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Trivializing Religion Left Us Unprepared for Political Islam
In my mind today was a man who sometimes joined our family’s Friday night Shabbat meal. He was at that time Chancellor Jim Heft of the University of Dayton, a Marianist priest who has long since moved to LA following his calling. A man well read in theology and philosophy, he also earned my basketball-mad son’s esteem for his appreciation of the game, both as a good pick-up player and as a fan of the usually-excellent teams that UD put forward. My son also appreciated his edgy sense of humor, and my son, in his own gently ironic way, would always call him “Padre.”
Explicitly religious conversations have driven freedom before. They are uniquely capable of doing that today.
One topic of conversation that came up was about the meaning of religious freedom. Jim came from a Protestant family; his brother continues faithfully in that path. With the same commitment that Jim follows his calling, he loves and respects his brother. He was true to that kind of behavior with me all the years of our acquaintance in Dayton.
That we love and respect people who differ with us on such a central thing as religion is no small thing. Jim was of the opinion — and I agree with him — that to say that religious freedom requires that people to admit that all religions are interchangeable and their differences immaterial is to reduce religion to emptiness and to make religious freedom trivial. Speaking of a talk with a non-Catholic who had engaged him with that line of thinking, he told me that he said to that man, “You probably have some very real reasons why you stay with the faith that you have and have not chosen any other.”
The attitude that the Chancellor was combating was real enough and pervasive as well. Trivializing difference means there is nothing to talk about and things about which we cannot talk have trivial meaning at best.
This trivializing of religion has a history in a larger and more comprehensive world view that came to dominate Western culture. Eric Nelson, historian and professor of government at Harvard, summarizes the thought, which tied in religious freedom to what is called The Great Separation — the decisive shattering of the universe of thought that ruled medieval culture. Looking at the sorry history of religious conflict and comparing it to the fruitful expanses being opened up in material science, the West increasingly pushed religion out of the center of life and loosed culture and politics from having to account to anything transcendent. Connecting this to politics, Nelson writes:
It is this separation, we are told, that is responsible for producing the distinctive features of modern European political thought, including (but by no means limited to) its particular notion of individual rights, its account of the state, and its embrace of religious toleration. These innovations could not appear on the scene until religion had effectively been sequestered from political science.
In other words, in this viewpoint that dominated the thought-world in which I was educated, religious freedom in political life emerges to the degree that religion loses credence as a source of truth. This implies, of course, that left to their own, religions revert to compulsion to get us to accept their doctrines. It also implies that as freedom of religion advances, and we are no longer compelled to participate, it will naturally result in freedom from religion. Increasingly sidelined in the culture. It will become, as Whitehead harpooned it a century ago, “increasingly … tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.”
Nelson’s scholarship demonstrates the inadequacy of that narrative, a narrative that still is dominant in some circles. In his masterwork on this topic, The Hebrew Republic, he states his conclusion:
The pursuit of [religious] toleration was primarily nurtured by deeply felt religious convictions, not by their absence; and it emerged to a very great extent out of the Erastian effort to unify church and state, not out of the desire to keep them separate. Once again, I argue that the Hebrew revival played a crucial role in forging this nexus between a pious Erastianism and toleration.
And for the benefit of those, who, as I, did not know the meaning of Erastianism when I first met this book, Nelson defines it briefly as the belief of those who “insisted that for a religious practice or observance to become law, it must be promulgated as such by the civil sovereign.”
Thus, for an Erastian, no one can say that because their reading of the Biblical law forbids alcohol, alcohol is thereby banned in the state by divine fiat. But one could say that if the civil authority decides to ban it, then it is law, even if the reasoning of the authority is religious. And so, America did not have a law against alcohol until, through the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, the secular authority fulfilled the wishes of the largely religiously-motivated prohibition movement.
It is necessary to fully understand the power and sophistication of Nelson’s position, and, by contrast, how trivial is the freedom of religion held by the view he contests — the view that meant to sideline religion from public discourse and deny its voice in the culture, the economy, and politics of our country and of the West.
This trivialization of religious freedom and the trivialization of religion that underlies it left us completely unprepared for the emergence of violent political Islam as a major force in the world. If there is one positive thing that the atrocity of 9/11 should have established solidly, it is that religion is still powerful. No longer treating religion seriously, we blinded ourselves to the powerful existential threat of using religion’s power to cause us great and deadly harm.
And having forgotten religious discourse we were handicapped in understanding religions well enough to make necessary critical distinctions. Thus, very quickly, when the intolerant apologists for 9/11 reacted to the least critical comment on the beliefs of the attackers by calling it “Islamophobia,” far too few of our cultural leaders knew how to respond with critical truth. As intolerant religionists through the ages have loved to do, even the most worthy of criticism was powerfully repressed in the very nations that al-Qaida and their likes wish to destroy.
We have learned that lesson less than perfectly. A major party and its president mocked and trivialized American religionists — “bitter clingers” to their guns and Bibles. And now that party, as indicated by recent polls, is liking guns and their application to our politics, excusing or even advocating for violence to change the politics of the country to the way they prefer. And they embrace with almost no criticism whatsoever advocates of religious violence and coercion, those who call for the imposition of religious law with no deference necessary to other religions or the robust and deeply religiously meaningful idea of religious freedom which is our American heritage and the Western heritage.
New York has elected a mayor who in the heat of his campaign told us that the real take-home image we should have of 9/11 was not the death of 3,000 citizens in New York at the hand of utterly intolerant religionists willing to establish their empire by whatever force necessary. No, no! We should rather make our stand, moved to tears by his painful simulation of genuine emotion, with an alleged relative of his who, in his telling, was fearful to ride the subway because she wore a hijab. Following the rules of the intolerance of the movements the mayor-elect fails to condemn, she had an expectation of some kind of angry reaction to her because of the slaughter executed by co-religionists.
We need not fear that we are intolerant if we reject Mamdani’s implicit ultimatum that this is the only grounds on which non-Muslims can join in his bogus version of religious freedom.
Islam itself has offered much better grounds. Sometimes it is a poet who says it best. The medieval Persian Sufi master Rumi wrote:
Beyond heresy (unbelief) and Islam there is a desert plain.
In the midst of that space, our passionate yearning dwells.
When the the mystic knower gets there, he lays down his head.
There is neither heresy, nor Islam, nor any place (for either) there.
At certain times and places, Islam led Christian Europe in religious toleration. That has not been the case for some time. The intolerant version of faith that rules much of the Middle East forces religious uniformity. No Jews at all are left in most of the places in the Middle East they called home for centuries. Much the same is now true of Christians as well. Try opening a church in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. Compare that with the flourishing Muslim community in Israel, where they make up 20 percent of the population and practice in all the professions, hold political office, and sit in the judiciary.
Though the advocates of this atavistic version of Islam in both America and Europe are many and believe they can win by force, there is no need for us to confirm these people as the authentic spokespeople of a vast community. If we understand, as history reveals, that religion is the source of our political embrace of religious freedom, and if we are unafraid to speak plainly but fairly about the the superlatively desirable ideas that are at the core of our own religious traditions, we can all come to Rumi’s place. Explicitly religious conversations have driven freedom before. They are uniquely capable of doing that today.
There are many in today’s Islam who are passionately invested in promoting such a view, and do not wish the atavists in their community to succeed. The wave of the Abraham Accords, on the Muslim side, was built on a growing engagement with toleration as rooted in Islam, a necessary consequence of its beliefs. The UAE as a state has taken a lead in this. I have a colleague who was invited to establish a Jewish house of study and worship there by the government. He posted pictures of a family wedding in which with transparent and contagious joy rabbis in long black coats and Emiratis in their white garb are dancing together with transparent and contagious joy. That is the direction where we all can go, where American politics at its best pushes the world to go, and which is congruent with our deepest religious commitments, each in our way.
God wants to unite us. True uniting comes only when we can speak freely to each other about the deepest of ideas, offering to each other that which we believe would truly benefit the other to consider.
In the intimacy of our own relationship with God, in all its uniqueness, we find the freedom to realize the greatest promises of peace and abundance that follow when we embrace fully the freedom God waits to give us. Let us criticize those whose religious views prefer coercion, with firmness and with love. May God grant that the peaceful way will take hold, not the triumphalism of the master manipulator and apologist for terror.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
False Confidence Against Jihadism
The West Learned From Defeat. So Must Islamic Civilization.
From Berlin to Gaza, the Cult of Death Marches On
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