Why secularism doesnt work

Historically, in the UK, marriage was lifelong, monogamous union between one man and one woman. A decade or so ago, that was supplemented by civil partnerships so that state could recognise the union between two people of the same sex but mark it out a different from marriage. Then, a few years later, it introduced the right of same sex couples to enter into a marriage union.

Each of these positions contains a view of what form s of union it is proper for a state to recognise, views that were often aired in more intelligent if less noticed debates around the time of the Marriage Same Sex Couples Act in There was and is no neutral position here. The debate can be extended. Why deny the rights of the so—called polyamorous who deny that relational exclusivity is necessary for recognising a union?

Why, indeed, not extend the right to polygamous arrangements, such as are permitted in certain interpretations of Islamic law, whereby a man may marry up to four wives? Speaking personally, I can think of various reasons to deny these extensions of recognition, but my views inevitably draw on my anthropological, and beneath it, theological and metaphysical commitments.

Similarly, the state cannot decide on these matters from a position of metaphysical neutrality can. Impartiality is not an option. The secular state, like the humans that inhabit it, is condemned to operate in a contentious ethical landscape, however much it pretends to have transcended it. Lots of people are afraid of the secular state. Certain crimes of history, and certain pettinesses of the present, show they have reason to be so.

Secularism can be a subterfuge, its cause not aided by being most often found on the same lips that dismiss religious commitment as inherently stupid or dangerous. But this, to return to an earlier point, is to less the bad dictate the good. Adhering to soft secularism, with all the caveats above noted, can be a step in the right direction but only a step. The end of the journey is not in sight, and there are good reasons to believe, with our growing pluralism, deep diversity and the hint of incommensurability hovering in the background, it never will be.

But that would mark not the end of a debate, but the start of a new one. Secularism yes. But what kind? Image by aga7ta available under licence from shutterstock. Nick is Senior Fellow at Theos. As the relationship between work, time and place changes, this report explores how we can rediscover patterns of rest. In the first episode of this series, Nick Spencer speaks to primatologist Frans de Waal.

In our final blog for COP26, Martin Palmer explores why and how major faiths should respond to climate change. Coronavirus, Technology, Work. Theos researches and investigates the intersection of religion, politics and society in the contemporary world. Our website uses cookies to improve your online experience. Find out more. Want to keep up to date with the latest news, reports, blogs and events from Theos? For example, Muslim scholars, or ulama , were hierarchically organized and sanctioned by the state, and Ottoman sultans often issued decrees with the force of law.

The powers of the central government grew after , enabling it to initiate a number of secularizing measures in the nineteenth century, often under Western pressure. These measures included significant government control over vakf mortmain property and the declaration of equal rights for Muslims and non- Muslims.

Meanwhile, nationalism grew in the army and among the educated middle classes. A war hero, he had led the Turkish troops that repelled the European invaders, forcing the Allied powers to recognize Turkish control of enough territory to constitute a viable nation-state. The need for strong government action to establish a secular state was due both to the residual strength of existing Islamic institutions and the felt need to catch up with a West that had a long head start in centralization and modernization.

His were the strongest measures against religious institutions anywhere outside the Communist world, as he and many Turkish nationalists adopted the French model of militant laicism. Even secular politicians wanting better relations with the oil-rich Arab world made gestures toward Islam. Mainly because of a deep economic crisis, a new Islamist-based but more moderate and formally secular AK Party won a plurality in the November elections and has since led the government.

Periodic struggles continue over issues like the prohibition of Islamic head covering for women in state localities such as Parliament and universities. This is partly because Turkey has hopes of joining the European community, and partly because the active majority of Turks are still secular, though often willing to allow freedom of dress, and the ruling party is not threatening basic secularism.

As in Russia, much of the population was successfully secularized by governmental fiat and policies. There is not as much religious backlash in Turkey today as in several Arab countries in the Middle East, and Turkey is unique in its renunciation of Islamic justifications for laws and institutions. In Iran, the ulama had far more independent power than anywhere else in the Muslim world, due to developments in Iranian Shiism after it became the state religion in Disgruntled ulama allied with merchants and nationalist reformers in a partially successful antigovernmental revolt in — Beginning in late , a revolution produced a constitutional parliamentary regime that continued in power until Russia and Britain intervened in He centralized his country — chiefly by forcibly settling nomads, improving education, transport, and communications, and promoting the secular nationalist view of Iran hitherto favored by intellectuals.

Simultaneously, he forced his citizens to adopt Western dress, promoted a secular public school system, and so forth. Modernizing secularization continued under his son, Muhammad Reza Shah r. Modernization, which took place there almost entirely between and , was much more sudden in Iran than it had been in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the suppression of secular opposition opened the way for the rapid rise and victory of a multifaceted revolutionary movement led by a religious opposition that appealed to widespread anti-Western and anti-tyrannical feelings.

Other Muslim countries had only partly similar trajectories, which I will describe in brief. By a historical contingency, in the Middle East only Arab countries experienced Western colonial rule. Almost all of them outside the Arabian Peninsula were for a time either colonies, protectorates, or mandates of Britain or France.

Western control of Palestine in the crucial years after culminated in the creation of Israel, which greatly strengthened anti-Western currents in the Arab Middle East. In Palestine and Algeria, the only Muslim countries occupied by foreign settlers, there was a strong counter-assertion of national and religious identities, prompted in large part by efforts to assert local, non-Western cultural values in regions ruled by the West.

Secular nationalists generally led the anticolonial liberation movements after World War II. In Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser participated in a revolution and survived an assassination attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood in , which he used to legitimate a crackdown on religious institutions; two years later, Nasser declared Egypt a socialist state.

Current Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak has not limited his crackdown to militant Islamists; he has arrested and brought to trial a number of dissidents, including civil rights leaders like Saad Eddin Ibrahim. In Tunisia after its independence, Habib Bourguiba instated strongly secular measures that reinterpreted Islam, weakened religious institutions, and introduced virtually equal rights for women.

His successor, Ben Ali, however, has autocratically suppressed both Islamists of all varieties and civil rights lawyers and advocates. In Algeria, governmental suppression of the elections that Islamists were poised to win led to a bloody civil war, but also to a significant decline in militant Islamism. Militant Islam is still a strong force in much of the Muslim world, but I would agree with those who point to its weakening in recent years in key centers including Iran, Egypt, and Algeria.

Despite the bin Laden phenomenon, it seems unlikely that militant Islamists will take over more Arab governments in the near future. The creation in recent decades of modernized and highly political versions of Islam encourages mobilization of the still-religious masses and provides the elements of an ideology that seems familiar, powerful—and untainted by Western influence. In recent years, Islamist Muslims have introduced antisecular elements rare in past Islamic history, like the total intertwining of religion and politics and the political primacy of clerical and lay Muslim leaders.

The idea and practice of codifying Islamic law and making it the law of the state is also distinctly modern. Still, most people attracted to Islamist ideologies do not envision a violent overthrow of their governments; they rather wish to establish political parties and participate in free elections. Several Islamists today champion values long associated with secularism in the West, including democracy and respect for modern science, technology, and education.

Anti-Western terrorism, while of natural international concern, involves a very small minority of Muslims, and has thus far spread far less than many feared after Paradoxically enough, the Islamic country where forms of secularism are most popular today is probably Iran.

Reformists have won repeated electoral victories in the country since , demonstrations against the hard-liners who control the government are increasingly frequent, and there is a healthy ferment in the arts. Just as the Iranian revolution was briefly seen as a model in much of the Muslim world, so Iranian reformism and activist opposition to clerical autocracy are now models for many outside Iran. Some intellectuals in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world think that advances associated with secularism in the West can be achieved via reinterpretations of Islam without renouncing the ties between state and religion.

Many Iranians are speaking not only against clerical rule, but also explicitly in favor of the separation of religion and the state. The failures of the Islamic Republic have also dampened enthusiasm for Islamic revolution and rule elsewhere.

The dynamics of secularization in South Asia and Israel, where religion and nationalism have been closely intertwined for decades, have been somewhat different from those in the West and the Middle East. In Pakistan and Israel, religious identity spurred movements to create a nation, movements chiefly based on religious nationalism. As a result, there is no consensus that being a Jewish or Muslim state requires any further strengthening of religious laws.

Pakistan differs greatly from Israel, however; it trails Israel in modernization and education programs, and must also contend with widespread poverty and persistent tribal and regional power centers. Current Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has secular aims, but by his acts he has alienated many Islamists and democratic secularists alike, and he is having trouble in his efforts to introduce secular education into the far-flung madrasas.

The case of India, where Hinduism is practiced among several other major religions, is more complex. Founded in , the Indian National Congress was predominantly liberal-secular, and officially neutral regarding religion.

Such religious neutrality seemed necessary if the party was to enlist both Muslims and Hindus in the struggle for national independence. Tilak attracted mostly Hindu support and alienated some non-Hindus. In the first years of the twentieth century, divisive communal issues came to the fore with the abortive partition of Bengal, favored by Muslims but broadly opposed by Hindus.

The dispute over Bengal led to the formation of the Muslim League and to the granting of separate electorates, at first for local bodies, based on religion. The Congress Party attracted a number of Muslim politicians, most prominently A. Azad, at a time when the Muslim League was far from securing the majority of Muslim voters.

On the other hand, the religious Gandhi and his agnostic fellow Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru were in agreement that the national movement and ultimate national government of a united India should be secular in its policies and treat all religions equally. In elections for provincial legislatures in , the Muslim League did not get the majority of Muslim votes, but subsequently many Muslims found the performance of the Congress-dominated legislatures pro-Hindu and discriminatory.

While partition might have been avoided—especially if Nehru had accepted proposals for substantial autonomy for Muslim regions— it instead took effect with brutal suddenness after the hasty departure of the British in Large-scale massacres occurred on both sides.

In India after the partition, maintaining state secularism and religious neutrality proved difficult, and the Indian constitution did not establish a uniform civil code. In , a crisis ensued when a branch of the Indian supreme court ruled that an elderly Muslim woman, Shah Bano, was entitled to maintenance by her ex-husband under a section of the Indian Criminal Code, and went beyond this in advocating a uniform civil code.

This led to significant Hindu-Muslim conflict, though some Muslim women and liberals agreed with the judgment. A Hindu nationalist backlash was a factor in the ultimately successful campaign to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. In recent years, Hindu nationalism has grown in power; its party, the BJP, currently leads the government. A number of intellectuals, including Ashis Nandy, T.

Madan, and Partha Chatterjee, have questioned either secularism itself or the particular secularist policies of past governments. Some Indian intellectuals defend secularism, but criticize its application, arguing, for example, that Nehru and his followers adopted a top-down policy, doing little to negotiate with religious people before handling problems with insensitivity.

The conflict between secularism and religious nationalism has been a recurrent theme of recent South Asian history not only in India but also in Sri Lanka. In reaction to Hindu and Muslim versions of religious nationalism, Sikh and Buddhist nationalist movements have emerged in South Asia.

All of these religious nationalist movements have contributed to a weakening of secularism in the region. The Indian situation differs from that of the Muslim world in that it involves reactions against a longstanding secular government with democratic elections.

The use of the term secularism in English began in the middle of the nineteenth century. George Jacob Holyoake — may have coined the word as early as ,and one of his main works, published in , bears the title The Principles of Secularism.

In , the philosopher John Stuart Mill was still treating the word as a neologism. Mill used the term because he was eager to avoid atheistic , which is the more fitting term to describe the opposite of religious.

But atheism was hardly the thing in Victorian Britain, and the word was felt to be rude. In the same intellectual atmosphere, the biologist T. In present-day Britain, a third word, humanism , is often used with the same meaning and with the same intention: to evoke the possibility of a nonreligious basis for a morally animated society.

The debate for which the word secularism was coined is a false one. Advocates of secularism assume they are proposing a novel possibility, which is that moral precepts can be known without any particular revelation by God. This was lost sight of in the modern era, when many Christians defended religion against skeptical and rationalist attacks by arguing that it is necessary for ensuring the moral basis of society.

Men without religion, it was argued, could not be trusted to behave in an upright fashion. So advocates of secularism were drawn into the false debate. I ronically, and perhaps inevitably, the words that are meant to express secularization are themselves Christian words that have been secularized. Both are derived from the Greek adjective that designates a member of a people or nation.

Thus even the advocates of secularism are unable to escape the biblical sources of so much of Western culture. The root of secular , secularism , and secularity is saeculum. It receives from Christianity a particular shade of meaning. In the vocabulary of the Church Fathers, saeculum designates the world as Christianity conceives of it. These terms stress the transitory, provisional character of the present state of the world. Saeculum is thereby diametrically opposed to the Greek kosmos , the beautiful world order that was believed to be everlasting.

The word also came to designate a century, one hundred years. This semantic evolution did not happen by chance, for one hundred years is not just any length of time. This use of the term was not uniquely Christian. Heralds would go all over Rome and Italy, inviting people to come and see a spectacle that nobody ever saw and nobody would see again. The ancient usage draws on the fact that a saeculum , a century, is the temporal limit of living memory.

It is the halo of possible experience that surrounds the life of the individual. I can keep a remembrance of my grandparents and, more seldom, of my great-grandparents. What my grandfather told me I can tell my grandchildren. I can reach back two generations and forward two, but rarely more, to a period spanning what amounts to a century.

One century is also the limit of the concrete care we can give. I very well can, nay, should think about the future situation of my children, of my grandchildren, possibly of my great-grandchildren. In Book 3, he depicts the struldbrugs, wretched immortals of the country of Luggnagg.

Till their thirtieth year, they behave like normal mortals. Then they begin to suffer from a melancholy that keeps growing till they reach the age of eighty years, considered the usual limit of life expectancy.

Although the struldbrugs live on, in Luggnagg after eighty they are considered legally dead and forfeit every right to their property, which falls to their heirs.

After two hundred years, they hardly understand the language of their fellow countrymen anymore. Their lives outrun the existential limits of the saeculum. Our intuitive sense of the outer boundaries of living memory and concern finds expression in the field of law.

One hundred years, what is known as the tempus memoratum , constitutes the longest possible duration for a contract. For example, the longest possible land lease holds good for ninety-nine years. The king remembers forever. A great deal. In the modern era, as Mill recognized and imported into English, it acquired the added meaning of an outlook, a person, or a body of people that renounces the transcendent.

There is a profound irony of language here, for the sense of secular that denotes one hundred years is implied in the later, more recent sense that denies the transcendent.

Put bluntly: A secularist is a person the inner logic of whose position compels him to act as if mankind were not to last longer than one century. And even: A secularist is a person whose behavior, if universalized, would make it so that mankind would in fact not last more than one century.