Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has arrived back home from his visit to China just in time to weigh in on the heated controversy over public wearing of religious symbols. He returned from a country that, in his view, is slowly moving away from an official policy of militant secularism—although there is still a very long way to go to full recognition of religious freedom.
The Chinese Government now repeats regularly that religion is essential to the “harmonious society” it aims to create — the sort of statement that would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago. Of course, it is religion on the Government’s terms. What China means by religious freedom is not unrestricted liberty of association.
It is ironic that, at a time when China is beginning to recognise the social benefits of religious activity and practice, many Britons say they want the UK to become a secular society. That, says Dr Williams, would make the state the arbiter of which manifestations of religion are acceptable and which are not.
Yet when people talk about whether we should “become a secular society”, I wonder if they realise that they are in effect echoing the idea that the basic and natural form of political organisation is a central authority that “franchises” associations, and grants or withholds their right to exist publicly and legally within the State. Up to now, we have in practice taken for granted that the State is not the source of morality and legitimacy but a system that brokers, mediates and attempts to co-ordinate the moral resources of those specific communities, the merely local and the credal or issue-focused, which actually make up the national unit. This is a “secular” system in the sense that it does not impose legal and civil disabilities on any one religious body; but it is not secular in the sense of giving some kind of privilege to a non-religious or anti-religious set of commitments or policies. Moving towards the latter would change our political culture more radically than we imagine.
So the ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen — no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils — is a politically dangerous one. It assumes that what comes first in society is the central political “licensing authority”, which has all the resource it needs to create a workable public morality.
Few places have tried as systematically as China to set this in stone; and now there is a tacit admission of defeat.
Secularist Britons think the Archbishop is out to lunch unwise.
Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, said: “The way we are going in this country with the rise of Islam, the churches should look at secularism as their best friend.
“Otherwise we are in danger of going down the same road as Northern Ireland or Iraq. Secularism is one of the best things that can happen to protect religions from being persecuted or persecuting each other.”
Secularism the church’s best friend? Mr Sanderson should ponder the fate of religion—and freedom—in such secularist states as Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China.
France is a currently popular example of a secularist nation, but its secularism policy has not prevented deep-rooted ethnic and religious differences from disrupting public life.
I’ve been thinking about this Muslim veil business, and I’ve decided I agree with Dr Williams. The idea of women covering themselves with burkas and niqabs, as inculcated by some Muslim traditions, is, to be blunt, repugnant to me. Covering one’s face with a veil as a matter of necessity whenever one ventures out in public is, in my view, inherently demeaning to the women who dress thusly. It is a sign of abject capitulation to the demands of power-hungry bullies, protestations of “free choice” notwithstanding.
Yet what is to be done? For the state to inhibit or restrict wearing of veils would be a cure worse than the disease, for the reasons Dr Williams outlines. The government should not be the judge of which religious symbols are permissible and which are not. When it comes to religious observances (in the absence of clear and present threats to social order), government has neither the competence nor the legitimate authority to make the rules.
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