Migration, religion, and schooling in liberal democratic states Open Access

The dominant storyline of the past months has been the rise of anti-immigrant movements within Western liberal democracies, thanks largely to populist nationalists of various stripes and parties. By means of a deft and salutary combination of philosophy, political theory, policy reflection, and sociology, Bruce Collet has waded into the deep end of a very important discussion that resonates well in Europe and the USA: the dynamics and policies that shape and are shaped by the arrival of large numbers of migrants, many if not most with high levels of religiosity. His primary question throughout the book is: How do we integrate religious migrant children into our education systems so that they develop as autonomous members of society while also practising their religious and other traditions, if they so choose? With this book, Collet has delicately threaded a needle, quite successfully I would add, but the problem is that the whole liberal democratic system is under raging attack from populist nationalists. We will return to this problem later in the review.

Collet's major theoretical constructs are three. ‘Pluralistic integration’ concerns the desirable objective of migrant policy, meaning that the goal is to help migrants incorporate ‘into society as equals, but without the necessity of completely sacrificing their cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds and practices’ (p. 6). As applied in the USA context, ‘selective acculturation’ describes the process by which pluralistic integration is achieved: ‘Both the first and second generations remain firmly with their ethnic communities and maintain their old country language and customs, while at the same time acquir(ing) the English language as well as the customs of the American majority culture’ (p. 8). He adds a third construct that describes schools’ method for helping migrant students pluralistically integrate: ‘reasonable and informed recognition and accommodation’. Reasonable accommodations ‘are essentially adjustments made in a system to accommodate or make fair the same system for an individual based on an established need’ (p. 9). Unnecessary burdens on religious practice, in particular, are what he has in mind. The ‘informed’ part of this definition concerns the evidence showing the implications of religion for the acculturation of newcomers. Put simply, Collet wants us to ‘listen and learn’ from religious migrant newcomers as we develop school policies that make space for religious expression without simultaneously establishing religion (p. 159).

Freedom for religious expression without establishing or mandating religious belief has, of course, been a foundational proposition in the USA context, having been scripted into the American Constitution in 1791 as its First Amendment. The working assumption was that the State must not use its power to interfere with religious organisations. State and church were to be functionally separate. While not always observed fairly, particularly in the nineteenth century, this policy vis-à-vis religion and education has been widely accepted in America and is not contested. Collet notes that the situation in much of Europe is more complex and does an excellent job of overviewing different European responses to challenges associated with migrants and religion. In France, for example, its great Revolution in the very same year that America crafted her First Amendment led to its famous policy of laïcité, whereby the great fear has been that religion would interfere with the State. Thus, apropos of the experience of Muslim girls who must not wear headscarves, ‘in these cases, it is not their religion and ‘origin’ per se, but rather the school, and by extension the state, that become the oppressive forces within their lives’ (p. 142). Thus, notes Collet, France has kept religious expression on a short leash, while the Americans have largely encouraged religious life. This difference has significant consequences for migrants but Collet hastens to add (p. 138) that he in no way considers the way that Americans have threaded the needle to be an ideal or universal approach to religion and migrant populations in our schools.

Collet's second chapter on religion, autonomy, and liberalism (here understood in its European, not its American sense) is one of several reasons to purchase the book, as he carefully threads the needle through complicated tapestries. He rightly notes the centrality of autonomy to liberal political theory (p. 18): Autonomy promotes rational reflection and individual choice-making without the threat of coercive violence (whether state-sponsored or otherwise). Autonomy, says Collet, must be a primary objective of education for all students, including religious migrant children.

To his credit as a wide-ranging scholar, Collet, from the very beginning of the book, acknowledges the degree to which traditional religions offer migrants security, community, institutional support, and coping and assimilation strategies, along with religious texts that help them to make sense of migration. Chapter 4 offers an outstanding portrait of the various ways that religion is implicated in the migration processes. Anyone engaged in education in our Western democracies needs to read the research on Mexican and Italian Catholic, Korean Buddhist, Guatemalan Pentecostal, Korean Protestant, Jewish, and Arab Muslim migrants.

But, as I suggested in the first paragraph, we have a major problem with populist nationalists, along with several minor problems. First, let's consider the several minor problems, beginning with the security minor problem. How do we provide security when a religion may have hegemonic ambitions that are clouded and hidden (pp. 165–166)? Not so many years ago, it was considered fair game to accuse conservative American Christians of efforts to take over local school boards (Deckman, 2004). How do policymakers balance citizen rights with organised efforts to dominate educational institutions? Collet has little to help us think this through.

A second, more elevated concern has to do with the fear that liberal democratic thought is somewhat outside the purview of critical reflection, as if the rules applied to religions, often subjected to withering critiques, do not apply equally. Does the underlying liberal political theory somehow demand our subservience? Collet notes his indebtedness to Ian MacMullen, who argues that ethical pluralism commits us to ‘the weaker claim that there exists no single best way of life that each person should follow’ (p. 19). Besides sounding very normative (and thus taking sides), to many religionists this claim sounds more like a robust challenge than a cautious plea. Liberalism has a problem: It wants to offer a neutral playing ground, but, oftentimes under the guise of secularism, it sets up a rival authoritative claim to those made by religionists. Are we expecting a migrant to understand liberalism's seemingly normative claims in any other way than a direct challenge to their core beliefs that theirs is the true interpretation of reality?

I think Collet is right when he asserts that the liberal state must help cultivate students who are critical thinkers with the capacity to ‘stand apart from’, but how can this be done without giving liberalism itself a free pass? I would rather see our schools develop autonomous students who analyse and critique the system of liberalism with as much vigour as the religious systems in their midst. Doing so offers a genuinely level playing ground that will, it seems to me, foster confidence in our educational systems. We must develop thoughtful analysts, not obedient ideologues of either religious institutions or political ideologies. Collet seems to lean in this direction (p. 20ff), but with a softer stance toward the state than is necessary.

My major concern is with secularism, particularly because I believe it breeds a relentless nihilism that has opened the door to populist nationalists and religious terrorists. Before addressing this much larger issue, I note that secularism makes demands on us as scholars that sometimes bind us. For example, the writer correctly observes on p. 164 that secularism is not neutral, but only five pages earlier he candidly acknowledged that he wrote the book in light of a common secularist ‘underpinning’. While Collet's overall text is a model of fairness and prudent judgment, one wonders to what degree secularism tips the mental scales. You had better believe that many religionists ask that very question of secularists who dominate the commanding heights of culture. Must we scholars and policymakers, in the fashion of influential American political philosopher John Rawls (1971), return to the ‘original position’ and adopt a ‘veil of ignorance’ in order to create public schools that inculcate liberal democratic values while also honouring religious liberty? Most liberal democracies do want to respect religious rights, ostensibly by means of secular regimes, but many religionists among migrants will, when they learn this assumption, doubt our sincerity.

But of far greater concern is that secularism, to the degree that it is both a political philosophy and an educational philosophy, breeds a kind of nihilism that is poisonous to meaning and purpose. I think it is becoming clear that migrant-delivered terror in Western countries involves a disdain for the empty, secularised nihilism of our public environments, including our schools, and enhanced respect for the profoundly meaningful framework of Islamic jihadism, or Salafism. If I am right, we have a very serious problem when all we have to offer migrants is a distilled, disenchanted secularism to which some of them, especially certain Muslims, seem averse (Oliver-Dee, 2018; Smith, 2010).

Of course, at the other extreme are those like Anders Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing terrorist who killed 77 school children and others in 2011. He finds meaning not in religion but in far-right nationalism,¹ which is being captured as a vehicle for anti-immigrant rhetoric. My point is that the secularism demanded by liberalism leaves us in a nihilistic lurch, against which politicised religion, on the one hand, and right-wing nationalism, on the other, offer extravagantly rich sources of meaning and purpose for both alienated immigrants and equally alienated nationalists who want to keep out immigrants. I wish that Collet had addressed this challenge more pointedly (he attributes merely psychological significance to the quest for religious meaning), because all the signs indicate that, at least in the short term, both migrants and their opponents are feeding from ideologies more satisfying than attenuated secularism.

If Collet were willing to engage this larger issue, I would then want to explore whether one reason liberal democracy is ailing might be because it has largely abandoned Christian virtues needed to sustain the democratic experiment (Deneen, 2009). Especially in light of Europe's history of state-sponsored religion, the typical response is that secularism, in its many forms, not only saved democracy in the past but that it will continue to do so in the future. Secular democracy is heroic, in this narrative and, to a significant degree, in Collet's vision as well. The large question, however, in light of fresh new electoral and rhetorical wins by populist nationalists, is whether secular liberal democracies can command our allegiance without some return to religious narratives that may re-invigorate the hope, vision, and meaning of liberal society.

Will Collet, who has so generously and prudently threaded the needle for liberal policymaking that honours migrants and their religions in education, be rendered irrelevant by the attacks from populist nationalists?