Originally a comment by jesse on Built on Christian values.
Well, unlike the US, England (and the UK as I understand it) still has an established church, as do many other European countries, which may be part of the problem. In the US at least we can be more explicit about secularism, even though there has been a LOT of pushback.
The thing is, I’ve noticed that many westerners have no problem with secularism — until they run into religions and people who are “other.” Then, all of a sudden, it’s a bad idea. The connection between what looks like secularism and entrenched privilege for largely western cultural norms (which can be just as negative and arbitrary as anyone else’s) seems lost on such people.
One of the flip sides of secularism — at last coming at it from an American point of view — is that it means secularism for everyone. That means that if we are going to do work-arounds to accommodate people’s freedom of conscience, then that applies to everyone, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Zoroastrian. The school cannot operate in a way that privileges one group over the other. It’s really that simple.
You can’t stop people from praying in school, but you can’t lead one (as a person in authority). You can offer space to religious clubs or groups but you can’t tell the Satanists or atheists they can’t meet in your gym while Campus for Christ can. You can’t tell students not to wear yarmulkes or headscarves or turbans, and you can’t have the 10 Commandments posted in the classrooms. People can do whatever they like within their religious community (within reason) but you can’t give it state sanction.
I don’t know why this is such a hard concept for people.
At least in the US, one of the reasons for an explicitly secular constitution is that there was a large variety of Christian sects in the US even then. Secularism was meant in part to leave room for that, so you wouldn’t leave anyone feeling alienated.
Let’s not forget that in 1780 the religious wars in England and Oliver Cromwell were not so far in the past — a century or so — and in fact much of the violence that we associate with Cromwell’s rule in Ireland spilled over into the Americas as well, though the targets weren’t Catholics. (In that case it was the Puritans, who supported Cromwell, engaging in battles with the people in places like Maryland, who supported the monarchy and its restoration). To say nothing of the then-current religious violence in Ireland. The founders of the US were not eager to repeat those experiences, nor create any more divisions between the colonies than already existed. Secularism was a principled position, but there was a very concrete political reason for it also.
When people feel alienated from the political process or the society in which they live, that’s when you get political violence (and religious violence). It is no accident that the countries that have a lot of terrorists and insurgencies tend to be ones that have managed to convince large sectors of the population that the ballot box and politics are ineffective. And that’s why secularism is so important to a modern — and yes, multicultural — society. You need to have a situation in which everyone feels like they are getting heard, where everyone has a stake in continuing some established order and method of resolving disputes. Otherwise yes, you do have whole classes of people who feel like they have no stake in the society at large, and that’s not good.
I’m not sure I get your point(s?).
I think I understand up to the point where, to oversimplify, secularism is okay until Muslims show up. But then are you saying that secularism and its ties to privileged western culture are lost on (oversimplifying again) Islamophobes? If that were so, they’d be pushing secularism, wouldn’t they? Instead they push Xtianity.
Then the following about secularism applying to everyone. Yes. Your point? That it should? That it shouldn’t? If schools, for instance, are to be secular you can, you must, stop people from praying in them. They do that in their holy places, not in a taxpayer-funded public place if it’s secular. But you’re saying one should allow prayer in schools? That seems contradictory.
Secularism is a principled position. Agreed. But principled positions are worth holding because they work. So I don’t understand the “but” either. It’s “Secularism was a principled position, and there was a very concrete political reason for it also.”
And then in the last paragraph, are you saying that secularism gives people a stake in society? The early Communists were extremely secular, but that wasn’t enough to make whole swathes of the population feel included. I think what you mean is mutual respect for each other’s rights, which is not a synonym of secularism.
So, as I say, my reading comprehension is deficient. Maybe you or others will feel like clarifying?
The Church of England is just that: the Church of England. The presbyterian Church of Scotland is certainly influential, but it is quite separate from the crown and from any parliament, EU, UK, or Scottish and has historically worked quite hard to maintain its independence.
If there is a feeling that there is justice FOR ALL (whether or not this is actually the case), you will have a culture of law where people appeal to the authorities to redress wrongs in accordance with an established set of laws. When people feel the law is not accessible or will not help them, you get a culture of honor where people take things into their own hands and set about doing honor killings, throwing acid in the faces of girls who have the temerity of attending schools, beating women whose shoes make too much noise while walking, etc. Notice that these women have no recourse – there is no effective legal system that applies the principle of “justice for all”.
With regard to the US’s Christianity, the guest overlooks one thing – Alexis de Tocqueville, in the early 1830s, noticed that, while there were numerous Christian sects, they were all CHRISTIAN sects. This meant that everyone felt there was a common basis for morality and ethical expectations and, thus, the public norm was embraced. While there were many sects, they were all variants of Christianity, which led to a homogenizing of the populace on this standard (Christianity). Tocqueville’s analysis was that, in a democracy where people feel equal to each other, there is enormous pressure upon the individual to conform; what person has valid reason to suppose his own perspective so superior to everyone else’s? And aren’t two heads better than one? The separation of church and state ensures that no individual will be prosecuted for deviating from the religious norm, but the individual will nonetheless be subject to an incredible weight of pressure to conform by the people around him. Within a democracy, as Tocqueville put it, “it will always be extremely difficult to believe what the bulk of the people reject, or to profess what they condemn.” [Footnote: Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”, Book II, Chapter XXI: Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare, p. 274]
Add to that the fact that, even in the smallest towns, there was at least one Christian church which early on served as the community’s first public building – weekly services were where people met up, connected, made plans, etc. Anyone who didn’t go would be left out, even ostracized – in a small, subsistence economy where everybody needed to pull together to survive, this might well be a death sentence for the outcast.
In a fascinating article on the Great New England Vampire Panic, based on ignorance of tuberculosis, a bereaved father allowed his daughter’s corpse to be dug up and desecrated, though he did not attend the black rites. The author opines that, while it was known that the father did not believe in such nonsense, he let his neighbors have their way (at what great cost to himself) because he knew he had to continue to live with them and they’d been pestering him to allow this monstrous imposition. Read all about it: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/?all
Christianity cannot survive without coercion. The Religious Right knows it. Cameron knows it. Will the rest of us allow them to play these silly, destructive games just to prop up their sham of a religion that can’t manage unless others are forced against their will to join?
I can think of three reasons:
1. A lot of people don’t think very clearly about the distinction between government action and private action, or about the distinction between “stuff the government has to let private citizens do” and “stuff the government is allowed to do itself.” And so they don’t distinguish between “students praying on their own on school grounds during their free time, in a non-disruptive way” and “school employees leading students in prayer.” To them, the story is “prayer is banned,” and that’s an infringement of their rights!
This doesn’t just happen on religious issues; you see it on free speech issues all the time, as the recent xkcd comic showed.
2. A lot of people don’t understand that the Establishment Clause is (or, if you prefer, has been interpreted by the courts as) broader than just prohibiting a literal establishment of an official church or literally forcing people to pray or worship. They see things like public school prayer or Ten Commandments displays in courtrooms as being just a recognition of the reality that the majority of the constituents are Christians, and hey, nobody’s forcing you to pray, you can just sit there quietly like the outsider you are. This is partly some legitimate confusion — even the Supreme Court itself isn’t terribly enamored of the current doctrine in this area (the Lemon test), and would probably overturn it if they could actually agree on an alternative — and partly a lack of empathy for those with minority religious viewpoints.
3. A lot of people know damn well, but pretend not to know.
Just an FYI – since screechymonkey brought up the Lemon test sbout religion in the schools. My children attend a small charter high school, where class space is split between the office building and class space rented in the large church down the block. Of course, these rented rooms are *dripping* with Christian paraphernalia. Ugh. Fortunately, the school’s new dedicated building will be ready by fall, but in the meantime…
Parents are expected to volunteer, and one group that was listed as an approved group to log volunteer hours with was “Moms In Prayer.” Yes, folks, sitting on your fat ass and doing absolutely *NOTHING* counts as volunteering! I got that shut down after going through Moms In Prayer’s website and finding out that they attempt to cozy up to Christian teachers and get personal information about the students in their classes so they can pray for the problem ones – creepy stalky – and anyone who wants to join is required to sign a “statement of faith” containing conservative Evangelical talking points. Take a look at these three of their six statements of purpose:
– To pray that our children will receive Jesus as Lord and Savior, then stand boldly in their faith
– To pray that teachers, administrative staff, and students would come to faith in Jesus Christ
– To pray that our schools will be directed by biblical values and high moral standards
Their “vision statement” is that they want to see every school in the nation “covered with prayer” and of course the person in charge has *loads* of books and merchandise for YOU to BUY!!! They DO ask that their members refrain from speaking in tongues out loud during the prayer time, so there’s that O_O Also, it’s *JUST* for women – I guess the menfolk are expected to be busy out there and won’t have time to spend hours sitting on their fat asses doing nothing. They also have as one of their policies that their member moms are encouraged to meddle:
– A mom who knows a teacher personally and is confident that the teacher is a Christian may ask for prayer requests privately.
Okay, this is SCREAMINGLY inappropriate, especially as they openly declare that they target public school students for conversion! I got this group removed from the volunteer group list, but it wasn’t pleasant O_O
THEN, on a Tuesday evening, I got a mass mailing from the school that a Christian group that purports to work with victims of sexual slavery would be coming in Friday morning to appear at an official all-school assembly to ask the students for money for their “ministry”! Knowing I couldn’t go head to head with the principal again, I called in the Freedom From Religion Foundation. They had a strongly-worded email in the school’s mailbox the next day. Good people – if you need them, go to http://ffrf.org/
Ophelia — thanks again.
@quixote — Actually, to remain secular one has to avoid enforced secularization.
To touch on your point about the Communists: many atheists have taken the position that since religion is bad, then it’s perfectly ok to make things uncomfortable for minority religions. That isn’t what they say, of course, but it’s why someone like Hirsi Ali is so problematic. Out in the Russian Far East, for instance, there were many minority religions — all non Christian Orthodox — and because secularism and modernity were, to the Communist party, self-evidently good, the party decided that enforcing that via law and such was a fine idea.
Now, far be it from me to say that religion is by itself a good thing, but I hope you can understand why the language of the Communists — who were all about modernity — started to echo the same colonialist language that made forced religious conversion a de facto policy of the BIA in the US when dealing with Native Americans. The result for the Chukchis and Tunguskan peoples and the Aleuts was a disaster. But the Communist party people were completely blind to their own biases in this regard.
Enforced secularism isn’t just secularism — it is, as you say, a lack of respect for the tights of others.
And I might add: the cultural pervasiveness of Christianity is precisely why nobody batted an eye about setting up essentially religious schools for Natives here in the US. After all, Christianity was the norm.
Many atheists I know of are guilty of this blind spot — not thinking through what cultural norms mean, and ignoring the fact that privilege is context-dependent and that your being modern and western — even if you have “enlightened” values, isn’t self-evidently good for everyone everywhere. Just ask a Lakota about it sometime — I have. You might say that religion is a bad thing, but would you outlaw the practice of the Sun Dance, which to white folks looks pretty awful? It involves a lot of pain and blood, and one could get into all kinds of arguments about agency for the participants.
For secularism the rubber meets the road precisely when minority religions are involved. If you can’t protect those “others” then no, you aren’t being a secularist, you’re just enforcing a set of norms that may or may not be good. And you have to figure this out on a case by case basis a lot of the time.
Allowing someone to pray in school is not the same as forcing people to do it. As the old joke goes there will be prayer in school as long as there are finals. A kid wants to say grace before lunch? Let ’em go nuts, it won’t harm anyone else. A Muslim kid needs to pray 5 times? No problem, as long as they don’t disrupt classes. After all, we let kids out for Easter (recognizing the Christian majority here) and we have whole schools here in New York where half the kids disappear for passover ’cause they have to get home before sunset. Nobody cares or notices anymore.
But the other side of that is people don’t feel stepped on. And that’s important.
@Blanche Quizno — I made the point that there were lots of Christian sects. The Founders didn’t include Jews or Hindus in their calculations, but the fact that the Establishment clause exists at all left room for them to live in the US at all and claim the rights that were theirs. (Yes the history is a bit more complex than that, but that is the TL; DR version.) And the religious violence that was still current then was between Christian sects. But the fact that a religious test for federal office was expressly prohibited was huge for that time.
I say all this because I come from a family where secularism was really important. My grandmother had the unfortunate bad luck to be Japanese in the US during WW II. On the bright side she was a resident of Utah, so she was able to bring food to the people in the concentration camps. Yes, that’s what they were.
At the time the rhetoric wasn’t about Christian values per se, but much of the propaganda was about how as non-Christians and non-westerners — Buddhists and Shintoists, no less — Japanese or Chinese people could never assimilate into western society. In fact some of the language used about Muslim immigrants especially sounds all too familiar.
quixote @#1:
“And then in the last paragraph, are you saying that secularism gives people a stake in society? The early Communists were extremely secular, but that wasn’t enough to make whole swathes of the population feel included. I think what you mean is mutual respect for each other’s rights, which is not a synonym of secularism.”
jesse also wrote:
“At least in the US, one of the reasons for an explicitly secular constitution is that there was a large variety of Christian sects in the US even then. Secularism was meant in part to leave room for that, so you wouldn’t leave anyone feeling alienated.”
When religious competition splits the society into a multitude of small contending grouplets, you get democracy along US lines. When sectarian conflict splits the society into two huge blocs (eg Syria) you get something else again.
@Jesse
“Actually, to remain secular one has to avoid enforced secularization.”
Secularism is not atheism. It is neutrality. Secularism requires the force of law in some circumstances, typically restricting government employees and political office holders from abusing their authority in order proselytize. This is not imposing a belief system on anyone.
Secularism without enforcement is not secularism at all.
When people feel alienated from the political process or the society in which they live, that’s when you get political violence
The violence in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, etc was perpetrated by people who were far from alienated from the political process.
@quixote — Actually, to remain secular one has to avoid enforced secularization
Secularism is freedom from religion. To say that to remain secular one has to avoid ‘enforcing’ that freedom is as absurd as arguing to that to defend against slavery we should refrain from ‘enforcing’ anti-slavery laws or that in order to defend free speech we should not ‘enforce’ the right to speak freely.
It’s an abuse of common sense.
@ 6 jesse
There’s a famous Jefferson quote (well, famous amongst atheists who like to argue against “the United States was founded as a Christian country” anyway) that suggests the founders were conscious of more than competing Christian sects.
Allowing someone to pray in school is not the same as forcing people to do it. As the old joke goes there will be prayer in school as long as there are finals. A kid wants to say grace before lunch? Let ‘em go nuts, it won’t harm anyone else. A Muslim kid needs to pray 5 times? No problem,
Horseshit. How is a child absenting themselves from the classroom 5 times a day, every day, not disrupting the class while also putting them at a disadvantage? It’s not the same as Easter holidays. Holidays may be timed around Christian festivals (that few actually celebrate religiously) but they’re fairly evenly spaced and children need breaks sometimes – and all children will have these breaks at the sometimes so none are disadvantaged.
No it is not. To give just one example, having to teach evolution is privileging groups that don’t have a problem with it over groups that feel evolution is against their doctrine.
An other problem is that accommodating for people’s freedom of conscience is as good as always accommodating organised religions and almost never an individuals conscience. If one person refuses to participate with the obligated swimming lesson, his arguments are ignored and he receives an F. If muslim girls refuse because it goes against their regulations of prudence then that has to be accommodated. In the end this means that religious people are often given a choice where not religious people are not, all in the name of freedom of religion while it actually means you need to be a member of a certain religion to have a choice.
@6. jesse :
You want to expand on that please?
For starters you’ve already noted that isn’t what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said but instead your interpretation -some like me would note misinterpretation of what she’s saying.
Then too “minority” religions aren’t all the same and vary in extent of the issues they cause for others in society. Worshippers of the Flying Sphaghetti Monsters for instance cause few problems as long as you put up with the odd person dressed as a pirate whereas Buddhists may require the small thing of adding vegetarian catering and extremist Muslims that demand nobody else in the world ever mocks their prophet on pain of riots, death threats and terrorism – yeah, a whole huge problem caused by their own intolerant actions and unwillingness to accept others.
Could also quibble about your definition of “religion is bad” and “many atheists” I spose as well.
@Axxyan —
Look, I am an atheist myself and feel very strongly that if an atheist kid doesn’t want to say the pledge of allegiance because of the “under god” reference then they should be free to not do so. The same has to apply the other way.
And you speak as if there is no such thing as a case-by-case workaround. For example, Sikhs wear turbans sometimes — so to work with that and meet the uniform requirements some police departments have designed turbans that take the place of the traditional hat. Problem solved. (And I have never heard of a Sikh so stupid that they forego the benefits of army helmets when necessary).
Muslim girls and swimming lesson is another case where the workaround is bloody simple. Olympic athletes wear full-body covering bathing suits. It’s not like you can’t design one. A Muslim child who wants to pray and that comes during classes is easy: there were four to five minutes between classes where I went to school. The breaks occurred about every 45 minutes. I’m old enough that we had a smoking courtyard, and the kids were able to find time for a puff. (The under-18 tobacco purchase rules were not enforced in the 80s) Prayer doesn’t take any longer and those kids wouldn’t have gotten cancer.
Sometimes you have to do that — work with people and around their needs. Proscriptive and absolutist solutions are limited, I think. And maybe it’s just me but I try to think about what stuff means for marginalized populations.
Also, a lot of what we deem “secular” is sometimes not at all that — it’s an expression of culture that is deeply religious but we can’t see it because it’s background noise. And I ask that people who bang on about secularism — myself included — think hard about whether what is secular is actually just norms for white wealthy people from European cultures.
We see this in a number of areas — take the education of doctors. You’d think that it would be pretty straightforward. But my mother entered med school in the 1970s. My sister did thirty years later. Both noted that stuff that is ostensibly a neutral meritocracy is entirely based on the assumption that the student is a young single male as opposed to a married woman with kids (as in my mom’s case) or a married woman generally (my sister) or a woman period (both). But nobody notices that structure because it’s a structure that you can’t see if you’re in it and it’s based on assumptions that people take as read.
@Shatterface – well Godwin came early. Anyhow, you know damned well that there’s a difference between people who feel alienated from the political process and turn to violence and governments and privileged classes perpetrating it. People who are marginalized turn to violence when you tell them that there is no place for them in your polity. I could point to a dozen historical examples in the last century where the insurgents were crystal clear about it. Ghandi was clear about it. (He said that if the Brits didn’t listen to him they were going to get a lot worse to deal with).
This is why we have things like freedom of speech. (As Donna Lieberman of the ACLU put it, “Freedom of speech is what you have instead of terrorism.”). And how do you enforce freedom of speech? By disallowing entities in authority from regulating or preventing it. Enforcement by non-enforcement, as it were.
Accommodating religious practice in a secular setting means something very different for minorities who aren’t part of the dominant culture. We talk about the evils of religion a lot but it was keeping their religion that enabled Native people to survive genocidal campaigns in the US — it would have been easy to give up and become darker-skinned white people. They did not, and it’s a good thing, too. Yet ostensibly secular institutions were dedicated to wiping their culture out –their religion — for decades.
And again I say this is precisely why public institutions have to remain as neutral as they can and allow spaces for people to do and believe as they feel they must, either by dictates of faith or politics. Think of it as a governmental version of DBAD.
@jesse #15
What do you mean with: “The same has to apply the other way”? Do you think religious people should be free to discard any regulation that is against their religion?
I find your case by case workarounds unconvincing and they illustrate the typical group think. What if one induvidual perfers bowler hats. Are these same police departments going to design bowler hats that take the place of the traditional hat? Somehow I doubt that very much? Everyone should be treated the same, so either everyon has to go with the traditional hat or everyone get some kind of choice of what they put on their head. Only allowing people a choice if their is a religious foundation, is priviliging the religious.
And no your work around for muslim girls is not bloody simple, they can simply argue that because wet closing tend to cling to the body and thus reveal their feaures, swiming itself is getting the girls imprudent. And why should we allow them to design their own bathing suit? What if an acceptable prudent bathing suit would be unsafe to actually swim in. And if we allow the moslims to design their own bathing suit, should not we allow this to the other girls too? Should we allow the girls to turn the swimming lesson into a fashion show?
What workaround is there in the case of learning evolution in school?
And what about the bare wrist rule by the NIH in the U.K. This is a hygiene regulation that all medical staff has to obey. Muslims have protested it, because showing your wrists is imprudent for girls. Should we allow the muslims to discard health regulations?
You write you try to think about what stuff means for marginalized populations, why only for marginalized populations and not for marginalized individuals?
Everybody has to make choices in his life. If I would like to become a police officer but at the same time I find the uniform unfit for me to wear, I will have to make a choice between what I find most important, becomimg a police officer or not wearing clothing that I find unfit for myself. Nobody is going to argue that if the goverment is unwilling to change the uniform to my taste that they are discriminating against me.
I see no reason to change this just because the reason I find the uniform unfit to wear is religious. If someone’s principles go against regulations in place for a specific job, that person will have to deliberate which is more important to him. And if he find his principle more important he will have to bear the cost of those principle himself. Sure there are cases for which we could argue the regulations are not really functional for the job. But in that case the regulation should be adapted, we shouldn’t allow exceptions for some specific religious group whille demanding the rest they still adhere to those regulations. Every individual has the right to the same flexibility. Not just religious people.
Axxyaan
I don’t understand why you’re generalising from a specific statement Jesse made about the pledge for allegiance – that atheist kids should be free to say it without the inclusion of “under god” and the same has to apply the other way i.e. religious kids should be free to say it with the inclusion of “under god”.
Jesse is arguing for a pluralist multi-cultural secularism, which includes making accommodations for people of all faiths (and none) in areas where bloodyminded rule-following would exclude the participation of people from many minority cultural groups. If your secularism doesn’t care about pluralism and multi-cultural inclusion, that’s your call. Just don’t be surprised if all those minority cultures you’re excluding then add up to a majority bloc who won’t vote for the secular rules you want to see.
@tig tog
Because to be honest that doesn’t make much sense to me. Does this mean we should allow kids to include “under god” to whatever we ask them to recite? How does that work when they are asked to recite something togethere and they name their gods differently or the phrase to show respect to their god is different. Can non-religious kid add something to their choosing too or can only religious kids add some kind of phrasing because only some reverence to a god is allowed here. That doesn’t seem like very secular.
In the end this just seems to propagate the previlige of the religious under the guise of secularity.