In January, the Harvard University Press will release “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” by Claire L. Adida (University of California, San Diego), David D. Laitin (Stanford University), and Marie-Anne Valfort (Paris School of Economics and Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne). The publisher’s description follows:
Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.
Claire Adida, David Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort found that in France, Muslims are widely perceived as threatening, based in large part on cultural differences between Muslim and rooted French that feed both rational and irrational Islamophobia. Relying on a unique methodology to isolate the religious component of discrimination, the authors identify a discriminatory equilibrium in which both Muslim immigrants and native French act negatively toward one another in a self-perpetuating, vicious circle.
Disentangling the rational and irrational threads of Islamophobia is essential if Europe hopes to repair a social fabric that has frayed around the issue of Muslim immigration. Muslim immigrants must address their own responsibility for the failures of integration, and Europeans must acknowledge the anti-Islam sentiments at the root of their antagonism. The authors outline public policy solutions aimed at promoting religious diversity in fair-minded host societies.
The opening scene of The Suppliants is set in the holy ground of the sanctuary of the goddess Demeter in Eleusis. The Eleusinian Demeter was a grain goddess, whose Great Mysteries were celebrated annually in September, when the autumn rains were expected to renew the life of the earth. At the climax of the mysteries, a reaped ear of wheat was revealed. Grain was stored in underground rooms in the sanctuary. By placing the play at this site, Euripides is invoking the idea of civilization, which the Greeks associated with the practice of agriculture. Thus, in the description of the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII of The Iliad, the cultivation of wheat is tied to prosperity and the rise of kingship: “at a furrow’s end the king stood pleas’d at heart,/Said no word, but his scepter show’d. And from him, much apart,/His harvest-bailiffs underneath an oak a feast prepar’d” (ll. 506-08). According to Athenian legend, the demi-god Triptolemus, to whom a temple at Eleusis was dedicated, was a favorite (perhaps even the son) of Demeter and is depicted in her company in many Athenian vase paintings. Triptolemus, whose name seems to mean “thrice-ploughed” or “thrice-sown” and who presided over the sowing of grain and the milling of wheat, was credited with inventing the plough and spreading the cultivation of agriculture. Hence he was thought to have originated civilization, which resulted from his discoveries. Sophocles wrote a lost play called Triptolemus. See Susan B. Matheson, The Mission of Triptolemus and the Politics of Athens(1994).
There are many echoes of these legends in The Suppliants. One critic goes so
Demeter, Triptolemus, Persephone
far as to suggest seeing the entire play “as a kind of fertility ritual ensuring Athenian and Argive prosperity.” See D.J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure (1967). The Athenian king Theseus praises “whatever immortal power” it was whose wisdom “[g]ave us earth’s fruit for food and, lest supply should fail/Sends rain to nourish growing plants, and fertilize/The womb of earth.” (Here and hereafter, I use Philip Vellacott’s Penguin Classics translation of the play). And in the speech that opens the play, Aethra, Theseus’ mother, tells us that she has come to Demeter’s shrine at Eleusis “to make sacrifice,/For a good harvest, at this holy shrine, where first/Bristled above the soil the fruitful ears of [wheat].” Aethra is there, apparently, to officiate as Athens’ Queen Mother at the feast of the Eleusinian Proerosia, when the first fruits are gathered. The founding hero of the festival was Triptolemus; it commemorates the beginnings of agriculture. See Noel Robertson, New Light on Demeter’s Mysteries: The Festival Proerosia (1996). Note that Aethra claims that Athens is the place where grain “first” appeared.
Furthermore, the sanctuary at Eleusis was emblematic of Athenian prestige and glory. The Eleusinian Mysteries “were for a thousand years one of the crowning glories of Athens, the pride of her statesmen, poets, and orators, a focal point of piety which though intimately civic was at the same time panhellenic.” Francis R. Walton, Athens, Eleusis, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter(1952). Many of Athens’ greatest leaders, including Pericles, were associated with renovations of the sanctuary. The accusation against the Athenian politician and general Alcibiades, that he and his friends had profaned the Eleusinian rites, charged him with an extremely serious offense, fed into suspicions that he intended to overthrow the democracy, and prompted him to demand that he be put to death if tried and found guilty. See Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book V, cc. 28-29. The fourth century Athenian orator Isocrates, in celebrating Athens’ contributions to the world, significantly put first two gifts of Demeter, “the greatest [gifts] in the world—the fruits of the earth, which have enabled us to rise above the life of the beasts, and the holy rite [i.e., the Eleusinian mysteries (RJD)] which inspires in those who partake of it sweeter hopes regarding both the end of life and all eternity.” Panegyricus, IV, 28.
Eleusis and panhellenism
Although Eleusis was located on Athenian territory and although the rites celebrated there were used to serve Athens’ self-presentation, the sacred precincts had a panhellenic as well as a specifically Athenian significance. Athens claimed “to be connected to all of Greece through the panhellenic and beneficial institutions” at Eleusis. Barbara Goff, Aithra at Eleusis(1995).
Athens attempted to be at once exclusionary and engaged in relation to the rest of Greece. After a law of Pericles adopted in 451, Athens excluded from citizenship all those who were not born of Athenian parents on both sides. But Athens was happy to open the city to foreigners, and non-Athenians (like the Argive women in the play) were free to worship at Eleusis. Indeed, the shrine at Eleusis, along with those at Dodona, Delos and Samothrace, was one of the four great “common shrines” of Greece, with unrestricted access to all. And sometime in the 420s (i.e., around the time The Suppliants was written), Athens issued the so-called Aparkhai decree, which ordered the city’s allies, and invited other Greek states, to send offerings of corn and barley annually to Eleusis. Athens seems to have been promoting Eleusis as a common religious center for the whole of Greece. See Ian Rutherford, State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece (2013).
Eleusis and the legends associated with the site thus functioned as a kind of bridge to other Greek cities. In Xenophon’s Hellenika (Book VI, c. 3.4-6), the Athenian envoy Kallias reminds the Spartans that “the first foreigners to whom Triptolemus, our ancestor, revealed the secret rites of Demeter and Kore were Herakles, your founder, and the Diskouroi, your citizens; and he first gave the seeds of the fruit of Demeter to the Peloponnese” (The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, Robert B. Strassler (ed.), John Marincola (trans.)). Through Eleusis and its cult, Athens claimed to be the source and provider of benefits, both material and spiritual, to the whole of the Greek world. It sought to be (as we might say) the supplier of international public goods for the other Greek cities (and hence entitled to a hegemonic role in their affairs). Panhellenic values will loom large in the play: Athens goes to war against Thebes for the sake of upholding panhellenic law and custom.
The rites of supplication
By situating the beginning of the play at a sacred site, Euripides has also underscored the social and religious significance of the actions of the Argive King and women in “supplicating” Athens. “Supplication” (“hiketeia”) was an important and distinctive social practice in ancient Greece. It was highly ritualized and was enacted through stylized symbolic gestures, such as kneeling and clasping or touching the beard, chin, hands or knees of the person to whom the supplication is made. The two main forms of supplication were a face-to-face encounter between a human being and a god (or another human), and an appeal through contact with the altar or sacred precincts of a god. See John Gould, Hiketeia(1973). Supplication of the first kind is illustrated by King Priam’s visit to the camp of Achilles in Book XXIV of The Iliad, ll. 414 et seq., when – following the instructions given by the god Hermes — he kisses Achilles’ hand and beseeches him to release to him the body of his son Hector. The action of The Suppliants, which takes place at a shrine, illustrates the second form, although it includes significant elements of the first. (For example, the Argive women cling to the knees of Theseus, clasp his hand and touch his beard.) Theseus himself describes the Argive women and their king as “formal suppliants.”
Suppliants were under the special protection of Zeus. In Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women (l. 1, l. 438), Zeus is said to “guard suppliants.” In Sophocles’ Ajax, the archer Teucer, fearing for the life of the son of his brother Ajax after Ajax’s death, bids him to assume the posture of a suppliant next to his father’s body and places a curse on any evil-doer who may seek to harm the lad. In Book IX of the Odyssey (ll. 303-05), Odysseus appeals to Polyphemus to bear in mind that he is a suppliant, guarded by Zeus of the Strangers, who will punish disregard of his rights. “[A]ll suppliants were placed under Zeus’ protection, and those who harmed a suppliant or violated the established rules were liable to divine sanctions.” Nonetheless, whether to yield to a suppliant’s pleas was in the discretion of the more powerful person to whom the appeal was made. Angeliki Tzanetou, City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (2012).
As suppliants at the Eleusian sanctuary, the Argive women and king occupy a liminal position between the gods and men: they stand at the border where humanity encounters the divine, and so demonstrate the “extra-territoriality of the sacred” (Gould). Moreover, they are powerless, but their very powerlessness invests them with the mystery and aura of the supernatural. (The blind, aged, ruined, destitute Oedipus, also portrayed as a suppliant in Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, exerts the same kind of power when seeking refuge from Thebes at the village of Colonus, near Athens.) Their speech, gestures and posture demonstrate their shameful vulnerability; but they also pose an implicit threat to the more powerful, because it would be shameful not to pity those who are so wretched, especially when the supplication is enacted in a public space. “The suppliant is by definition weak and defenceless; yet he carries within him the threatening power of what is ‘beyond’” (Gould). Moreover, the Argive women are foreigners, strangers to Athens; and yet they assert some claim to its protection, as if they were members of the city’s community. Supplication, in short, was “a ritual one of whose functions is to bring an aberrant human being within the norms of the social order and to mitigate or resolve the crises which result when the community or its representative agent is confronted with what is ‘outside’” (Gould).
Just as the unburied sons are “outsiders” at Thebes, lying on its soil but given no place in its social order, so the suppliant women are “outsiders” at Athens. But Euripides will show that Athens, unlike Thebes, has the humaneness and the courage to take the outsiders “in.” As Sophocles’ Oedipus will say of Athens, it must show itself to be “that rock of reverence all men say it is,/the only city on earth to save the ruined stranger,/the only one to protect him, give him shelter.” Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 277-79 (Robert Fagles trans.).
Note, though, the counterpoint later in the play (after Athens’ victory at Thebes). Although the Argive mothers get their sons’ bodies back, they will still lament their deaths and, strikingly, they will still remain “outsiders.” Just as their unburied sons occupied a liminal place between the living and the dead, so too will their bereaved mothers:
Now in childless misery
I tread the lonely road to old age;
Numbered neither with the dead nor with the living
I inhabit the world of the outcast.
The Argive mothers
War is unfamiliar to most of us. But we should not mistake the depths of the Argive mothers’ agony. In our own time, we need only consider the anguish of the Argentine “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Beginning in 1977, a group of mothers marched every Thursday around the central square of Buenos Aires, demanding that the government inform them of the fates of their children, who had “disappeared” by the tens of thousands in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s against left-wing activists. Until they discovered what had happened to their children, the mothers’ grief could not be assuaged: they marched for over thirty-five years.
For reasons that I cannot claim to fathom, it is a balm to such suffering to learn the fate of a child who has gone missing in war, and still more to be able to hold that child’s remains, visit that child’s grave, or at least know the place and circumstances of his or her death. In his moving and powerful account of how Britain and her Empire dealt with the burial of their dead soldiers after the First World War, David Crane writes of the yearning that thousands of parents across the Empire felt to identify or to visit the sites where their sons had died or been buried:
In 1931, an Australian mother was found sobbing at the grave on Gallipoli of a son who she had thought among the missing. ‘If only I could see your grave, I would die happy,’ another Australian, the mother of Jack Fothergill, killed on the first day of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, wrote . . . eight years later.
Empires of the Dead (2013).
While reflection on experiences that are, like these, nearer in culture and time to us may help us understand the Argive mothers’ sorrow, it seems that we would still have not touched the full depth of their agony. Greek epic and tragedy seem to have had a unique pathos and poignancy on this matter. In her Mothers in Mourning (1998 (French ed. 1990)), the French classicist Nicole Loraux calls attention to the fact that in Greek literature, the sight of a son’s corpse is presented as the cause of a peculiarly intense, as it were physical, anguish for his mother, activating in her what Loraux calls a “body-memory.” “Suddenly present with a heart-rending accuracy, the grief and the memory of the intimacy of these bodies produce excessive pain for the body-memory of mothers. Euripidean tragedy has much to say about this sensual intensity that expresses itself only on a background of loss.” Here in The Suppliants, the Argive women plead for the recovery of their sons’ bodies so that they can once more hold and touch them: “Out of the depth of pain I cry to your [Aethra’s] son/To give my dead into my arms,/ That I may embrace and mourn the body that I bore.” And later: “Give me my son;/ Let my arms hold him fast;/ Let my embrace rest and enfold him.”
Loraux connects this longing with the scene in Book XXII of The Iliad in which Hector’s mother Hecuba implores him not to fight Achilles: she knows, not only that Achilles will kill her son, but also that he will take his body, and so deprive her of the comfort that she has often imagined that she would eventually have in holding his body in the mourning ritual. Hecuba tells Hector (in Loraux’s translation) (ll. 86-7):
If he kills you, I shall no longer be able to weep
Over your bier, dear child, whom I myself begat.
Loraux comments: “As if mourning necessarily were part of a mother’s fate from the very beginning, Hecuba has so much anticipated the vision, both dreaded and strangely comforting, of Hector’s prothesis [the part of the Greek death ritual in which the body is laid out and ritually cleansed (RJD)] that the mother panics . . . foreseeing the loss of her son and of his dead body [my italics (RJD)], as well as of the comfort brought on by ritual. . . . Hecuba thus evokes . . . the ritual that has been imagined so often and will not take place.” The bond between the mother’s body and her son’s, ruptured by his death, must be reknitted in the funeral ritual by her holding and mourning over his body, or her grief and loss are redoubled.
And this, Euripides shows us, will become the final, exquisite agony of the Argive mothers. For Theseus, despite eventually recovering their sons’ bodies and bringing them back to Athens, will deny them the one last chance to hold them; and Adrastus will concur. Between them, the two kings, guardians of the civil order, will set limits to the grieving of the women:
ADRASTUS: Is it wrong for a mother’s hand to touch her son?
THESEUS: They are disfigured; the sight would be too great a shock. . . [W]hy inflict distress on these women?
ADRASTUS [To the CHORUS]: Wait patiently. Theseus is right.
The civic ideology of ancient Athens had little patience with women’s mourning. In Sophocles’ Ajax (ll. 579-80), the hero says to his concubine Tecmessa, “make no laments before the house. God, what a weepy thing is woman” (Richard Jebb trans.). Even Pericles’ funeral oration pays little concern to women: Pericles remarks near the end (Book Two, c. 45) that a woman’s part is simply not to be talked about. But Euripides’ play lets the Argive mothers speak, if not mourn.
Islam is a growing presence practically everywhere in Europe. In Italy,
however, Islam has met a unique model of state neutrality, religious freedom and church and state collaboration. This book gives a detailed description of the legal treatment of Muslims in Italy, contrasting it with other European states and jurisprudence, and with wider global tendencies that characterize the treatment of Islam. Through focusing on a series of case studies, the author argues that the relationship between church and state in Italy, and more broadly in Europe, should be reconsidered both to secure religious freedom and general welfare.
Working on the concepts of religious freedom, state neutrality, and relationship between church and state, Andrea Pin develops a theoretical framework that combines the state level with the supranational level in the form of the European Convention of Human Rights, which ultimately shapes a unitary but flexible understanding of pluralism. This approach should better accommodate not just Muslims’ needs, but religious needs in general in Italy and elsewhere.
In January, Columbia University Press will release “Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy” edited by Jean L. Cohen (Columbia University) and Cécile Laborde (University College London). The publisher’s description follows:
Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe.
Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project’s theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.
Last month, Pax Romana released “The Protection of Religious Minorities Worldwide,” edited by Elizabeth F. Defeis (Seton Hall Law School) and Peter F. O’Connor. Prof. Defeis is an alumna of St. John’s Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for International and Comparative Law at St. John’s. Mr. O’Connor is a third-year law student at St. John’s. The publisher’s description follows:
Throughout history, religious minorities have experienced discrimination, persecution, expulsion, and genocide. Further, in the last decade, the world has witnessed an unprecedented increase in violent persecution of religious minorities, particularly in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa. Yet the international community has been a bystander and has not been able or willing to develop a strategy to protect persecuted religious minorities and to stop their expulsion and genocide. After the Second World War with the creation of the United Nations, there were great hopes that all peoples could live in peace with one another as good neighbors, based on the fundamental human rights and the practice of tolerance as stated in the Preamble of the United Nations Charter. However, the United Nations never developed specific and effective strategies to protect the human rights of religious minorities and to stop their persecution, expulsion and genocide. Even so, we must recognize that the United Nations has been providing humanitarian assistance to refugees who fled for religious reasons. The 2014 Symposium at the United Nations in New York on the “Protection of Religious Minorities Worldwide” was directed at the international community in the hope that it will acknowledge the dire situation of so many religious minorities and will adopt practical strategies and measures for protection of, and strong humanitarian assistance for, the expelled religious refugees.
Outsiders in a Promised Land explores the role that religious activists have played in shaping the culture of the Pacific Northwest, particularly in Washington and Oregon, from the middle of the 19th century onward. The region’s earliest settlers came to work in the mines and forests, and a culture of saloons, gambling halls, and brothels grew up to serve them. When migration to the region intensified, newcomers with families and religious traditions often saw themselves as outsiders in opposition to the prevailing frontier culture.
As communities grew in population, early activists found common ground in a desire to protect women and children, and make their towns more hospitable to religious values. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews worked together to transform communities. Together they introduced public and private schools, health care institutions, libraries and orphanages, and lobbied for the prohibition of alcohol.
Beginning in the 1930s, religious activism played a crucial role in the emerging culture wars between liberals and conservatives. Liberals rallied around the protection of civil rights and the building of social safety nets, while conservatives decried the rise of secularism, liberalism, and communism. Today, religious activists of many faiths are deeply engaged in matters related to women’s and gay rights, foreign policy, and environmental protection.
Outsiders in a Promised Land is a meticulously researched, comprehensive treatment of religion in Pacific Northwest public life. The first book of its kind, it is destined to be an essential reference for scholars, activists, and religious leaders of all faiths.
In No Jim Crow Church, Louis Venters recounts the unlikely emergence of a cohesive interracial fellowship in South Carolina, tracing the history of the community from the end of the nineteenth century through the civil rights era. By joining the Bahá’í Faith, blacks and whites not only defied Jim Crow but also rejected their society’s religious and social restrictions.
The religion, which emphasizes the spiritual unity of all humankind, arrived in the United States from the Middle East via northern urban areas. As early as 1910, Bahá’í teachers began settling in South Carolina, where the Bahá’í Faith is currently the largest religious minority. Venters presents an organizational, social, and intellectual history of South Carolina’s early Bahá’í movement and relates developments within the community to changes in society at large, with particular attention to race relations and the civil rights struggle. He argues that the state’s Bahá’ís represent a significant, sustained, spiritually based challenge to the ideology and structures of white male Protestant supremacy. His research provides a fascinating study of an unlikely movement’s rise to prominence and the role of the South Carolina Bahá’í community in the cultural and structural evolution of a new world religion.
Take a look at the photo above, which appeared recently on Instagram. It’s the photo of a page from the New Testament — Acts 25, which recounts St. Paul’s trial before Festus. The page, seared into a bookshelf, is all that remains of the Bible that once contained it. ISIS recently burned the Bible, along with the Armenian Orthodox Church that held it, in Tal Abyad, Syria. The page is written in Armenian characters, but in the Turkish language, which suggests the Bible was once the possession of refugees from the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Survivors of that Genocide founded the town of Tal Abyad 100 years ag0.
I thought of this photograph while reading Nina Shea’s searing assessment, in yesterday’s National ReviewOnline,of the US’s treatment of Syrian Christian refugees. In the past five years of the Syrian civil war, she writes, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Christian refugees from Syria. Fifty-three! When one considers that at the start of the conflict Christians made up 10% of the country’s population of 23 million, and that ISIS and other Islamist groups have made Christians special targets, the minuscule number of Christian refugees the US has admitted is truly shocking.
Shea says there are two explanations. First, the US has generally been reluctant to admit any refugees from Syria. Second, the US relies on the UN to process and refer applications for asylum from its own refugee and resettlement camps. But Christians and other religious minorities are reluctant to use the UN camps, which are infiltrated by ISIS operatives:
Like Iraqi Christians who opt for church-run camps over better-serviced U.N. ones, Syrian minorities fear hostility from majority groups inside the latter. According to British media, a terrorist defector asserted that militants enter U.N. camps to assassinate and kidnap Christians. An American Christian aid group reported that the U.N. camps are “dangerous” places where ISIS, militias, and gangs traffic in women and threaten men who refuse to swear allegiance to the caliphate. Such intimidation is also reportedly evident in migrant camps in Europe, leading the German police union to recommend separate shelters for Christian and Muslim migrant groups.
There are other explanations as well. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, is reluctant to appear too solicitous of Christian refugees. The concern is that singling out Christians would cause our allies in the region to view our humanitarian efforts as sectarian. We should get over this concern. Our allies view us as sectarian, anyway. And it’s not like our strategy of projecting even-handedness has won us much support till now.
This is a complicated situation. Many Christian leaders do not want their flocks to leave their homes in Syria, where Christians have lived for many centuries. And other religious minorities are also dying in Syria, as well as Muslims. But, for many Christians, escape to the West is the only viable option. And Christians have suffered disproportionately in Syria and deserve more help from the US than they are receiving. Shea’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. You can find it here.
Much of the debate surrounding issues of religious freedom today seems to center around the appropriate social role of religion, whether religion is predominantly private or is something that can—or maybe must—extend to all aspects of public life.
This question becomes more critical as new laws highlight existing tensions and create new clashes between the religious rights of individuals and the rights of others. What will be required of a California doctor who wishes not to participate in euthanasia procedures after the passage of the “right to die” law? To what extent must opponents of same-sex marriage participate in gay weddings after Obergefell v. Hodges? What accommodations should be made for service providers like the Little Sisters of the Poor who feel that complying with portions of the Affordable Care Act is against their religion?
Pope Francis offered his insight into the meaning and importance of religious liberty in the public sphere in his opening remarks at the Center’s conference on international religious freedom in June 2014. A complete English translation of his remarks is available here. He said, in part:
Reason recognizes in religious freedom a fundamental right of man that reflects his highest dignity, that of the capacity to seek the truth and to adhere to it, and recognizes in that right an indispensable condition in order to deploy his own potentialities. Religious freedom is not only the freedom of a thought or of a private sect. It is freedom to live according to ethical principles consequent to discovered truth, whether privately or publicly. This is a great challenge in the globalized world, where weak thought—which is like a disease—lowers the general ethical level, and in the name of a false notion of tolerance ends by persecuting those who defend the truth about man and that truth’s ethical consequences.
Legal regimes, national or international, are called to recognize, guarantee, and protect religious freedom, which is a right that inheres intrinsically in the nature of man, in his dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and one of the principal fonts of the legitimacy of the state.
Last month, when the Holy Father spoke at Independence Hall during his visit to the U.S., he highlighted similar themes. (The New York Times published an English translation of his speech here.) After reminding listeners, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that we were created with inalienable rights, Pope Francis said this about religious freedom:
It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own.
Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families.
. . . In a world where various forms of modern tyranny seek to suppress religious freedom, or try to reduce it to a subculture without right to a voice in the public square, or to use religion as a pretext for hatred and brutality, it is imperative that the followers of the various religions join their voices in calling for peace, tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of others.
We live in a world subject to the globalization of the technocratic paradigm, which consciously aims at a one-dimensional uniformity and seeks to eliminate all differences and traditions in a superficial quest for unity. The religions thus have the right and the duty to make clear that it is possible to build a society where a healthy pluralism which respects differences and values them as such is a precious ally in the commitment to defending human dignity and a path to peace in our troubled world.
The Pope’s words challenge lawmakers, individuals, and followers of all religions (and those who are not religious as well) to see religious freedom as essential to a person’s dignity. It seems difficult today to strike a balance between the rights of believers to live according to their faith and the rights of non-believers not to have the faiths of others imposed on them. This increasing tension seems at least partially due to cultural forces that pit the religious and the secular against each other. Fewer people consider themselves to be religious than previously and both the religious and the non-religious become combative and defensive. Too often, the non-religious argue that any display of religion or act of faith is an inappropriate imposition and an attempt to establish religion as the law of the land. The religious on the other hand, claim that there is a war being waged by politicians aiming to eradicate religion altogether. Legislating in light of social and scientific developments while protecting the rights of religious believers requires careful balancing.
Pope Francis insists that relegating religion to the private sphere is not a solution to this conflict, as it would deny people the human dignity of living according to “discovered truths.” Instead, individuals must go beyond labeling those who disagree with them as either immoral or bigoted and governments must prioritize the human right to publicly practice religion and live by religious principles.
Hearty congratulations to our friends at Villanova Law School on their new Center for Law and Religion!! Details are here. We look forward to many wonderful collaborations!
countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.
sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe.
has witnessed an unprecedented increase in violent persecution of religious minorities, particularly in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa. Yet the international community has been a bystander and has not been able or willing to develop a strategy to protect persecuted religious minorities and to stop their expulsion and genocide. After the Second World War with the creation of the United Nations, there were great hopes that all peoples could live in peace with one another as good neighbors, based on the fundamental human rights and the practice of tolerance as stated in the Preamble of the United Nations Charter. However, the United Nations never developed specific and effective strategies to protect the human rights of religious minorities and to stop their persecution, expulsion and genocide. Even so, we must recognize that the United Nations has been providing humanitarian assistance to refugees who fled for religious reasons. The 2014 Symposium at the United Nations in New York on the “Protection of Religious Minorities Worldwide” was directed at the international community in the hope that it will acknowledge the dire situation of so many religious minorities and will adopt practical strategies and measures for protection of, and strong humanitarian assistance for, the expelled religious refugees.
Washington and Oregon, from the middle of the 19th century onward. The region’s earliest settlers came to work in the mines and forests, and a culture of saloons, gambling halls, and brothels grew up to serve them. When migration to the region intensified, newcomers with families and religious traditions often saw themselves as outsiders in opposition to the prevailing frontier culture.
community from the end of the nineteenth century through the civil rights era. By joining the Bahá’í Faith, blacks and whites not only defied Jim Crow but also rejected their society’s religious and social restrictions.
