Contesting Religious Gender Norms – Contesting Religious Power Relations. Religious Actors between Religious Principles and Worldly Interests

The UN and its agencies have not become tired of mentioning the importance of engaging with faith-based actors. Religious actors are seen as mediators especially in developing societies (Karam 2013, Marshall 2016). Besides this positive impact, however, the integration of religious actors in the public sphere becomes crucial in discourses about fundamental moral questions (Bob 2012, Neale 1998). Most prominently, Christian actors have been successful in disrupting debates about sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). The Holy See with the informal support of Muslim allies successfully exercised its moral power over debates on population control and reproductive rights at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo 1994 and at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995 (Joachim 2007). As a reaction, Catholic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been speaking up. On the one hand, conservative NGOs support the conservative, so-called pro-life position; on the other hand, progressive NGOs built a liberal countermovement by promoting the so-called pro-choice position. Both actors engage religious and theological arguments to support their position and, thus, reveal an explicit norm conflict. However, Catholic civil society actors utilize this norm conflict on the international sphere in order to negotiate dynamics within the religious community. In this context, questions of the Catholic identity and privileges and power of the institutional Church are intensely discussed. This observation points to multiple motives and orientations religious actors pursue in the international sphere and which so far remain unnoticed and unexplained by existing literature. By engaging literature on motives and interests of (secular) NGOs (Cooley/Ron 2002, Klotz 1995) and applying it to religious actors who so far were characterized as merely principled actors (DiMaggio 1998, Fox 2004), this paper presents the various motives of religious NGOs which result in these normative and power conflicts. Therefore, it differentiates between orientation of principles and orientation of interests of the actors. Whereas the orientation of principles describes the normative objectives in the SRHR discourse which predominantly are of religious origin, the orientation of interests reveals that religious actors implicitly also aim at legitimacy, representation, prestige, recognition, and power within and outside their community. This approach enables a differentiated perspective on religious actors and relativizes the popular image of highly principled religious actors. Empirically, the paper presents the case studies of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) and Catholics for Choice. Both NGOs are the most visible and openly contradictive cases in the SRHR discourse. While C-Fam strongly supports the Holy See and, thus, the Catholic Church and its normative and hierarchical position, Catholics for Choice strongly challenges the Catholic hierarchy and religious norms. An explorative outlook on Muslim NGOs in the discourse shows to what extent one can generalize the results. In a last step, an outlook will depict unintended consequences of the orientations of religious actors for political actors and discourses.