Thrones (HBO)

Categories:

Run time: 1:24

Clip Description: A religious movement that the crown thought it could use becomes a political actor in its own right, with its own courts, its own armed men and its own claim on the king’s authority.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for religion as a political institution rather than as a private belief, and for the recurring pattern in which a state empowers a religious movement instrumentally and then cannot control it. It connects to work on religion and state-building, to the question of competing sources of legitimate authority within one territory, and to secularisation arguments that treat religion as politically residual.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this in a unit on identity, religion and politics, or on the state, since the scene is really about sovereignty – whether there can be two authorities in one territory. It pairs well with any case where a government sponsored a religious movement for short-term advantage and lost control of it.

Discussion Questions

The Faith Militant is armed by the crown and then cannot be disarmed by it. Political scientists call this a commitment problem: a ruler who empowers an ally to solve a short-run difficulty creates an actor with its own agenda and no reason to stand down once the difficulty passes. Name two real cases with the same shape, and say what, if anything, a ruler can do at the outset to make such an arrangement reversible.
The religious movement in this scene gathers its strength among people the crown has failed. Is religion doing independent causal work here, or is it simply the available vehicle for grievances that are fundamentally about status and scarcity? The distinction matters a great deal for what you would predict if the material conditions improved, so commit to an answer and say what would follow from it.
Establishment, disestablishment and state regulation of religion are measurable things, and states vary enormously in how much regulating they do — including self-consciously secular states, which often regulate more rather than less. Describe the crown’s relationship to the Faith before this scene, and say precisely what changes about it.

Assignment

The Religion and State Project (Jonathan Fox, free to download) codes every country on scores of separate measures of how governments treat religion: official status, funding, restrictions on minority religions, restrictions on the majority religion, and the presence of religious law. Pick three countries that look alike on the crude question “is there an official religion?” and show how differently they behave once you disaggregate. Roughly three pages, in three parts. First, build the comparison and describe it plainly. Second, take the single variable on which your three cases diverge most and establish, from country histories rather than from the dataset, what produced the divergence — a settlement after civil conflict, a colonial inheritance, a constitutional moment. Third, the scene is about a ruler who empowers a religious movement and loses control of it; ask whether any of your three states has done something structurally similar, and what the dataset would show if it had. Be careful at this last step: the coding captures state policy, not the strength of the religious actor, so the thing you most want to measure is the thing least visible in the data. Say so explicitly rather than working around it.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 3: Political Culture and Participation

Topics: 3.8 Political and Social Cleavages; 3.9 Challenges from Political and Social Cleavages; 3.1 Civil Society
Skill: Concept Application
Big idea: Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: Iran, Nigeria

The crown empowers a religious movement expecting to use it, and the movement turns out to have its own courts, its own armed men and its own claim on authority. That pattern — a regime creating an ally it then cannot control — recurs across the course countries, and the clip states it in under ninety seconds without requiring any background.

Discussion questions

Explain the difference between religion as private belief and religion as a political institution. Name one thing the movement in the clip has that makes it the second.
Iran gives clerical authority a formal constitutional role. Explain where that authority sits relative to the elected president, and who can overrule whom.
Nigeria is split roughly between a largely Muslim north and a largely Christian south, and twelve of its thirty-six states have adopted Sharia criminal codes, which apply to Muslims rather than to everyone living there. Explain how a federal system is meant to manage a division like that, and name one way it can fail.

Short activity

Cross-cutting or reinforcing (15 minutes). Explain the two terms first: cleavages that cut across one another divide people differently on different questions, while cleavages that reinforce one another stack the same division on top of itself. Students then diagram Nigeria’s religious, regional and ethnic divisions and decide whether they cross-cut or reinforce, and what that predicts about the likelihood of sustained conflict. One diagram, two sentences. This is the single most portable concept in the unit, and it transfers immediately to Iran and to the United Kingdom.