ABSTRACT
European Secularism, one of the many versions of secularism available in the world, was developed in the context predominantly of single-religion societies, after a great deal of religious homogenization had already taken place. It was and remains a modest secularism. However, with the migration of workers from former colonies and the intensification of globalization, pre-Christian (Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain) and post-Christian faiths (Islam and Sikhism) have been thrown together for the first time in modern Europe creating an unprecedented diversity the like of which has not been witnessed in Europe under conditions of modernity. This has destabilized European secular states and the conception of secularism that underpins them. European Secularism is in crisis for as it now turns out it is not quite secular enough.
European Secularism, one of the many versions of secularism available in the world, was developed in the context predominantly of single-religion societies, after a great deal of religious homogenization had already taken place. It was and remains a modest secularism. However, with the migration of workers from former colonies and the intensification of globalization, pre-Christian (Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain) and post-Christian faiths (Islam and Sikhism) have been thrown together for the first time in modern Europe creating an unprecedented diversity the like of which has not been witnessed in Europe under conditions of modernity. This has destabilized European secular states and the conception of secularism that underpins them. European Secularism is in crisis for as it now turns out it is not quite secular enough. My main claim in this essay is that this crisis is due largely to the failure of Europe to make a conceptual shift from a secularism developed in and for single-religion societies to one that is far more sensitive and finely tuned to deep religious diversity. At its root then the crisis of European Secularism is conceptual. Europe must reconceptualize its secularism and in order to do so possibly learn from the experience of non-European, non-western societies such as India.
I begin by distinguishing three senses of the term ‘secularism’. First, it is used as a shorthand for secular humanism. The second specifies the ideals, even ultimate ideals, which give meaning and worth to life and that its followers strive to realize in their life, I call it ethical secularism. I distinguish this ethic from political secularism. Here it stands for a certain kind of polity in which organized religious power or religious institutions are separated from organized political power or political institutions for specific ends.
Now political secularism is usually thought of as involving the separation of state and church. This is true, for example, of both the French and the American versions. This is only a half-truth and sometimes only a third of the whole truth. This way of seeing political secularism is highly inadequate because it leaves out those societies which have no churches. For instance, neither Islam nor Hinduism are church-based religions. But both Turkey and India have consistently followed political secularism. However, this is not the only reason for its inadequacy. The separation of church and state is neither necessary nor sufficient in non-Christian societies and though necessary, it is not a sufficient condition in even Christian societies.
A crucial requirement of a secular state is that it has no constitutive links with religion and that the ends of any religion should not be installed as the ends of the state. For example, it cannot be the constitutive objective of the state to ensure salvation, nirvana or moksha. Nor it can be a requirement of the state that it increases the membership of any religious community. The conversion of one individual or a group from one religion to another cannot be the goal of the state. Then what are the typical ends of a secular state? These can be of two kinds: (1) amoral – the attainment or aggrandizement of power or wealth, or (2) moral ends such as the protection and advancement of liberty, equality, and fraternity between or among individuals and groups. Then, for such a value-based secular state, two conditions are widely believed to be crucial: (1) separation at the level of institutions and personnel and even more importantly (2) separation at the level of ends. Besides these two levels of separation, a third level of separation is sometimes believed to be as crucial – (3) separation at the level of law and public policy.
Although not fully institutionalized until 1905, the birth of the idea of political secularism happened with an abrupt break with the past, with the revolution in France. The French revolutionaries wished to deconfessionalize the French state, and sought the strict separation of the church-based religion and state not only at the level of institutions and personnel but also at the level of ends. The state had to be separated from the objectives of the church for the sake of an emancipatory agenda. The enormous social power of the church had to be curbed in order to grant liberty and equality to all individuals. Even more important was the equality of individuals as citizens of a common republic, now made available to all regardless of religion. They could have it, provided they left behind their communal identity and entered the public domain merely as individuals. They would be treated as full citizens as long as they left behind their religion in the private domain and entered the public domain without it. Political secularism here meant the privatization not just of powerless religions but equally of the most powerful religion in France – Catholicism. And not only was separation of church-based religion and state introduced here but also separation itself was given a new meaning. For the French, it meant one-sided exclusion. From now on, the state could intervene in every matter of all religions, to help or hinder them but no corresponding power was available to any religion including Catholicism. I shall call this model, the idealized French model (Model 1).
While France was developing its own political secularism, another model was developing in America. Here new residents of this territory had fled from religious persecution and toleration in Europe, deeply valuing the religious liberty of individuals to associate and form their own churches. Over time a consensus grew, enshrined in the first amendment to the constitution, that the best way to protect the interest and freedom of one's own denomination was to keep state power completely away from all denominations. Thus, church-state separation was installed for the sake of religious liberty and denominational pluralism. This strict separation was understood in the USA as mutual exclusion, i.e., the exclusion of the state from the affairs of the religion and the corresponding exclusion of religion from the affairs of the state.
So, we have two models of secularism, one that developed in France and the other in the USA, but neither took shape in the rest of Europe, where it developed later and took a different form. Here a progressive secularization of society and the permeation of secular humanism in European social imaginary led to the weakening over time of confessional states. Gradually, faiths that were previously tolerated became publicly visible and civic disabilities of individuals belonging to minority religions were slowly, in varying phases, removed. Eventually it led, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, to the availability first of civil rights and later political rights to all individuals regardless of their religion. This does not mean that institutional arrangements pertaining to the dominant religion were disbanded. Just that as the power of the church declined and religion became less salient in their lives, people simply stopped bothering about those arrangements. Consider the mandatory presence of a fixed number of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. This form of secularism is different from France because it allows some support for single religion but not any negative intervention. It is also different from America where constitutionally speaking the state can neither support nor hinder religion.
By the standards of American and French models of political secularism which have hitherto shaped our normative conceptions of it, the European version is fairly moderate. Hence, Tariq Modood's apt term for them: moderate secularism (model 3). Formally speaking, the public or official monopoly of dominant religions remained intact, even as their social power has considerably declined.
These are not the only models of political secularism; however, other conceptions have emerged outside the west that have transformed its meaning. Two of these have developed in the subcontinent and at least one of these is enshrined in the Indian constitution. Allow me to explicate them and then evaluate European Secularism by the norms of two richer, transcultural variants of secularism. Perhaps, the best way to begin articulating them is to use the categories of self and the other. By the mid-sixteenth century, all of Western Europe had fragmented into predominantly single-religion societies. Religious homogenization came to Europe in the wake of a persistent, deep, and pervasive anxiety about the other, about both the other outside one's religion and, potentially, the other within. The other was viewed and felt as an existential threat. So doctrinal differences were not mere intellectual disagreements but were cast in a way that undermined basic trust in one another. The other could not be lived with but simply had to be expelled or exterminated. One might say that this constitutes the hidden background condition of Europe's toleration and even its political secularism.
The background conditions in India were different, at least till the advent of colonial modernity. For a start, different faiths, modes of worship, philosophical outlooks, and ways of practicing existed. Deep diversity was accepted as part of the natural landscape – all were at home. Syrian Christians, Zoroastrian, Jews, Muslims (Arab traders on the Malabar coast), Turks, and Afghans, who came initially as conquerors – not to speak of a variety of South Asian faiths – were all at home. To feel and be secure was a basic psychosocial condition on the Indian subcontinent. They all exhibited basic collective self-confidence, possible only when there is trust between communities. In short, the presence of the other was never questioned.
It was not until the advent of colonial modernity and the formation of Hindus and Muslims as national communities that this background condition was unsettled. Doubts about coexistence forced themselves upon the public arena and religious coexistence became a problematic issue to be spoken about and publically articulated. An explicit invocation and defense of the idea became necessary that all religions must be at peace with one another, that there should be trust, a basic level of comfort among them and if undermined, mutual confidence must be restored. This was put sometimes normatively and sometimes merely affirmed. The term used by Gandhi for this was ‘communal harmony’. Soon after independence, this idea found political articulation in public discourse as secularism, strictly speaking, political secularism. The state must show sarvadharma sambhāv (be equally well disposed to all paths, god, or gods, all religions, even all philosophical conceptions of the ultimate good). The task of the state as an entity separate from all religions was to ensure trust between religious communities, to restore basic confidence if and when it was undermined. This happens under conditions when there is a threat of interreligious domination and when a majority religion threatens to marginalize minority religions. So here secularism is pitted against communalism – a sensibility or ideology where a community's identity, its core beliefs, practices and interests and constitutively opposed to the identity and interests of another community.
Secularism came to be used for a certain comportment of the state, whereby it must distance itself from all religious and philosophical conceptions in order to perform its primary function, i.e., to promote a certain quality of sociability, to foster a certain quality of relations among religious communities, perhaps even interreligious equality under conditions of deep religious diversity (Model 4).
A second conception developed too, even more ambitious, that tried to combine its major aim of fostering better quality of social relations with an emancipatory agenda, to not only respect all religions and philosophies but also to protect individuals from the oppressive features of their own religions or religious communities – or to put it differently, to confront and fight both interreligious and intrareligious domination, simultaneously. This is the constitutional secularism of India.
Several features of this model are worth mentioning. First, multiple religions are not optional extras added on as an afterthought but were present at Indian secularism's starting point as part of its foundation. Indian secularism is inextricably tied to deep religious diversity. Second, this form of secularism has a commitment to multiple values, namely liberty, equality, and fraternity – not conceived narrowly as pertaining to individuals but interpreted broadly to cover the relative autonomy of religious communities and their equality of status in society – as well as other more basic values such as peace, toleration, and mutual respect between communities. It has a place not only for the right of individuals to profess their religious beliefs, but also for the right of religious communities to establish and maintain educational institutions crucial for the survival and sustenance of their distinctive religious traditions.
The acceptance of community-specific rights brings me to the third feature of Indian secularism. Because it was born in a deeply multireligious society, it is concerned as much with interreligious domination as it is with intrareligious domination. Whereas the two Western conceptions of secularism have provided benefits largely to individuals only, under the Indian conception even community-specific political rights (through political reservations for religious minorities) were almost granted during the drafting of the constitution but were withheld in the last instance only for contextual reasons. In fact, it is arguable that a conceptual space is still available for these rights within the Indian constitution.
Fourth, Indian secularism does not erect a wall of separation between religion and state. There are boundaries of course, but they are porous. This situation allows the state to intervene in religions in order to help or hinder them without the impulse to control or destroy them. This intervention can include granting aid to educational institutions of religious communities on a non-preferential basis and interfering in socioreligious institutions that deny equal dignity and status to members of their own religion or to those of others – for example, the ban on untouchability and the obligation to allow everyone, irrespective of their caste, to enter Hindu temples, as well as, potentially, other actions to correct gender inequalities. In short, Indian secularism interprets separation to mean not strict exclusion or strict neutrality but what I call principled distance, which is poles apart from one-sided exclusion, mutual exclusion, strict neutrality, and equidistance. Religious groups have sought exemptions when states have intervened in religious practices by promulgating laws designed to apply neutrally across society. Principled distance allows a practice that is banned or regulated in the majority culture to be permitted in the minority culture because of the distinctive status and meaning it has for the minority culture members. Religious groups may demand that the state refrains from interference in their practices, but they may equally demand that the state interfere in such a way as to give them special assistance, so that they are able to secure what other groups are routinely able to acquire by virtue of their social dominance in the political community.
For the promotion of a particular value constitutive of secularism, some religion, relative to other religions, may require more interference from the state. For example, suppose that the value to be advanced is social equality. This requires in part undermining caste and gender hierarchies. Thus there is a constitutional ban on untouchability, and Hindu temples were thrown open to all, particularly to former untouchables should they choose to enter them. Child marriage was banned among Hindus and a right to divorce was introduced.
A somewhat forced, formulaic articulation of Indian secularism goes something like this. The state must keep a principled distance from all public or private and individual-oriented or community-oriented religious institutions for the sake of the equally significant – and sometimes conflicting – values of peace, worldly goods, dignity, liberty, equality, and fraternity in all of its complicated individualistic and non-individualistic versions (Model 5).
Despite all changes, European states have continued to privilege Christianity in one form or another. The liberal democratization and the consequent secularization of many European states have helped citizens with non-Christian faiths to acquire most formal rights. But such a scheme of rights neither embodies a regime of interreligious equality nor effectively prevents religion-based discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, it masks majoritarian, ethnoreligious biases. These biases are evident in different kinds of difficulties faced by Muslims. For example, they are manifest in the failure of many western European states to deal with the issue of headscarves (most notably France), in unheeded demands by Muslims to build mosques and therefore to properly practise their own faith (Germany and Italy), in discrimination against ritual slaughter (Germany), and in unheeded demands by Muslims for proper burial grounds of their own (Denmark, among others).
So far, I have spoken of the failure of European states to counter interreligious domination and accommodate some practices of Muslims. However there are also practices among Muslims that may need to be reformed which may not be possible without state-backing. There may be practices including the wearing of niqab to which Muslim women might object and seek state intervention. Now in such cases some European states may only be too happy to intervene. But my point is that such intervention would entail a massive shift in their conception of secularism – from first separate from and then only support religion to first separate and then sometimes support, sometimes inhibit religion - in short, to what I call principled distance then – sometimes support, sometimes inhibit religion, what I call principled distance. In short, they may have to set aside their rather moderate stance of accommodating religion (that in practice is not always extended to Muslim practices) and sometimes even be hostile to religion. Currently, the practice of most European states is to offer little official support, to provide no accommodation, and with few exceptions, to stay indifferent to massive societal intolerance. What might be required is more support of some religions, less support of others, and active interference in societal intolerance – that is, an attempt by the state to tackle both inter- and intrareligious domination.
Not appreciating deep religious and cultural diversity is one of the central failures of modern Europe. To respond to the challenge of deep diversity, Europe might be better off with an altogether different conception of secularism. As of now, European Secularism, at least when judged by standards of richer conceptions (Models 4 and 5), is not secular enough.
Rajeev Bhargava is Professor, CSDS and was formerly Professor of Political Theory, JNU, New Delhi. His books include Individualism in Social Science (Clarendon Press, 1992), The Promise of India's secular democracy (OUP, 2010), What is Political Theory and Why do we need it (OUP, 2010), and Secularism and its Critics (ed. OUP, 1998).