The Western notion of geoculturally looking at the world through the prism of the Oriental-Occidental binary is flawed but continues nonetheless
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
24 February 2025
INDIA
Suit Your Agenda: A vendor sells anti-fundamentalist Islam buttons in Berlin on September 3, 2011 | Photo: Getty Images
On February 6, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force “to end the anti-Christian weaponization” of the government and the “unlawful conduct targeting Christians”. In a country where Christians make up two-thirds of the population, he promised to protect Christians from religious discrimination.
The task force, officially known as the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, will review the activities of all departments and agencies to identify and eliminate anti-Christian policies, practices or conduct. The departments, as Trump’s speech indicated the same day, include the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Trump argued that until and unless Christians in the US had religious liberty, “we don’t have a free country”. The next day, he signed an executive order to open a ‘Faith Office’ at the White House. Trump banned the legal recognition of transgender people by the US government. He pardoned anti-abortion activists convicted of blockading the entrances of abortion clinics.
Trump had literally announced the arrival of Christian nationalism—an ideology that fuses Christian religion with national character—at the helm of US affairs. Such a chain of developments in any Muslim or Hindu majority nation would have triggered a flurry of reportage over the capture of state power by religious fundamentalist/ nationalist/communal forces. But in the case of the US, the coverage appears to be rather mellow.
This, however, is not without a pattern. The case of Tanzania shows that the Western media tends to ignore, or take lightly, the threats from Christian fundamentalism. In 2019, Bettina Rühl, a freelance journalist based in Cologne (Germany) and Nairobi (Kenya), wrote in an article published in International Politics and Society that John Magufuli, a professed and practising Catholic who became the president of the African country of Tanzania in 2015, fought his electoral campaign with prayers, making a show of his faith.
Between Us And Them: Outlook’s Next Issue ‘The Grid’
Rühl pointed out that had Magufuli prayed to Allah as demonstratively as he practised his Catholic faith, the Western world would likely have been less at ease. “When, as in this case, a practicing Christian comes to power, no one in Western countries gets nervous,” she wrote.
As it turned out, in September 2018, Magufuli said that women using birth control were “simply too lazy to feed a family” and advocated against birth control. Subsequently, his government barred pregnant girls and single mothers from attending school—a ban rigorously enforced—and criminalised homosexuality, with provisions up to the death penalty, and launched a crackdown.
Such Western bias in their treatment of the societal and political developments in the West and in Asia got reflected in how the Western media responded to two incidents involving writer Salman Rushdie.
Christian Christensen, a professor of journalism at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, showed in a 2023 essay that when Rushdie came under attack from a suspected Muslim fundamentalist in 2022, the incident was leveraged by politicians and journalists across Europe and the US to frame Islam as the greatest threat to the ‘Western’ value of free speech. “There were countless news articles, opinion pieces, tweets, Facebook posts and television soundbites,” he wrote. But when Rushdie, in 2023, identified “populist Right-wing authoritarianism” as a greater threat to free speech in ‘the West’ than fundamentalist Islam, “Gone were the news articles, opinion pieces, tweets, Facebook posts and television soundbites.”
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This silence was despite religious fundamentalism of a different variety—Christian fundamentalism or Christian nationalism—remaining intrinsically linked to the rise of the Right-wing populists in the West. As political scientist Gionathan Lo Mascolo and sociologist Kristina Stoeckl wrote in their 2023 work: “The rise of the Christian Right is inextricably linked to the ascent of the Far Right both in Europe and in the United States.”
The fact that the religious aspect did not get enough attention was reflected in what journalist Katherine Stewart said in February 2025. In an interview with Ms. Magazine, Stewart, author of the recently released book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, said, “Some political commentators have scratched their heads over the fact that Latino support for Republican candidates has shifted so dramatically over the past eight years. This shows that they haven’t been paying attention to religious organizing on the ground.”
A Historical Construct
Such a lack of focus existed despite the rise of Christian nationalism/fundamentalism having been expected to impact politics and society beyond Trump’s territory. In March 2019, an investigation by the UK-based independent media platform, Open Democracy, revealed that Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ poured millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe to push ultra-conservative agendas boosting the Far-right.
An apparent lack of alarm bells in the Western media and political discussions over the rise of religious fundamentalism/nationalism in regions dominated by Christianity may have its roots in the colonial-era notion of the secular occident (Western world) and religious orient (Eastern world).
What was the East and what was the West? The East or the Orient is merely what Europeans and North Americans called Asia. One of the biggest flaws in this binary is that neither the West nor the East includes Africa and South America. But there are bigger flaws. It generalises the whole of Europe and the US on the one hand, and Asia on the other.
There also was a religious angle to it. The Orient comprised followers of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, whereas the Occident was the land of Christianity. This bias of portraying the East as religious and the West as secular is well-reflected in how the 19th-century British historian James Mill periodised the history of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu, Muslim and British (not Christian) periods. This notion may have had a partial historical basis in the fact that the western part of Europe became highly secularised during the 19th century.
However, the scene was different in Eastern Europe or the US. In both the US and Eastern Europe, organised religion—especially Christianity—had traditionally been conspicuously strong. As many studies have suggested, the religious fervour in the politics of the US and Eastern Europe steadily rose since the 1990s, especially after the end of the Cold War.
While Christian fundamentalists kept raising their heads in regions dominated by Christianity since the 1990s, the ‘Western’ media kept talking about Western civilisation’s impending clash with Islam.
An influential role in this narrative was played by American political scientist Samuel P Huntington’s work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. It speculated about a scenario in which the secular and the democratic Western cultures were coming into increasing conflict with religious non-Western cultures. He identified the major cultures as Western, Orthodox, Hindu, Islamic, Sinic, Buddhist, Latin American, African and Japanese.
How he mixed geographic and religious cultures could not be missed. Wasn’t he carrying the legacy of James Mill? In this categorisation—Arab countries, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina—became part of one world, the Muslim world. But the Christian world is divided into Western, Orthodox and Latin American.
In 2001, following Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in the US, Huntington wrote that the attack was Osama bin Laden’s attempt to draw the US and the West into a full-fledged clash of civilisations with Islam. Again, how he used a secular (geographic) term to refer to Christian-majority areas cannot be missed. Huntington’s theories have been widely accused of spreading Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the media grabbed it. Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian wrote in a 2003 paper that the mainstream media in the US “automatically, implicitly and unanimously adopted Huntington’s paradigm to explain September 11”.
Thinking Beyond Gender Binaries
BY Suraj Yengde
The same attitude continues. When the West discusses the rise of the Right in Asia, it highlights the religious or cultural aspects. But when the ‘Western’ media discusses the rise of the Right or the Far-right in the ‘West’, issues like immigration and economic distress find greater priority over the part being played by religion—the Christian Right.
Old habits die hard.
Suit Your Agenda: A vendor sells anti-fundamentalist Islam buttons in Berlin on September 3, 2011 | Photo: Getty Images
On February 6, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force “to end the anti-Christian weaponization” of the government and the “unlawful conduct targeting Christians”. In a country where Christians make up two-thirds of the population, he promised to protect Christians from religious discrimination.
The task force, officially known as the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, will review the activities of all departments and agencies to identify and eliminate anti-Christian policies, practices or conduct. The departments, as Trump’s speech indicated the same day, include the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Trump argued that until and unless Christians in the US had religious liberty, “we don’t have a free country”. The next day, he signed an executive order to open a ‘Faith Office’ at the White House. Trump banned the legal recognition of transgender people by the US government. He pardoned anti-abortion activists convicted of blockading the entrances of abortion clinics.
Trump had literally announced the arrival of Christian nationalism—an ideology that fuses Christian religion with national character—at the helm of US affairs. Such a chain of developments in any Muslim or Hindu majority nation would have triggered a flurry of reportage over the capture of state power by religious fundamentalist/ nationalist/communal forces. But in the case of the US, the coverage appears to be rather mellow.
This, however, is not without a pattern. The case of Tanzania shows that the Western media tends to ignore, or take lightly, the threats from Christian fundamentalism. In 2019, Bettina Rühl, a freelance journalist based in Cologne (Germany) and Nairobi (Kenya), wrote in an article published in International Politics and Society that John Magufuli, a professed and practising Catholic who became the president of the African country of Tanzania in 2015, fought his electoral campaign with prayers, making a show of his faith.
Between Us And Them: Outlook’s Next Issue ‘The Grid’
Rühl pointed out that had Magufuli prayed to Allah as demonstratively as he practised his Catholic faith, the Western world would likely have been less at ease. “When, as in this case, a practicing Christian comes to power, no one in Western countries gets nervous,” she wrote.
As it turned out, in September 2018, Magufuli said that women using birth control were “simply too lazy to feed a family” and advocated against birth control. Subsequently, his government barred pregnant girls and single mothers from attending school—a ban rigorously enforced—and criminalised homosexuality, with provisions up to the death penalty, and launched a crackdown.
Such Western bias in their treatment of the societal and political developments in the West and in Asia got reflected in how the Western media responded to two incidents involving writer Salman Rushdie.
Christian Christensen, a professor of journalism at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, showed in a 2023 essay that when Rushdie came under attack from a suspected Muslim fundamentalist in 2022, the incident was leveraged by politicians and journalists across Europe and the US to frame Islam as the greatest threat to the ‘Western’ value of free speech. “There were countless news articles, opinion pieces, tweets, Facebook posts and television soundbites,” he wrote. But when Rushdie, in 2023, identified “populist Right-wing authoritarianism” as a greater threat to free speech in ‘the West’ than fundamentalist Islam, “Gone were the news articles, opinion pieces, tweets, Facebook posts and television soundbites.”
Foul Is Fair: The Power And Peril Of Binary Thinking
BY Chinki Sinha
This silence was despite religious fundamentalism of a different variety—Christian fundamentalism or Christian nationalism—remaining intrinsically linked to the rise of the Right-wing populists in the West. As political scientist Gionathan Lo Mascolo and sociologist Kristina Stoeckl wrote in their 2023 work: “The rise of the Christian Right is inextricably linked to the ascent of the Far Right both in Europe and in the United States.”
The fact that the religious aspect did not get enough attention was reflected in what journalist Katherine Stewart said in February 2025. In an interview with Ms. Magazine, Stewart, author of the recently released book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, said, “Some political commentators have scratched their heads over the fact that Latino support for Republican candidates has shifted so dramatically over the past eight years. This shows that they haven’t been paying attention to religious organizing on the ground.”
A Historical Construct
Such a lack of focus existed despite the rise of Christian nationalism/fundamentalism having been expected to impact politics and society beyond Trump’s territory. In March 2019, an investigation by the UK-based independent media platform, Open Democracy, revealed that Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ poured millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe to push ultra-conservative agendas boosting the Far-right.
An apparent lack of alarm bells in the Western media and political discussions over the rise of religious fundamentalism/nationalism in regions dominated by Christianity may have its roots in the colonial-era notion of the secular occident (Western world) and religious orient (Eastern world).
What was the East and what was the West? The East or the Orient is merely what Europeans and North Americans called Asia. One of the biggest flaws in this binary is that neither the West nor the East includes Africa and South America. But there are bigger flaws. It generalises the whole of Europe and the US on the one hand, and Asia on the other.
There also was a religious angle to it. The Orient comprised followers of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, whereas the Occident was the land of Christianity. This bias of portraying the East as religious and the West as secular is well-reflected in how the 19th-century British historian James Mill periodised the history of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu, Muslim and British (not Christian) periods. This notion may have had a partial historical basis in the fact that the western part of Europe became highly secularised during the 19th century.
However, the scene was different in Eastern Europe or the US. In both the US and Eastern Europe, organised religion—especially Christianity—had traditionally been conspicuously strong. As many studies have suggested, the religious fervour in the politics of the US and Eastern Europe steadily rose since the 1990s, especially after the end of the Cold War.
While Christian fundamentalists kept raising their heads in regions dominated by Christianity since the 1990s, the ‘Western’ media kept talking about Western civilisation’s impending clash with Islam.
An influential role in this narrative was played by American political scientist Samuel P Huntington’s work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. It speculated about a scenario in which the secular and the democratic Western cultures were coming into increasing conflict with religious non-Western cultures. He identified the major cultures as Western, Orthodox, Hindu, Islamic, Sinic, Buddhist, Latin American, African and Japanese.
How he mixed geographic and religious cultures could not be missed. Wasn’t he carrying the legacy of James Mill? In this categorisation—Arab countries, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina—became part of one world, the Muslim world. But the Christian world is divided into Western, Orthodox and Latin American.
In 2001, following Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in the US, Huntington wrote that the attack was Osama bin Laden’s attempt to draw the US and the West into a full-fledged clash of civilisations with Islam. Again, how he used a secular (geographic) term to refer to Christian-majority areas cannot be missed. Huntington’s theories have been widely accused of spreading Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the media grabbed it. Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian wrote in a 2003 paper that the mainstream media in the US “automatically, implicitly and unanimously adopted Huntington’s paradigm to explain September 11”.
Thinking Beyond Gender Binaries
BY Suraj Yengde
The same attitude continues. When the West discusses the rise of the Right in Asia, it highlights the religious or cultural aspects. But when the ‘Western’ media discusses the rise of the Right or the Far-right in the ‘West’, issues like immigration and economic distress find greater priority over the part being played by religion—the Christian Right.
Old habits die hard.
This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'Secular Occident And Religious Orient?'
