CESNUR - Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni diretto da Massimo Introvigne
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The 2007 International Conference
June 7-9, 2007
Bordeaux, France

Globalization, Immigration, and Change in Religious Movements

Accommodating religious diversity: beyond liberal dilemmas

by Marion MADDOX (Victoria University, Wellington)

From the 1970s to early 1990s, Australian governments prided themselves on multicultural pluralism. But recent events have highlighted political and philosophical challenges concerning the proper balance between the rights of minority groups (cultural, ethnic, sexual etc) and the more individualist and majoritarian impulses traditionally associated with liberal democracy.

Particular problems attend attempts to respond to religious diversity. Such attempts typically rely on an unstated, and often unrecognised, Christian-shaped view of religion.

This paper proposes a robust model for the political embrace of religious pluralism informed by some aspects of the work of Émile Durkheim. Whatever its limitations when considered as Australian ethnography, the Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse proposes a model of the relationship between religion and society which, especially when read alongside Durkheim’s political and moral writings, suggests intriguing possibilities for informing a move beyond classic liberal impasses. His work provides a helpful theoretical resource for considering how recent, post-colonial Australian experiences can contribute to international efforts towards greater accommodation of religious diversity.

Love it or hate it, globalisation compels us to live together—in increasingly diverse societies. While it is possible to overstate the homogeneity of societies past, yet the globalised communities of today encompass a much wider variety than was accommodated in past theories about diversity. Consequently, the strategies for living together, and the theoretical stances underpinning them, which worked well in the past may prove inadequate to the dilemmas faced by modern societies.

Where once Europeans talking about religious diversity meant, broadly, relations between Catholics, Protestants and perhaps Jews, such discussions today are likely to embrace not only members of several world religions, but also members of new religious movements, secular majorities and also, in nations with a colonial history, Indigenous peoples.

In western societies, deriving their philosophical traditions from European sources, the main strategy for living together with people different from ourselves is summed up in the discourse of ‘toleration’[1]. An important component of the strategy is that we put up with others’ differences, and expect them to put up with ours, by keeping our differences, as far as possible, out of the public sphere. By designating key markers of difference—such as religion, ethnicity, sexuality, culture—as mainly ‘private’, we hope that our points of difference can be protected from undue scrutiny or interference, and that we will be preserved from having others’ thrust upon us. This has translated into various policy approaches depending on the issue at stake. Our concern here being with religion, it is salient to note that it has been axiomatic in liberal discussions of religious liberty that freedom of religion is best protected by a rigorous separation of church and state.

Historical accounts of liberalism’s genesis frequently[2] identify religious liberty as foundational. For example, Will Kymlicka’s entry on ‘Liberalism’ in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy states as conventional the view that

liberalism grew out of the recognition that toleration was the only alternative to the Wars of Religion. After innumerable wars, both Protestants and Catholics accepted that the state could not assume or impose a shared devotion to a single faith, and that the only stable basis for a political regime was to separate Church and State.[3]

This forms a point of consensus among holders of otherwise various positions, from supporters of John Rawls’s delineation of a ‘political liberalism’ which ‘applies the principles of toleration to philosophy itself’[4] to critics of Rawls’s position such as William Galston. Galston agrees with Rawls that ‘that religious diversity ... undergirds, and eventually sets in motion the development of, our wider conception of individual and cultural difference’ such that, even today, ‘any reasonable understanding of diversity will have to include (though in modern circumstances cannot be restricted to) religious commitments’[5]. Nevertheless, he challenges that liberalism requires a still stronger defence of religious diversity[6]. The genealogy which accords such a central place to religious liberty has led liberalism to advocate secularisation of the public sphere and a corresponding privatisation of religious commitments[7].

This account of the place of religious freedom in liberal thought is a development from certain strands of seventeenth century Puritanism[8]; but its rise as a response to the Wars of Religion is usually traced, above all, to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration[9]. Consequently, I shall draw on Locke’s argument in pointing out the way separation of religious and political life has come to be seen as a necessary foundation for religious freedom[10].

Locke builds his case on fear of religious persecution. When there is a risk that some will ‘persecute, torment, destroy and kill other men upon pretence of religion’[11], the most pressing need is to persuade them not to; and the most urgent step is to remove the means of force from the hands of those in ecclesial authority. Locke therefore opens the Letter Concerning Toleration with the case that ‘I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other’[12].

There follow reasons why ‘the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate’, almost a mantra in this section of the Letter. First, the civil magistrate has no more responsibility for others’ souls than belongs ‘to other men’: his magisterial authority is impotent to affect the well-being of souls. Second, the magistrate’s power ‘consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God’. Finally, even if force could compel genuine change of mind, ‘yet would not that help at all to the salvation of ... souls’. This is because, given the difficulty of knowing for certain which creed is right, even a genuine assent to externally imposed doctrine would be too risky if people undertook it ‘under the necessity to quit the light of their own reason, and oppose the dictates of their own consciences’[13]. Ecclesial authority holds, as its highest sanction, the power of excommunication[14]; but no physical force can be employed, both because the horror of ‘fire and faggot’[15] is so terrible as to make its avoidance ‘above all things necessary’, and because in any case the kinds of coercion available to those who take up physical force will not produce the willing assent which genuine religious persuasion requires.

The theme of making the means appropriate to the desired change is developed at length. In Locke’s version of the ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’ argument, he explores a contrast between ‘inner’ persuasion and ‘outer’ force, inner ‘conviction’ and outward ‘show’. Belief and conscience are internal; force, coming from outside the self, can have no genuine bearing on one’s inner beliefs or the workings of conscience: ‘Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things’[16]. Similarly, the inner conviction which makes up religious belief must be understood separately from the outward acts which fulfil its requirements:

But as in every Church there are two things especially to be considered — the outward form and rites of worship, and the doctrines and articles of faith — these things must be handled each distinctly, that so the whole matter of toleration may the more clearly be understood’[17].

Locke’s concern to avoid the conditions which give rise to religious persecution, together with the rationalist emphases of seventeenth century Protestant theology, led him to place extraordinary emphasis on the strand within Christian theology which sees religious commitment as a matter of intellectual ‘belief’, of ‘inward persuasion of the mind’[18] and ‘the dictates of ... conscience’. ‘Outward’ religious practices, while helpful, are ultimately incidental; their force derives from the believer’s conviction that they will be ‘pleasing unto God’[19].

This view of religion as grounded in the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, the ‘inner’ consisting of intellectual commitment to ‘doctrines’ or ‘principles’, has proved durable in liberal writing on freedom of religion. But the price of this achievement is to recast religion in very particular ways. Religion is reinterpreted as something ‘internal’, a matter of cognitive assent to doctrines with which other may agree or disagree. Religion may move the heart and engage the hands, but the really important religious activity in this interpretation takes place in the brain.

This cost is significant, because, in fact, only certain kinds of religion lend themselves to such radical separation; only certain kinds of god can be banished from the external world, including political process. Professing religious neutrality, a state which requires its religiously-minded citizens to ‘leave their metaphysical presuppositions at home when they enter the public realm’[20] paradoxically enjoins upon them a particular theology.

Modern Australia, exceptionally multicultural and secular, throws into question received liberal assumptions about the relation of religion to the state, and of religious to other freedoms. During the 1980s and 1990s, particularly, numerous controversies surrounded the protection of sites sacred to Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Several such instances resulted in protracted legal proceedings. One particularly high-profile case concerned mining at Coronation Hill in the Northern Territory, in a region regarded by the Jawoyn people as vital to their ritual life. A second concerned a proposal to build a bridge (now completed) at the mouth of the Murray River in South-Eastern South Australia, connecting Hindmarsh Island to the mainland. In this case, creating a permanent link between island and mainland was understood by many Ngarrindjeri people as violating a religiously-significant aspect of the landscape.

Both cases revolved, in other words, around disputes about how land should be understood. For the Indigenous communities concerned, particular sites have spiritual significance which requires particular kinds of ritual and other activity on the part of humans associated with those sites. Furthermore, the sites’ spiritual significance limits the range of other uses to which the land may be put.

Yet, although legal mechanisms exist for recognising and protecting Indigenous sacred heritage, in practice the few such successful protections have been achieved only after bitter argument, and in the face of numerous other losses. The possibility that material sites can have irreducible religious significance has proved extremely difficult for Australian courts to negotiate, and even harder for Australia’s political processes to accommodate. In part, this is due to the mismatch between the two sides’ understandings of what religion is.

The conventional ‘state neutrality’ arguments suppose that people can take their religion out of the landscape, leaving it to commercial interests. Yet to do so, the religious traditions at stake would have to be reformulated along the privatised and intellectualised lines peculiar to Protestantism—relegating religion largely to the private arena of home, and the still more private arena of individual cognition. An examination of state neutrality in relation to non-Christian, non-Western religious traditions suggests that the liberal understanding of religion is less universally applicable than many of its proponents seem to suppose.

I would like to suggest that Emile Durkheim’s vision of the relationship between individual, community and the state offers a route beyond these liberal limitations. What follows can be no more than a sketch, pointing to promising lines in Durkheim’s thought. The exercise involves a reorientation in the reader’s approach to Durkheim, reading material which he conceived as scientific sociology as offering useful directions for political philosophy.

At first sight, Durkheim seems an unlikely saviour from the problems in liberal theory which I have been discussing in this and the preceding chapter. For all his emphasis on the importance of ritual, Durkheim shares — at least in part — the doxastic view of religion criticised by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, which places ‘believing’ particular propositions at the core of ‘what religious people primarily do’. Setting out the ground for The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim divides ‘religious phenomena’ into ‘two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites’. Between the two ‘is all the difference which separates thought from action’: rites are ‘determined modes of action’, while beliefs are ‘states of opinion and consist in representations’[21]. Following W. C. Smith, but supplementing his account with my assessment of the structural importance of internal, intellectual assent to doctrine in Locke’s argument for freedom of religion through state neutrality, I have hitherto argued that this approach should be understood as peculiarly Protestant. We may wonder, then, why the Jewish son of a Roman Catholic national culture should so readily have embraced it, albeit with modifications.

First, we should note that while France was the scene of repeated outbreaks of Huguenot oppression and the accompanying Roman Catholic chauvinism[22], it was also (and more recently) shaped by the Enlightenment efforts of the philosophes to shake off just that complex of myth, ritual and belief. This was the movement which, on Durkheim’s reading, issued (however briefly) in its own cult, that of ‘the Fatherland, Liberty and Reason’[23]. In other words, the French Enlightenment rejection of Catholic dogmatism in favour of a secular state arguably took a similar philosophical path to that which informed the Protestant rejection of Catholic dogmatism and which was then developed into the Protestant advocacy of state secularism. Both, while appearing to remove religion from the public arena, in fact instituted (in D. E. Smith’s terms) their own kind of theological reform, reshaping religion into the peculiarly internalised and noetic form of belief which can ostensibly be confined to believers’ minds, while also forming (in de Tocqueville’s terms) ‘the first of ... political institutions’.

Further, we might note that Durkheim’s most prolific period spans precisely the two decades (1890-1910) during which some strands of French Roman Catholic theology began to explore Enlightenment trajectories, in the movement which Pope Pius X condemned under the title of ‘Modernism’[24]. Modernism was distinguished not only by its enthusiasm for historico-critical approaches to biblical criticism and advocacy of ecclesiological reform, but also by its affirmation of the ‘inner’ dimensions of religious conviction, attempting to move Roman Catholic theology away from the neo-scholastic commitment to dogma as a structure of externally-defined and maintained beliefs into which the believer must fit, in favour of a view of belief as both internal and as ultimately uncertain. Modernism’s account of the nature of belief is therefore much closer to the religious epistemology which informed Locke than is the neo-scholastic position where assent to doctrine comes from submitting one’s own will to the guidance of authority. Durkheim, then, was moving among intellectuals in a Catholic culture during the two decades when, of all periods prior to Vatican II, Catholic thought was developing its strongest similarities in certain crucial areas to the Protestant views which I have identified as being central to the liberal position on freedom of religion and on the place of ‘belief’ in religion more generally[25]. Further, Durkheim’s writing displays an extensive familiarity with both historical and contemporary Protestantism[26]. At the intersection, as it were, of so many of the major currents in Western thought — French Enlightenment, Jewish, ‘modernist’ Catholic and Protestant[27] — it is not surprising that Durkheim shares a substantial part of the view of religion which underpins so many of the political and philosophical developments from the Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, while Durkheim’s view of religion can be criticised for maintaining an unrealistically sharp division between beliefs (‘matters of opinion’) and rites (‘determined modes of action’), his great contribution remains his resolute focus on religion’s social and collective nature. This means that, while sharing the Protestant inclination to privilege doctrine, he avoids the most individualising tendencies which emerge in the Lockean development of that tradition. On the contrary, Durkheim’s account sees the individual as delicately poised between nature and society — which she both is produced by and helps to produce:

If the essential element of the personality is the social part of us, on the other hand there can be no social life unless distinct individuals are associated, and this is richer the more numerous and different from each other they are. So the individual factor is a condition of the impersonal factor. And the contrary is no less true, for society itself is an important source of individual differences.[28]

Durkheim’s social focus means that the ‘matters of opinion’ cannot carry the sense of exclusively personal or even idiosyncratic conviction. Rather, in his further description of beliefs as ‘states of opinion [which] consist in representations’, the emphasis must be on ‘representations’, in the Durkheimian sense of ‘collective representations’ which he develops throughout The Elementary Forms. Collective representations cannot be built up out of nowhere, but require a range of interactions between people in order to come into existence. Some of the interactions are verbal, some bodily, and some involve the material environment, as well as other people. Collective representations arise as a result of all three kinds of interaction: ‘It is by uttering the same cry, or pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that [worshippers] become and feel themselves to be in unison’[29].

But while such collective action requires a group consciousness in the sense of cohesion and solidarity to make it possible, Durkheim contends that the higher levels of social existence, of the group’s ‘consciousness of itself’, arise out of such mutual experience[30].

Despite its strength of wording, Durkheim’s ‘all the difference’ which separates belief and rite turns out not to be the sharp inner/outer division which characterised Locke’s view of the relationship; on the contrary, Durkheim’s argument at many points shares with the passages quoted above an insistence on the mutual interdependence of myth and ritual[31]. Far from being idiosyncratic opinions, then, ‘beliefs’ in Durkheim’s schema are the element which individuals draw from the social: ‘It remains true that our nature is double; there really is a particle of divinity in us because there is within us a particle of these great ideas which are the soul of the group’[32]. Durkheim’s view of the relationship between the doxastic, communal and material elements of religion therefore provides a helpful starting point for analysing how these various levels fit into a liberal framework which presupposes state neutrality with respect to religion. 

I suggest that we can find room for these possibilities by developing Durkheim’s account of religion in the Elementary Forms in conversation with his take on the relationship between individuals, intermediate associations and the state, drawn from such less frequently read works as his lectures on moral education[33] and on professional ethics[34].

First, in those works, Durkheim develops a view of difference as a creative source of moral innovation and an opportunity for expanding the conscience collective. This insight offers great potential for circumventing the tendency in both the liberal mainstream and its consociational developments (such as Kymlicka’s) to view difference as a problem to be overcome. Like much of the liberal theory it aims to transcend, the consociational variation still at times implies that the best thing to do with difference is to overlook it, even though it also acknowledges that there are some circumstances in which cultural difference cannot be ignored without damage, at least, to the individuals and communities concerned — and perhaps to the society as a whole, which thus misses out on a possible source of cultural richness. The consociational solution is to adjust the liberal, individualist ‘background’ to accommodate group rights for those whose cultural difference makes universal models of citizenship inappropriate.

This solution is open to the challenge that it still presents the bearers of difference as the ‘problem’, the ones needing special accommodation to ‘make up’ for their ‘differences’. Moreover, the consociational solution allows an asymmetric picture to emerge in which the material disadvantage and cultural and political exclusion of some appears as a glitch in an otherwise smoothly-working system, rather than as the cost of others’ material advantage and political and cultural inclusion.

Second, the strength of Durkheim’s position in relation to this matter is not only his appreciation of difference as a creative source for learning (which the consociational model can also claim) but the mutually constructive yet ‘agonistic’ relationship (to borrow a term from Connolly) between individuals, intermediate associations and the state, set out particularly in his work on professional associations. For Durkheim, intermediate associations are not something which the state can allow into the picture in special circumstances to accommodate the needs of those who cannot conform themselves to the individualistic liberal background. Rather, associations of all kinds and at all levels are the crucial elements which go to make up a political society; and which, having done so, remain as essential brakes on the state’s power to intrude too far into the lives of individuals. Their closeness to the particular circumstances of individuals’ lives means that they can monitor tendencies for impersonal and distant state institutions to subordinate individuals’ interests to their own; while that same impersonality at the level of the state fits it to prevent intermediate associations from abusing their proximity by imposing an inappropriate conformity. The fact that individuals belong not just to one intermediate association but to myriad networks related to kinship, employment and other economic activities, religion, culture and commitment means, also, that different kinds of association can counterbalance one another: while some associations, in some circumstances, may be inclined to relax their role in standing between individuals and an intrusive state, or even to join forces with the state’s oppressive mechanisms, there are likely to be others whose interests run counter to such collaboration.

Playing out Durkheim’s account in the way I am suggesting, the state is never conceived as a stable, fixed force; on the contrary, it is perpetually produced through perpetual contestation between the layers of individuals, intermediate associations and the institutions of government. As with institutions, so with values: the ideologies which might lay claim to ‘core’ status at any given moment are not invested with the permanent authority of a stable public reason, but are produced out of a process of contestation between the competing interests, religious, cultural, ideological and civil, which arise from the shared enterprises of the various groups. But, unlike Connolly’s schema, the fact that certain interests are likely, in practice, to have greater colonising potential than others is not overlooked: ideological contestation arises out of the political struggles which are necessary to unseat present hegemonies. Always contested and always produced by negotiation between competing interests, the state in this model is not neutral: its governing image is engagement rather than neutrality.

In such a setting, it becomes desperately important to make sure that the state’s engagement takes the form of protection of minority interests rather than coercion. This is achieved by its reliance on continuing contestation and continuing give and take among lower-level associations. Where in conventional liberal theory the state’s impartiality is one ground (among others) of its legitimacy, the direction I am proposing would see its engagement as evidence of its responsiveness to the various needs of a diverse citizenry. The state is then able to be partial on behalf of those individuals or communities needing protection, while its relative distance from individuals enables it still to retain an impartial stance in providing one layer of protection for individuals from undue intrusion on the part of their various communities. Learning from Durkheim’s separation of ethical from methodological individualism[35], this model tries to resolve the liberal-democratic tension by arguing that ethical individualism is in fact best served by seeing the state as the product of ongoing democratic contestation.

Third, the emphasis on individuals as both products and shapers of society distinguishes Durkheim’s ethical individualism from the methodological individualism at the base of political theories which place individuals in universal relationship to the state. Equally important, however, is his less frequently stressed emphasis on individuals and society in non-human nature. Nature and society together mould the development of desire: healthy desire sensitises individuals to violations of their natural and social being. Violations against oneself move one to anger, while a sense of identification with others, fostered partly through social bonds and partly through an appreciation of common relationships with the natural world, translate that desire into altruistic fellow-suffering with others. But nature and society also set limits for desire: one can want indefinitely, but to want beyond what is physically and socially necessary leads to the downward spiral of anomie[36].

The position of nature as a voice in Durkheim’s moral play, crucial to the three-fold process of quickening desire, directing it outward into altruistic sensitivity and establishing its healthy limits, alerts us to the difficulties of excluding the material from any account of moral or religious positions. The Protestant model, seeing religious sensibility as something internal to the believer and indifferent to the outside world, has often been noted for the neat dovetail between its radically individualising tendencies and those of the capitalist economic system which has grown up with it[37]. I hope to have augmented this conventional analysis, first, by demonstrating that that individualism is central to the liberal account of freedom of religion, and second, by pointing out that such freedom as a liberal state can offer is therefore likely to elude traditions which do not share Protestantism’s doxastic, individual and internal focus. Durkheim’s double extension of this individual-focused view, stretching it to incorporate society on the one hand and nature on the other, allows a more generous interpretation of the liberal matrix. This might lead us to hope that those traditions in which religious meaning is not confined to a believer’s mind but extends into the social and material environments could be more successfully accommodated.

Rather than a pattern of universal citizenship equally distributed among homogeneous yet radically individual players, the model I have sketched would see everyone as a participant in the state by way of their involvement in intermediate associations. The asymmetric picture which goes with universalism and persists in consociationalism would give way to an account in which all are seen as comparably shaped by membership in multiple groups at multiple layers of social existence, all the way up to — and beyond — the state. In and of itself, group identification would be neither an indication of nor a step towards group disadvantage or unjust discrimination; instead, everyone would be understood partly in terms of their collective identifications.

Durkheim throws into relief shortcomings of a model, such as Kymlicka’s, which, while accepting a category of ‘group rights’, assumes that at least some citizens associate with the state ‘universally’. For Durkheim, no one is a ‘universal citizen’: every citizen relates to the state through lower-level communities, without which the state could not exist. This allows us to be more explicit about the nature of citizenship rights. For example, seeing all citizenship in group terms would enable us to point out that the rights of white Australians did not develop as universal citizenship rights, from which some of the country’s inhabitants were unfortunately excluded by a kind of historical oversight. The rights which are taken for granted by white Australians were historically understood as relying on the active exclusion of Aborigines and non-white immigrants[38]. Australian history shows the notion of universally accessible ‘universal citizenship’ to be at least questionable. Further, as feminist theories of citizenship have pointed out, when the imaginary ‘universal citizen’ is stripped of his unisex outfit, he is unmistakeably male[39]. Again, this is not by accident or oversight but because the rights of men as public citizens were made possible by the relegation of women to the private ‘feminine netherworld’[40].

Viewed in this context, Kymlicka’s vision of an underlying ‘universal citizenship’, within which some (members of cultural minorities) require special kinds of consociational citizenship, glosses over the exclusive nature of that universalist ideal. In Durkheim’s picture, everyone’s association with the state is through various lower-level communities; people are created as individuals out of the intersections of their various communities and out of those communities’ various relationships with the state; individual rights are creations of the state in response to the needs of individuals, mediated through those intermediate levels; and individuals in turn push their communities to challenge and restrain the state from becoming unduly intrusive. This model allows us to identify the ways in which the rights of some groups have been defined through the exclusion of others. Since there is nothing natural or innate about such rights, the wrongs of exclusion can be rectified by incorporating new rights as they are articulated by the excluded communities.

 

CESNUR reproduces or quotes documents from the media and different sources on a number of religious issues. Unless otherwise indicated, the opinions expressed are those of the document's author(s), not of CESNUR or its directors.

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