New Religious Politics: How Secularists Got Lost.

 

A New Phase in the Politics of Religion: How Secularists Got Lost.

For left secularists few events can have been more depressing than Marine Le Pen’s announcement that her far-right party, the Front National (FN), was now the defender of French laïcité. The apparent conversion of the youngest daughter of France’s 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State has not been the only saddening story. The British left (with the exception of Solidarity) and the liberal Guardian ignored one of the most important trials of acts of  religious hatred in Britain for years. In May  four Muslims were given lengthy sentences for a vicious attack with a metal rod and bricks on East London teacher Gary Smith. The reason? In religious instruction he, an unbeliever, was giving lessons about Islam to Muslim girls.

Across Europe the politics of religion are changing. Attempts are being made to single out Islam. From Denmark and Holland, to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, populist parties claiming to defend national identity have targeted the followers of the Qur’an. The most famous symbol of this trend is in France. The President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has banned the public wearing of the face-veil, while his “positive” secularism encourages the emergence of a ‘French’ Islam. Religious issues are, in this way, increasingly politicised and immersed in the noxious discourse of national identity.

Here all mainstream parties pride themselves on tolerance towards the outward display of Muslim belief. Only would-be imitators of the Continental far-right, that is parts of the media and the English Defence League, seize on Islam. But instead of offering an anti-racist response, the Liberal-Conservative Coalition has adopted some of Sarkozy’s integrationalist policies. The ‘Prevent’ programme, designed to combat Islamic extremism, has been reshaped. Its aim now is to draw Muslims into a state defined ‘post-multiculturalism’, demanding that they accept British “mainstream values”. The spying on ‘extremists’  is deeply undemocratic, as can be seen by its use against left-wing radicals  – here. Political attention to religion has extended further. Ed Miliband has appealed to Blue Labour whose ideal of the ‘Good Life’ is equally patriotic and draws heavily on faith claims to virtue.

The new politics of religion places great importance on the role of the State in fostering religious institutions. Not surprisingly many religious figures welcome recognition of their authority. Demands on public policy, from the evangelical Mothers’ Union report on the sexualisation of children, to efforts to curb abortion rights, are increasingly listened to. There is a continued creep towards making it impossible to offend religious sensibilities. David Cameron’s Localism is much more serious than his already shop-soiled rhetoric about the Big Society suggests. It will give devout groups, as charitable institutions, a fundamental role in social and community life bypassing democratic control.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s protests against the Coalition’s polities would have had more weight if religious organisations were not plundering State coffers to set up Academies and Free Schools. As would the left’s voice, if it recognised that acts such as the assault on Gary Smith demonstrate that religious intolerance is a problem. Instead the left places its hope in integrating faith groups through their own version of multiculturalism. Ken Livingstone’s efforts in this direction, which give prominence to fighting Islamophobia and binding faith communities in ‘progressive coalitions’, are widely followed. They have the effect of paralysing the left’s response to the Coalition’s faith agenda.

Secularist Failures.

A.G.Grayling’s self-interested support for the cause of private University education is an illustration of the limits of New Atheism. Its renewed criticism of sacred books and doctrines is to be welcomed. It has often been done with great verve – to the annoyance of the pious. Since the days of Charles Bradlaugh and Colonel Ingersoll, not to mention the writings of French anti-clericals, such the novelist Anatole France, this has not been done so well. But it has not inspired any great intellectual renewal, still less a New Enlightenment. More importantly, the politics of the New Atheists are, like Grayling, flawed. The New College of Humanities looks increasingly like it will resemble the privileged niche that the majority of British secularists are trapped in.

New Atheism has not led to any serious intellectual innovation. It is frequently misdirected. The believers lament at the New Atheists lack of theological knowledge – it generally stops before the 20^th century – and ignorance of modern Biblical criticism. Both, it has to be admitted, are obvious even to this outsider. To which one can add that their philosophical alternatives are thin to the point of invisibility.

Dawkins’ ‘theory’ of religion as a system of memes (self-replicating ideas selected for survival value) is unlikely to be carried into future generations. It, as critics are not slow to point out, has little explanatory power (and a causal mechanism binding it to genes). Daniel C. Dennett’s elaboration of this, that religion is rooted in “an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency.” dates back to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Universe (1^st century CE). A simple theological objection, that god is not an ever-present cause of events, throws this claim back to the query – why there should be something rather than nothing. We may prefer science to respond to many of our why questions, but this one remains, as yet, unanswerable.

Whether some kind of religious ‘need’ is inherent in some human beings, and might be something part of their make-up, is hard to determine. Evidence seems to point that way. But its manifestations, as William James showed, go further into the depths of human ‘experience’ of a ‘beyond’ than simple reaction to events (The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902). More social accounts begin from the observation that religions are time-bound. Sociological explanations of faith as a projection of human characteristics onto alienated objects (Feuerbach and the young Marx) or society worshiping itself (Durkheim) try to capture these developing forms. They were updated long ago. The New Atheists have added little to accounts of how religious ideologies are created, play a part in protests and in power, and are sustained, absorbed into social being, the state and politics. Christopher Hitchens uses great wit and a fine analytical razor to cut faith up. But he ends by calling religion ‘barbarism’ and suggests, in a windy generality, that it is a fount of totalitarianism (god Is Not Great. 2007).

Michel Onfray brings such cack-handed politics to the fore. “My atheism leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter, when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organise a world for others.” (In Defence of Atheism. 2007) More politely one could see that if religion is a public matter then atheism has something public to say. But what does it? Onfray alleges that religion is a reaction to fear (and life’s unpleasantness), and, as a quasi-mental illness, leads to various forms of pathological totalitarianism.

Grayling’s own arguments are equally threadbare. In Against All Gods (2007) he asserted that “Religion is a man-made device, not least of oppression and control (the secret policeman who sees what you do even in the dark on your own), whose techniques and structures were adopted by Stalinism and Nazism, the monolithic salvation faiths of modernity, as the best teachers they could wish for.” One would wish for, perhaps, a sketch, of why Theology foreshadowed the Gulag and the Shoah. Or how the countless acts of kindness by, no doubt mentally challenged, believers over the centuries count as nought. But no.

Who will oppose these forces? As an academic turned entrepreneur Grayling is unlikely to endorse Onfray’s support for “the jokers, materialists, radicals, cynics, hedonists, atheists, sensualists, voluptuaries”. Or indeed his un-business like hope in a “hapax existentionel” (unique unprecedented event) that may come along and upset everything, religion included. Instead we have the no doubt, as Grayling says, “kind, considerate, peace-loving, courageous, truthful, loyal to friends, affectionate to our families, aspirants to knowledge, lovers of art and nature, seekers after the good of humankind.” lobbyists of the British Humanist Association, and others. Their political strategy appears to be to try to stem succeeding governments’ growing reliance on religious bodies. These ties from the state to civil society are the real issue. The state absorption of religious communities and accommodation to the values of faith is unlikely to be fought by politely asking for a Humanist voice to be part of the ‘dialogue’.

Secularism and Republicanism.

The impasse of British humanism mirrors that of the, much more socially rooted, French secularist movement, which had little success in its last big campaign (in the mid-80s) to bring the state subsidised Catholic education system under public control. At present it too is fighting a rearguard action against ‘positive secularism’ – state efforts to enter the religious fray. But here the comparison strains. French secularism embraces humanism in its widest sense, that is, ‘free-thinkers’ of a religious turn, traditional anti-clericals, social democrats, rationalists, atheists, some powerful freemason lodges, and social liberals. But is also involves many Marxists, socialists, and anarchists – groups which in the United Kingdom play a peripheral role in public debate and policy on religion.

Yet the French secularists have influenced ordinary people’s ideas. The appeal to freedom from religious authority may well have flaws in a capitalist society where other forms of domination have far graver effects. But it is a widely accepted principle. Sarkozy’s opportunistic decision to ban face covering was not universally welcomed by secularists, many of whom protested at the law’s extension to all public spaces. It singled out Muslim women. It pandered to the far-right’s defence of one identity against another.

But for the French secularist left the ‘Sharia in the street’, the full-body veil, has raised a number of problems. This is not just a sign that one has faith, but that Islamic Law covers women’s whole appearance. Many on the secularist left see the undeniable rise in women covering up (extremely marginal in France but certainly not so rare elsewhere, as in the United Kingdom) as evidence of a proto-state movement with an anti-feminist agenda. The Islamists’ wish to control ‘their’ females is a difficulty for anyone promoting cultural pluralism. Sarkozy’s demagogy and religious law can, however, be opposed by demands for gender equality and co-operation with the very large constituency of Muslims who also see secularism as a liberating force.

Only a minority of the left, French or European, defend all opposition to secularist Republicanism, that is whether in the shape of the existing state, or a potential social republic. Their criticisms have more than a little in common with Hippolyte Taine’s attack on the Jacobin period of the French Revolution and the attempt to enforce a civic doctrine and ban any other “religion positive” (Les Origines de la France Contemporaine. Vol. 4. 1884). This Jacobin heritage continues, many on the social democratic centre argue. More influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville, theorists such as Pierre Rosanvallon put in question the republican concept of popular sovereignty at the ground of the Revolution.

For more radical theorists France’s colonial past and present-day incorporation into global capital markets and imperial alliances, is also indebted to the nationalist Jacobin past. It remains active in the state ideological apparatus and political parties. The secular republic, masked by popular sovereignty, that the left supports is a falsely universal device, a cover for this deeper structure that dominates domestic minorities and absorbs class struggle. In Britain Alex Callinicos, from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), has employed a version of this approach. He alleges that the influence on the French left of an “all-embracing republican identity” leads in an “ethnic and exclusivist” direction. (Marxists, Muslims and Religion: Anglo-French Attitudes. Historical Materialism. 16.2.)

Few people in the United Kingdom take an interest in these arguments. Nor in other voices hostile to republican secularism, which uphold the right of the Other-wearing Burka, to defy the world of mass sexualised consumption. Some found the Islamists’ use of the concept of ‘group rights’ appealing – ignoring the communitarian implications of such claims over people inside the ‘group’. But the majority of the British left, which talks of collective class rights, found with their humanist and liberal counterparts that there was a straightforward individual entitlement to wear the Burka or the Niqab. In the cases of some, this position, which silently drops any opposition to intimidating religious obligation, is motivated by far more pressing concerns. The very real bullying of the domestic far-right, such as the EDL, it goes without saying, is of more immediate importance. For others, however, there was a less understandable degree of indulgence towards the Islamist right.

Egalitarian Universalism.

Despite this there are indications that republican secularism has strengths when confronting many issues. Against Callinicos’s assertions, republican secularism on the French left, promoted against Sarkozy, shows some signs of an “egalitarian universalism”. The wide solidarity shown in last year’s French protests against Pension Reform illustrate that republicanism has a broad social basis (it will be interesting to see if a parallel solidarity on June the 30^th in the UK happens). Marine Le Pen’s ‘laïcité’ is an attempt to capture this substrate. But her claims are hollow: the Front National is profoundly Catholic, nurtured in the counter-revolutionary tradition that considered the French revolution a Diabolic interruption of the Divine Order. If proof were needed her ‘national-secularism’ can be contrasted with the open-minded internationalism of the secular left.

The Arab Spring itself has opened up a new basis for world-wide democratic and social advance; one that directly confronts not just Western supported dictatorships, but also poses the problem of Islamist projects. A secular, that is ‘religion-neutral’ approach to opposing the ideology of various religious groups, including forms of Islamism, has already had an influence in the countries from which many European Muslims originated. This is now a key battle-ground. Morality, and the Sharia are at stake. Opposition to the desire of faith leaders to order public life, to restore a segmented organic while that globalising culture threatens. In Egypt and Tunisia the demands of Muslim ‘Constitutionalists’ who seek to seal public and private life around their ideology, by law, and (if need be) by intimidation, have been opposed. If genuine secularist internationalism is to emerge it has to liase with political forces in the countries swept up in the Arab revolts. The potential for internationalist co-operation on these, and wider social issues, has never been greater. Unlike the majority of the British left, the French secularist left has nurtured contact with these forces, notably in North Africa,

Secularism continues to have European implications. Callinicos denies that Islam has great political influence in this continent He notes that its followers are amongst the “poorest and most disadvantaged” and the least powerful. This neglects the effect Islamic religious politics have had on public life. Following in Muslim footsteps, as described by Kenan Malik’s book on the aftermath of the Rushdie Affair, others have entered the fray. Now the State is opening up to the influence of faith (From Fatwa to Jihad. 2009) One religion after another demands that its beliefs be protected from criticism, that it has a right to interfere in social policy that it can carry out state functions. As indicated earlier, this is now happening.

The SWP and most of the left has not opposed the state’s turn. The Guardian’s battery of religious left enthusiasts, and professional Islamophiles has embraced it. One of their favourite figures, Tariq Ramadan, is, at Oxford, and other sinecures, not amongst the least effective. Some may welcomes his, or any, influence of faith on public life. But such an appeal to the interests of the divine, which separates us into believers and unbelievers, is unlikely to further the cause of egalitarian universalism.

How Not To Protest and Secularism’s Future.

Radical egalitarian secularism exists in Britain. But its vociferous, if erratic, media presence has not been either effective or attractive. A low point was reached last year with the Protest the Pope campaign. As its aggressive American title implies this was intended as part of a culture war. The New Atheists had set the tone by alleging that believers were either deluded or highly unpleasant people. Legitimate protest at the state recognition and financial support the Catholic Church received for the visit was swamped by other charges. The direct object of this campaign, the Pope, was accused of a host of crimes. That he was guilty of permitting institutionalised prejudice against gays is one thing. But it was implied that he was personally responsible for covering up child abuse. The message was that Benedict was Bad, and probably Worse.

This is, to say the least, distasteful. It may be tempting to reverse the old jibe (largely extinct in Europe) that no-one without faith in the divine can be honest and virtuous. But this impulse, even for a contrarian, is empty. It is simple to apply these charges to Moslem clerics to see how dangerously intertwined with prejudice this could quickly become. There is no more evidence that the religious are better or worse than anybody else. Goodness is too important to be the property of either atheists or believers. It is actions that are at stake, not people’s ideas.

The real difficulty with religious groups is that they appeal to something outside that world, with apparent greater authority than anything else. This cannot be communicated under any possible conditions to those who do not share their premises. In a secular state this creates a permanent tension. Politics are about interests, personalities, and clashes between them. But they also involve the way people rank their needs in these conditions – their values. Whether they are represented or are direct actors, religiously inspired political players have the potential to stray onto their own agenda. It is blindingly obvious that nobody can prevent this happening. But the secularist case is that an enduring overlapping consensus, in which political opponents appear as adversaries and not as root-and-branch enemies can only be built by setting up areas of neutrality. These have to be defined by secularism.

Historically support for secularism has come as much from religious minorities (Protestant dissidents across Europe, Alevis in Turkey, and many other examples) as from atheists and free-thinkers. The desire for an authority that does not trump the right to determine one’s own religious or non-religious practices has a wide basis of support. It is exactly this ground which present bi-partisan government policy is undermining, with the alternative strategy of building consensus amongst believers and incorporating this within the state.

The use of the public power to impose a faith-led programme is not, by contrast, except in countries where a political religion such as Islamism has support, an immediate possibility. But the new religious-state agenda is being introduced in Western countries that have a long and dishonourable history of promoting particular religious doctrines. In more than a few certain religions enjoy special publicly subsidised status. To alter this by making, say the future King of England, the ‘defender of the faiths’ is a step towards a newly privileged role. Religions, with their legions of the unseen, deserve no particular regard for their position. Above all the present day moves towards special consideration for them has to be opposed on egalitarian grounds.

The present-day policy has had the effect of turning public debate away from interest-led politics. For the left they weaken a response to the important topics of class exploitation and other oppressions. Class politics, unlike religious or ethnic ‘community’, can be aligned to an open identity, which unites people, from any faith or non-faith background, around the prospect of a better world without these barriers here and now. Institutionalised faith is not the only obstacle to class politics. But it is one that still has to be confronted. It may well be that many believers, particularly from minorities, will, as we have cited, find that it is better to support secularist equality than to plunge into the world of administrative power being colonised by the loudest and best-funded religious organisations.

Reshaping the State.

The evidence is that religious influence is so deeply entrenched that only a really radical, revolutionary, reshaping of the state could bring real egalitarian secularism about. This would not require a carnival of anti-clerical demonstrations. But it would imply a serious commitment by left political parties. A modern day secular socialism would not aim for a republic of virtue but a democratic self-managed society that respected religious privacy.

A minimum demand is for a radical secularisation of the British state, the establishment of the Church, an end to public funding for religious bodies, and for their removal from state services (including education), and their representation on consultative bodies to be severely reduced. A maximum programme would imply that an overlapping consensus that religion is a private affair would have to be hammered out. Despite its seemingly uncontroversial air, this would mean tackling the entrenched claims of Churches, Temples, Mosques and Synagogues, that certain children automatically ‘belong’ to them.

Science can perhaps, as Sam Harris informs us, help our exploration of the “moral landscape”. Harris claims that this can resolve “meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose, “questions about the well being of conscious creatures” (The Moral Landscape 2010). But it’s hard to see that these rule out the quest for religion. People hold such ideas, strongly. Why there is something rather than Nothing? For some there’s an answer in god. Alain Badiou faces the material absoluteness of the singular Messianic Event, and pursues the Truth of the Idea of Communism. A person may want the Jesus to help the seeds sprout and ensure the food supply. Science will probably be an aid only in the latter case. For the rest, Terry Eagleton, and others, can and should, pursue their lonely search of the ground of being. *

* The Meaning of Life. Terry Eagleton. Oxford. 2008.