Secularism and Islamism
Appendix to Possible Religion
In Possible Religion I wrote about Kant’s view on the parameters of reason within which religion is possible. I wanted to append the following reflections on the issue of secularism and the often emotional debate surrounding it, which flared up again after the horrible islamist attacks in France and Vienna in the autumn of 2020. Below notes were formulated directly after the Vienna attack.
In the context of the recent islamist terrorist murders and attacks in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Nice and now in Vienna, the expected escalating agitation has come from islamists around the globe, which needs no rational rebuttal as it is entirely predictable and unjustifiable. Anti-secular fanatics can only react with more fanaticism, and immune to reasoned debate, they are best ignored.
But what is more striking and even more deplorable are the apologias from journalists, intellectuals, politicians, even philosophers, in the West whose condemnation of these vicious attacks is not categorical, but qualified with a ‘horrible, but...’. As the leader of the Dutch leftwing Christian Union political party, Gert-Jan Segers, I think rightly said in his excellent commentary in Het Nederlands Dagblad, this type of half-hearted (not his words) condemnation is ‘immoral’:
Each ‘but’ after the condemnation of the murders of today is a building block of the apologetics from the murderers of tomorrow. At this moment in our history we need a full stop after a wholehearted condemnation. Or an exclamation mark. Not a comma.
I venture to say such half-hearted condemnations are also and especially not helpful to the majority of moderate Muslims who practise their religion entirely peacefully within the laws of the state, and particularly not to those imams—in France and elsewhere in Europe—who fight islamism within their own midst and consider it a ‘poison to Islam’, thereby risking their own lives. They deserve our full support by among other things not conflating islamism with Islam simpliciter and thus feeding the islamist agenda—which is what regressive-leftist apologists, perhaps inadvertently but most likely out of ideological rigidity, do each time they heedlessly shout ‘islamophobia’ whenever Macron and others, including many moderate imams and Muslim leaders and intellectuals, commit themselves to rooting out islamism from society. Islamism is a ‘deformation’ of Islam. Read also the statement by the Muslim federations and mosques in France.
But whatever the case may be as to whether the ‘horrible, but...’ type of condemnation is immoral and counterproductive in the fight against islamist extremism, at any rate by bandying about such hackneyed labels or phrases as ‘fanatical’ or ‘absolute views of secularism’, or ‘militant secularism’, and sophistically reasoning that ‘such forms of' secularism are at least partly to blame for the terrorist extremism that we currently witness,1 or that the state (which state? the French state?) has abandoned the principle of neutrality apropos of religion, or worst of all, that the French love to blaspheme (seriously!), so-called liberals show to be talking through their hats. And this is what particularly irks, given the tone of superiority they often adopt in the debates about what’s wrong in our society.
First, secularism is antithetical to fanaticism and militancy by its very nature, so it eo ipso can’t itself be fanatical or militant. This is clear from the definition of secularism, as given by e.g. The National Secular Society. The three principles of secularism are:
Separation of religious institutions from state institutions and a public sphere where religion may participate, but not dominate.
Freedom to practice one’s faith or belief without harming others, or to change it or not have one, according to one’s own conscience.
Equality so that our religious beliefs or lack of them doesn’t put any of us at an advantage or a disadvantage.
Similary, the principle of ‘laïcité’ in France is built on the maxim that the state should not interfere in the religious beliefs or convictions of its people, and guarantees to each the freedom to exercise his or her religion or conviction without interference and, importantly, without being forced to show respect for any conviction, belief or faith. This principle fundamentally respects the freedom of conscience, for the non-believer and believer alike. Nobody should be able, neither state, organisation, nor individual, to encroach upon the domain of an individual’s most subjective beliefs or convictions.
Elle garantit le libre exercice des cultes et la liberté de religion, mais aussi la liberté vis-à-vis de la religion : personne ne peut être contraint au respect de dogmes ou prescriptions religieuses. (emphasis added)
Crucially, in France laïcité is itself not a view, or opinion, it is the principle that guarantees that one can have one:
La laïcité n’est pas une opinion parmi d'autres mais la liberté d’en avoir une. Elle n'est pas une conviction mais le principe qui les autorise toutes, sous réserve du respect de l’ordre public.
This principle has nothing got to do with a supposed love for lampooning religion, Islam in particular. It defends any belief or conviction insofar as it remains within the law and doesn’t contradict with public order, and to this extent it defends the right to satirise religion, including Islam.
You can’t be fanatical or militant, or less fanatical and militant about these principles. You either subscribe to them, or you don’t. That’s how it works with principles: you stick to them or you don’t. Calling strictly adhering to these principles fanatical or militant is like saying that always driving on the right side of the road (that is, either on the left or right side) is fanatical or militant. If you don’t subscribe to the principles of secularism, you’re simply not a secularist, not a half-arsed one, or a moderate one or a do-gooder multiculti type of secularist; you’re just not one. You are either a secularist or you aren’t. Religious fanatics aren’t, and they are militantly anti-secularists at that. At least they are consistent.
There is also the misconception that if you are a secularist, you can’t be religious. So it’s supposedly an either/or choice. This is where the spurious Islamophobia charge comes from: it is based on a simplistic view of religion and of the relation between faith and reason. If you’re a strict secularist, you must be an islamophobe, the thinking goes. You have to moderate your secularism in order to allow for religious views to get a hearing. But this is mixing up the principle with what it guarantees. Secularism in fact guarantees that religious views can be held in all freedom; it vouchsafes the very freedom to be religious and have religious convictions. It is itself not a religious view among others. Secularism is not atheism!
Nothing in the statements above, about either secularism or laïcité says that you can’t be religious if you’re secularist. In fact, the aforementioned Gert-Jan Segers is a clear example of someone who is very religious but also believes strictly in the ‘convenant of freedom’, as he calls it, that as a society we have agreed upon. As Segers writes, in the Netherlands especially we have a bloody history that attests to the efforts of attaining this equilibrium in society between various faiths and between believers and atheists. In accordance with Kantian principles, one can certainly be religious within the bounds of mere reason. The ‘convenant of freedom’ guarantees this religious peace.
Of course, when we look at the state of France, which like no other big state has adopted the principles of secularism in its constitution in the aftermath of the 1789 revolution, there may be some debate about the proper application of the principles of laïcité in practice, in particular the interpretation of the extent to which religion, Islam in this case, ‘dominates’ in society, and the extent to which the state lawfully interferes in balancing this domination. There is debate about the issue whether the French state’s interference in the wearing of religiously conspicuous clothing in public or public institutions doesn’t go too far, the ban of the full-face veil being a good case in point. This is however not in itself an abandonment of the principle of neutrality that is ingrained in laïcité, since it is envisaged in the principle that no conviction of a religious nature may encroach upon the domain of any other individual or pose a risk to the public order. This principle itself is neutral with respect to specific religious convictions. The question circles round the extent to which and the manner in which the principle is applied, equally and proportionately.
But one could argue, and there is evidence to back this up, that in France at least the state has in fact done too little to balance the domination of Islam in the public sphere, or in fact covered up the extent of the imbalance and the negative consequences that may have led to what is considered an uncontrollable ‘parallel society’. In France, the consensus, across the political aisle, now is that such a parallel society exists where islamist influence in the public sphere (on the level of education in particular, in local communities, even in academic circles etc.) has become far too big and poses a danger to the cohesion of society. This imbalance and too lenient an approach to antisecularist tendencies amongst a significant portion of its people, especially the younger generation, together with other compounding causal factors (high employment, identity crises, felt and real discrimination, low social mobility, etc.) is most likely the big explainer of the rise of extremism and terrorist attacks that we see. What is clear at any rate is that it is certainly not a consistent sticking to the principle of secularism that is the or even a blameable cause of this rise in extremism.
© Dennis Schulting, 2020, 2022.
There is also a confusion—or an intentional ambiguity, maybe?—here between seeing secularism as blameworthy, at least partly, for extremist terrorism, and as a cause of it. The latter can’t be denied, since islamists themselves see secularism as a culprit—they don’t like it, not a bit of it. But surely, liberals and the ‘regressive left’ don’t wish to do their bidding, do they?