A strange piece appearing in Saturday's Financial Times of London, written by "a senior editor at the Weekly Standard" who does not, it would seem, wish to be identified, takes as its point of departure Tony's Blair's recent remark that "We know that these people act in the name of Islam but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor terrorism every bit as much as we do." -- The short article goes on to argue that "we" suffer from a confusion "not simply over what is religion and what is culture," but "over what a religion is in the first place." -- While it does not entirely dispel "our" confusion and its meditative tone and book-review-like form hardly make it seem alarming, in content the doctrine advanced by this anonymous article is quite radical and far-reaching. -- "The Sacred Cow of Religious Rights," as the article is entitled, is a challenge to one of the pillars of the secular Republic and of the Enlightenment: the possibility of a society that respects religious freedom. -- "The Sacred Cow of Religious Rights" is based largely on a book published by Princeton University Press on June 1, 2005, and written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a professor at the University of Chicago, that bastion of neoconservatism. -- The book's title is The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. -- Following upon Friday's editorial in the Financial Times proclaiming that "It is all too much," and that the West must now embrace a generalized ethic of "intervention" with regard to all states in the world and disparaging the United Nations, we find that the Financial Times is becoming the launching pad for some disturbing doctrines that are not conducive to general peace in the world, to say the least (though they are conducive to, for example, war with Iran). -- The Weekly Standard, of course, is the journal of opinion edited by William Kristol, one of the leading lights of the American neoconservative movement. -- In our view, it is quite possible that William Kristol himself is the author of this piece, or that he dictated that it be written and published. -- What is certain, in any case, is that William Kristol and the views that he holds (along with others who look to him for guidance) on religion and culture are not merely matters of intellectual interest in the early 21st century. -- They are, rather, key components of U.S. policies as implemented by the Bush administration and as articulated, before 2001, in the documents of the Project for a New American Century. -- One of the distinctive characteristics of American neoconservatism is a "cultural" embrace of religion, which means that the importance of religion for the masses can be embraced without the slightest element of belief on the part of leaders. -- The subtext of this piece is that Muslims' religion need not apply for this function, though it does not say so explicitly. -- This Thursday, July 21, at 6:30 p.m., at First United Methodist Church in Tacoma (423 Martin Luther King Jr. Way), United for Peace of Pierce County will be showing "The Phantom Victory," Part II of the three-hour BBC documentary film by Adam Curtis, "The Power of Nightmares" that Britons have seen twice on BBC television but which Americans are not being allowed to see (lest "we" become even more confused, no doubt, and because it challenges the narrative frame of the Global War on Terrorism that is now well-positioned to lead the entire world into a generation-long war of religion, in the name of -- what, exactly?)....
Comment
THE SACRED COW OF RELIGIOUS RIGHTS
Financial Times (UK)
July 16, 2005
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/63c55dc2-f595-11d9-8ffc-00000e2511c8.html
After episodes of Islamist terrorism -- whether in New York after September 11, 2001, or in London last week -- Islam itself has tended to face high levels of suspicion and even hostility. But, surprisingly, such incidents have also elicited a raft of praise for Islam from political leaders. In his televised address in the wake of the London bombings, Tony Blair, the prime minister, said: "We know that these people act in the name of Islam but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor terrorism every bit as much as we do." Days later, he extolled "the moderate and true voice of Islam."
As when President George W. Bush, four years ago, proclaimed that "Islam is peace," Mr. Blair risks sounding like protesting too much. For if the terrorists' idea of religion is as perverted as he says, then their attitude towards true religion should be of no more import than, say, the economic program of the Red Brigades. Most likely what Mr. Blair means is radicalism among certain Muslims should not be allowed to shake western traditions of freedom of religion.
But how secure are these traditions in the first place? Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a scholar of religion and law at the University of Chicago, has just published a smart -- and in the present circumstances, sobering -- little book called The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press). Her argument implies we have overestimated the amount of real religious difference that even a tolerant democracy can handle. Freedom of religion can be called a "basic" right, but it is not one that goes without saying.
Ms. Sullivan's book deals with a federal court case (Warner v. Boca Raton) in which religious sensibilities were riled by seemingly small matters. The city of Boca Raton, Florida, established a public graveyard. Whether to ensure the site looked "classy" or to make the cemetery lawn easier to mow, the authorities had rules against gravestones and other memorials. Small, flat grave markers, flush with the grass, were used instead. Over the years, this regulation was honored in the breach. Groundkeepers turned a blind eye to, and even encouraged, the installation of Stars of David and shrines to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Cemetery authorities ordered the monuments removed, to the relief of some neighbors, who found the displays garish, or "not Boca." But Florida, like many states, has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which places heavy burdens of proof on government entities that try to limit exercise of religion. The plot owners sued. Ms. Sullivan testified in their favor. And they got clobbered.
Most of the plaintiffs in the case were Catholics, with a scattering of Jews, and the judge was Protestant. That may or may not have been important. What was important was that the entire legal idiom in which cases like these get argued in America is a Protestant one. For the court's purposes, writes Ms. Sullivan, true religion "came to be understood as being private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed. Public, coercive, communal, oral and enacted religion, on the other hand, was seen to be 'false'." Religions with a large role for ritual or community or sacred objects -- such as American Catholicism in the 19th century or Islam today -- are not always intelligible to this system.
Attorneys on both sides of the Warner case were uncomfortable talking about religion, and preferred to address the issues as if they were the same as those in free speech cases. Ms. Sullivan notes that they often spoke of religious "views" and "expression." But protecting expression or views or opinions cannot be the aspiration the American founding fathers had in mind when they included freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights. It if were, then protecting freedom of speech would have been sufficient. The problem is that not all people understand religious freedom as freedom of speech about holy things. For many, religion is primarily a matter of allegiance and custom.
Not all of these customs arise from a religion's doctrines and holy writings. This opens up an avenue for misunderstanding and those most zealous about protecting religious freedom can be led down it quite easily. It is always the temptation of political authorities to take the parts of an alien religion that are similar to one's own and call them (protected) religion, then to take the parts that are foreign to one's own and call them (unprotected) culture. The Warner prosecution argued that there was no "genuine" religious reason for preferring a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to a headstone that is flush to the ground and the court accepted this view. After all, such statues are not a "requirement" of Catholicism. The court, Ms. Sullivan argues, "frequently implied the plaintiffs did not understand their own religion."
We hear echoes of this strategy for understanding religious diversity in Mr. Blair's pronouncement on what is, and is not, true Islam. Similarly, most discussion of the Islamic headscarf in both France and Turkey has turned on whether such coverings are "religious" or "political." As a practical matter, such judgments are totally in the eye of the beholder. Judges and legislators seem powerless to resolve them.
To determine when religious expression is a right, courts need to determine when it is present at all. Maybe freedom of religion can be realized only where religious differences are limited as a sociological matter, as they have been between American faiths; or where people are demoralized by some historical calamity with a strongly religious element, like Protestants and Catholics after the Thirty Years War or Christians, Jews, and atheists in the 50 years after the second world war. Meanwhile, our confusion is not simply over what is religion and what is culture. It is over what a religion is in the first place.
--The writer is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
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