Religion, Modernity, and Injury in Thailand

Abstract

When Thailand’s¹ ruling elite transformed the polity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and created a nation-state with European-style courts and law codes, it proceeded down a familiar path toward “legal modernity.” The ideology of modern law is said to rest on a shift from religious to secular legitimation. Fitzpatrick (1992, pp. 54, 56) describes this imagined shift toward secularization as a basis for what he calls “the mythology of modern law”:

The story is so well known as not to bear repetition without tedium. To summarize, it is a story of the separation and dominance of a secular power in the initial form of the centralizing monarchies of medieval and early modern Europe. Although some god is invoked for a time as a final source of law, political rule assumes a secular sweep in which the divine becomes incidental or irrelevant. Natural and divine law become subordinate to the self-sufficient determination of positive law—the law posited by the will of the sovereign. Like its divine counterpart, law is autonomous and self-sustaining. It is independent of any exterior reality.

Thus, the mythology of legal modernity rests on a new conceptual distinction between law and religion, which are necessarily separated, as Thomas Jefferson famously remarked, by a “wall” between church and state. Modern law, writes Unger (1976, pp. 84–5), “presupposes that no one group in the society has a privileged access to religion and moral truth,” and that the proper role of law is therefore to establish a neutral “process for conflict resolution” rather than to endorse one set of cultural practices or religious beliefs over another.