World View : Faith Comes in From Political Fringe : * Religion is taking a central role in dozens of governments around the globe.

This week, the world was expected to witness the birth of a new form of government--the first Islamic democracy--when Algerians went to the polls for the second round of their parliamentary elections.

The Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win decisively--as it did in the stunning first round on Dec. 26--and in the process formally secure the two-thirds control needed to change the constitution and override presidential vetoes. The outcome appeared so certain--and the ramifications of a fundamentalist victory so fearsome to political moderates and the army in the North African country--that a newly proclaimed High Security Council moved over the weekend to abort the electoral process.

It now appears that President Chadli Bendjedid, Algeria’s head of state since 1979, was forced to resign because the government and the military so feared the Islamic tide. The events have left angry Muslim leaders accusing the authorities of treason, thrown the future of the Islamic party into doubt and raised fears of widespread unrest in the nation of 25 million people.

In a larger sense, however, developments in Algeria are not an aberration.

The growing role of religion in politics, a trend that took root in the 1980s, has now become a global phenomenon affecting most major faiths and dozens of otherwise disparate governments.

Under growing pressure from the religious right, Israel passed a new budget two weeks ago providing $75 million for roads, schools and 5,500 new settlement homes in the occupied territories--in defiance of international pressure to suspend settlements during peace talks.

“The ultra-Orthodox and the extreme right, the very religious, have never been so powerful in Israeli politics,” said Ehud Sprinzak, a Hebrew University political scientist and author of “The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right.”

“Because of their audacity and the chutzpah of the religious settlers, (Prime Minister Yitzhak) Shamir may soon have to make a decision about whether he is prime minister of a state that has settlers or head of a religious fundamentalist movement which has a state.”

After openly criticizing the government of President Fernando Collor de Mello for “gradual impoverishment” of the electorate, Brazil’s Roman Catholic Church last year endorsed national strikes and the takeover of factories by workers. The Catholic bishops’ “Brotherhood Campaign” openly declared its intent to “provoke in the people a rage and indignation” to fight poverty where government efforts have failed.

In Mongolia, where the Communist stranglehold has loosened, Buddhism is making a comeback arm-in-arm with Mongolian nationalism.

And in Cambodia, the new peace pact opened the way for restoration of Buddhism as the state religion, ending years of persecution and murder of religious activists by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese-backed government. Prime Minister Hun Sen’s tolerance of the Buddhist resurgence and the restoration of Buddhist temples has helped foster rapprochement with former rival Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

With the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, Orthodox Christianity has emerged as a powerful alternative source of national identity and, indirectly, political direction. Protestant evangelical groups have gained ground in the former Soviet-aligned East Bloc as well as in Central America, in the process redefining the traditional political culture.

Among Muslims, Pakistan last year introduced Sharia, or Islamic law, as the supreme law of the land. Although authority remains in the hands of secular officials, school curricula, banking and penal codes, and the judiciary must, in theory, conform to Islamic standards.

In Tunisia, which neighbors Algeria, the most serious opposition group today is the outlawed Islamic Renaissance Party. In the former Soviet Asian republics, Islam is also one of the most powerful new political forces, despite the fact that Muslim political groups are outlawed in all but two republics.

Western democracies appear to be least affected. A 1991 poll in Western Europe revealed that religion is considered less important than family, work, friends and leisure time. The European Values Study reported that traditional religious belief was declining, as was the influence of the church in daily life.

Yet religion is still a defining factor in many of the nascent right-wing movements in Europe--ranging from France’s National Front to the neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Austria--that oppose integration of foreign ethnic groups and religions in their own societies.

Even in tolerant Denmark, major protests erupted last year against plans to build an Islamic Cultural Center and mosque in Copenhagen for the 60,000 resident Muslims. Although polls indicate that only 2% of Danes regularly attend the national Lutheran church, 55% opposed the project and only 23% favored it, according to local press reports.

One of the most noticeable differences from the trend in the 1980s is that religious movements are no longer limited to the political fringe; religious parties are prominent not only in radical states such as Iran or anarchic environments like Lebanon.

In India, the world’s most populous democracy, a militant right-wing Hindu movement became the official opposition in elections last year. In 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won only two seats in the 545-member Parliament; last year, it rose to 119. The saffron banner, a symbol of Hinduism, is now a trademark of Indian politics.

One common denominator among the diverse movements is the troubled environments in which they grow. They are often more a reaction to the weakness or outright failure of the traditional political forces than a new display of piety. Alienated by political malaise or corruption and economic decline that has reached crisis proportions, electorates are looking for viable or visible alternatives.

“Religion is subject to being used politically in the search for a rationale or for identity during times of change, whenever there is a cultural vacuum or when the old order is falling apart,” said James Turner Johnson, a Rutgers University political science professor who specializes in religious movements.

“Religion is always there in the subculture and relatively easy to grab onto for political use.”

The Islamic Salvation Front’s sweep of Algeria’s first-round parliamentary elections was widely considered as much a rejection of the National Liberation Front (FLN), which has ruled since the 1962 independence from France, as a popular embrace of Islam. It came at a time when at least one in four Algerians is unemployed, inflation is running about 100%, and the budget deficit exceeds $2 billion.

Once famed throughout the Third World for taking on the French and forcing their retreat in 1962 after more than a century of colonial rule, the FLN was humiliated in the first round of voting. It came in third, winning only 16 of 232 seats. The Islamic front won 188.

The fundamentalists were expected to win most of the 199 additional seats up for grabs in a second round of voting that was to take place this Thursday, thus insuring its majority. The Islamic party advocates strict adherence to Muslim tenets, including a ban on alcohol, separation of the sexes at school and “protection of the family,” a position widely interpreted as denying jobs to women.

The new High Security Council has called for new elections to replace Bendjedid within 45 days, as required by Algeria’s constitution. But that is widely seen in Algiers as a ruse meant to provide time for the military to devise some method to politically cripple the fundamentalists.

The rise of the Hindu BJP in India has coincided with disarray and divisiveness within the Congress Party, which has ruled for most of the 45 years since independence from Britain. India’s economy is also deeply troubled, while growing Sikh and Muslim insurgencies are challenging the Hindu-dominated central government for control of rich Punjab and Kashmir provinces.

Another common denominator is the reaction against the prevalent themes of modern times. “Secular civilization, with its guided missiles and broken moral compass, its good life and bad faith, has never had more doubters,” wrote editor Nathan Gardels in an issue of New Perspectives Quarterly that focused on the activist religions.

“The yearning for old certitudes and new revelations abound. From ethnic revivals to Islamic fundamentalism, from Catholic conservatism to New Age holism and Japanese traditionalism, the quest is on for a way to fill the hollow where God and community dwelt.”

Many U.S. analysts expect the trend to grow in the years ahead.

“With modern nationalism called into question in so many places, the large-scale trend will be toward tribalism or massive convulsive in-gatherings of peoples who consider themselves to have mythic and historic roots that radically separate them from all others,” said Martin Marty, University of Chicago professor and head of an international project on religion in politics.

“Religion comes into the political picture here because it’s almost always the reinforcer of the tribal habit and ethos.”

In the short-term, religion could increasingly become a defining force in conflict, as it has already in pitting Christian Armenians against Muslim Azerbaijanis, in those two former Soviet republics, and Catholic Croats against Orthodox Serbs in Yugoslavia.

The greatest threat to Nigeria’s return to civilian rule, scheduled for later this year, is tension between the Christian south and the Muslim north. Twice last year, sectarian clashes left hundreds dead in Africa’s most populous state.

The rivalry played a major role in the demise of Nigeria’s two previous civilian governments in 1966 and 1983, but African experts say the political division along religious lines has never been as intense as it is now. In the north, one group of Muslims is now demanding the creation of an Islamic state. In the south, Christian military officers were behind a failed 1990 coup attempt to overthrow the long-dominant Muslim leadership.

U.S. specialists say the most destructive influence of India’s BJP is on the Kashmir crisis, which was twice responsible for wars with neighboring Pakistan. In 1990, the Third World witnessed its first nuclear scare when India and Pakistan, both believed to have nuclear arms capabilities, went on full alert because the long-simmering insurgency had turned into a full-fledged rebellion.

“The BJP is basically immobilizing the government on the Kashmir issue, preventing a flexible sensible position that would allow that mess to be resolved,” said Sig Harrison, an Asian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “India is engaging in human rights violation and repression in Kashmir and is not moving toward a settlement that could be achieved by granting maximum autonomy” to the Muslim-dominated province.

Later this month the BJP has scheduled a march from southern India to Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, to show opposition to a compromise. “In this climate, there’s a real danger of a war,” Harrison added.

Although the interim may be turbulent, U.S. analysts predict that, in most cases, politicized religious forces either will be tempered by having to deal with practical political and economic crises or they will not survive.

The growing pragmatism of Iran’s 13-year-old Islamic revolution, symbolized by the release last month of the last American hostages held by pro-Iranian extremists in Lebanon, is widely viewed as a byproduct of its need to get access to Western aid to reconstruct its troubled economy.

“The overall tide of history will take societies where religion is now being used in politics beyond this,” said Rutgers’ Johnson. “We in the West used to have religions used in this way. In some ways, what we’re seeing in other regions in the world is a repeat of a process that Western societies have already gone through.”

The case of the Catholic Church’s role in Poland is another example. “A decade ago in Poland, religion was a driving force, the thorn in the side of the Communist regime and instrumental in supporting Solidarity,” said Jeffrey Hadden, a University of Virginia sociologist and author of several works on religion in politics.

“But no sooner had the transition to democracy taken place when religion took a very different role.” Based on a tour of Poland last year, he added, “it’s hard to find many people who have anything nice to say about the church, which is now seen as asserting a conservative agenda on the country.”

Indeed, although the country is more than 90% Catholic, the Polish Parliament last year refused to pass a restrictive anti-abortion bill that had been endorsed by Pope John Paul II, a Pole and a pivotal supporter of Solidarity. And a call last year by Poland’s Catholic bishops to end the constitutional separation of church and state has been basically ignored.

“Over the long run,” Johnson concluded, “what will have to happen is an acceptance of pluralism by everyone to be able to carry on meaningful relationships beyond their own religio-cultural frameworks.”

Some Places Where Religion and Politics Meet ALGERIA: Islamic Salvation Front expected to win parliamentary majority this week, creating world’s first Islamic democracy. ISRAEL: Religious right with hard line on Mideast peace enjoys unprecedented political power. INDIA: Militant Hindu movement becomes leading opposition party in 1991 general elections. ARMENIA and AZERBAIJAN: Religion becomes defining force in conflict between Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis in these former Soviet republics. BRAZIL: Activist Roman Catholic Church endorses strikes, factory takeovers in protest over failed government anti-poverty programs.