British Secularism and Religion: Islam, Society and State

Introduction

Predicament or Promise? Exploring Britain’s Unsettled Secularism

Yahya Birt, Dilwar Hussain and Ataullah Siddiqui

It has long been thought that secularism was a settled question in Britain. The overall shape of the institutional arrangements between the established Anglican Church and the state, the steady co-option of post-war Britain’s greater religious pluralism, and the widely-held reluctance to invoke God in public debate has lent credibility to the perception that this has indeed been the case. However, since the late 1980s, Britain’s secular dispensation has become increasingly unsettled. Although far from being an exclusive contributory factor in our newly unsettled condition, Islam – as Britain’s second largest religion – has more often than not served as the lightning rod for this debate. A series of cultural and political crises – from the Satanic Verses Affair, 9/11, 7/7, and the Danish Cartoons crisis, to name only some of the major flashpoints – have served to put the national debate on the public role of religion back on to the centre stage.

Definitional Disputes

We have not set out in this collection to be overly prescriptive with regard to definitional matters. In the academic literature, and indeed in contemporary public debate in Britain, political, religious or other differences are often played out through definitional disputes themselves. That said, however, there is a broad distinction made between the general historical processes of secularisation, and a set of political prescriptions around the relationship between religion and politics, which is often termed as secularism.

With regard to secularisation, the sociologist Peter Berger defined it as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger 1967: 107). By contrast, however, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre defines secularisation as ‘the transition from beliefs and activities and institutions presupposing beliefs of a traditionally Christian kind to beliefs and activities and institutions of an atheistic kind’ (MacIntyre 1967: 7-8). This dichotomy between a naturalised sociological process in Berger’s early thought and a more contested, purposeful transformation in MacIntrye’s definition reflects the fact that religious traditions may see the framing secular world of communication as their definitional opposite (Bader 2009: 110), and is emblematic of the polarised positions in the discussion. In a more philosophical context, secularism often refers to the understanding that life can be best lived by applying reasoned ethics, and the universe best understood by the process of reasoning, without reference to a deity or other ‘supernatural’ concepts. Hence there are distinct undertones of atheism or agnosticism (and indeed anti-clericalism) associated with secularism in this sense.

However, the use of the term ‘secularism’ in this volume is largely focused upon its political sense to refer to the relative separation between state and religion, to non-discrimination among religions and to the guarantees made with respect to the human rights of citizens, regardless of their creed. In his recent work, the philosopher Charles Taylor (2007, 2009) has sought to clarify the meaning of secularism, in a manner that underscores the difficult and contested nature of its definition, and helpfully takes this debate right to the heart of the issues that we think are important to deliberate upon. For instance, he argues that political secularism requires the pursuit of four distinct public goods that are in partial conflict with each other:

1.  The exercise of religious freedoms (including the freedom not to believe);

2.  The state should not be partial in favour of any one denomination or religion, and within this Taylor does include weak forms of establishment like Britain’s, which he regards as largely symbolic and vestigial;

3.  Political culture must be inclusive, in Taylor’s terms ‘fraternal’, so that all, including religious groups, are involved in determining society’s political identity and how it will achieve a consensus on the distribution of rights and privileges; and

4.  Political culture should seek to promote and maintain harmonious relations between all groups, including religious ones.

The definitional dispute about what political secularism means reflects the debate over how these public goods may best be achieved. One view is that these goals may only be achieved if public debate is informed by the exercise of reason alone, a process that requires the strict separation of religion from politics. The other view is that secular democratic politics can, as a process, incorporate religious viewpoints within the public sphere, whose character may veer between harmonious relations and agonistic dispute, without harm to these public goods. The second view also assumes that there is sufficient overlap in views to achieve a consensus. Another argument Taylor makes is that insisting on the need to invoke a single higher authority, in this case, pure reason (but equally theocratic rule in a non-secular context) vitiates the fraternal imperatives of inclusion and seeking harmony in political culture. The usefulness of Taylor’s four-part definition lies in the fact that it highlights the delicate balance required to uphold religious freedoms, state impartiality between religions, the principle of inclusivity and the aspiration to seek greater political cohesion simultaneously.

It will be noted that while Abdullah Sahin in Chapter 1 and Tariq Modood in Chapter 5 employ slightly different terms in their definitional discussions, they are both largely concerned to get at a difference between an ideological rigidity that seeks in some manner to exclude religion or marginalise it in ways that are unjust from the secular democratic public sphere and a more accommodative ethos that allows a public role for religion. Sahin defines the former as secularism or ‘an ideological position that confines faith strictly to the personal sphere of life’ and the latter as secularity or ‘a political principle integral to democratic inclusion, may accommodate ... the diversity of cultures, value systems and faith traditions that make up modern plural society’. Similarly, Modood proposes a spectrum for secularism, which he defines as a ‘religion–politics separationist view, which is clearly normative rather than scientific, can take quite different forms, either as an idea or as practice and can be more or less restrictive’, which he argues may take radical or moderate (or accommodative) forms. Nick Spencer in Chapter 2 also notes the underlying similarity in the distinction the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams makes between programmatic and procedural secularism. Ted Cantle in Chapter 6 accepts the fact of a diverse society with the participation of religious voices in public life, but insists upon the rational and evidential basis of governmental policymaking, so making a secular distinction between public debate and policymaking.

Secularism in Practice – The British Case in Comparative Perspective

In terms of political practice, as opposed to theory, secularism has taken on many different forms of governance. However, the rationale of secularism that finds its roots in Enlightenment values as well as the desire to rid Europe of religious conflict and tension tends to dominate the debate. In this spirit it is assumed that the public arena ought to be free of religious interference. Religious believers, and, at the present juncture Muslims in particular, are often seen to be ‘disturbing’ the steady state of British secularism by reminding Britain of the medieval past that she wishes to leave behind. However, both of these assumptions – that the public arena was ever really free from religion or that there was a steady state prior to Muslim migration to post-war Britain – do not bear up to critical examination, and we would like to suggest that it would be more useful to start the debate from an analysis of actually-existing secularisms, in which the British tradition of secularism forms but one instance.

The most important historical fact has been the long continuity of England’s constitutional arrangements for the relationship between Church and State: no triumphant invasion since 1066, a reformation in the sixteenth century that put the English monarch in place of the Pope at the head of the Church, and a civil war in the seventeenth century that restored the monarchy but was defined by a political culture of republicanism. This has profoundly marked the English sense of secularism as one that has avoided the revolutionary root-and-branch reform of, say, France and America, in favour of piecemeal reform leaving many timeworn and archaic features in place. In fact there has been a marked preference for preserving the increasingly symbolic aspects of England as a confessional state, even if social, political and religious change has meant that reform has never been abandoned either; in short, the English model of secularism has been informed by an ethic of pragmatic gradualism that pays due attention to the dialectic between symbolic authority and the realities of social and political change.

Thus since 1689 the Protestant nature of the monarchy has been insisted upon: the monarch must be Protestant and cannot marry a Catholic; however, while the monarch is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he or she has been obliged since 1707 to swear to support the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which retains its formal independence.¹ Thus, in constitutional terms, Scotland is more formally secular than England. Furthermore there were two formal disestablishments of the Churches of Ireland (1871) and of Wales (1920), but these were not precursors to disestablishment in England, but were the outcome of regional conditions of the period. All this is indicative of how traditions of continuity and gradual piecemeal reform have led to a multiplicity of Church–State arrangements within the four nations of the United Kingdom today (Morris 2009).

There is not the space here to provide a comprehensive historical reflection upon the tests of legitimacy that these arrangements have faced, but instead to note that since 1945 there have been two main challenges: (i) the emergence of a post-Christian society and, with the great post-war migrations, (ii) a higher degree of religious pluralism, both Christian and non-Christian, than in the past. That there has been an increased rate of decline in worship and participation in Christian rites of passage since the 1960s (Brown 2000) has obvious salience for the symbolic legitimacy of the English confessional state, but an exploration of the implications of the changing nature of identification with Christianity in Britain is not the main aim of this volume. Perhaps the major sociological outcome, however, has been a marked deinstitutionalisation of religious expression or a condition of ‘believing without belonging’ (Davie 1994). The chief reason for our inattention is that the locus of the debate on the merits or demerits of the Church of England’s continued establishment has largely been within the Church itself. As a corollary to that, the non-Christian religious minorities have largely been content to support continued establishment on the basis that some representation of religion within the state is better than none, although whether the Church of England should act as an effective proxy for religious minorities that have preferred to treat directly with the state has been more contentious (Modood 1997: 3-15).

The focus, however, in this volume has been drawn more towards the implications of the second main development in post-war Britain, which is the emergence of a far greater degree of multi-faith pluralism. The 2001 Census showed that 72% defined themselves as ‘Christian’, 23% as having ‘no faith’ or not having entered a category at all, and the other 5% belonging to non-Christian religions, half of whom are Muslims; in short, the debate on revisiting British traditions of secularism is likely to reflect the fact that British society is now ‘three-dimensional’ – Christian, secular and religiously plural (Walker 2008: 52).

Although the contributors examine particular aspects of British secularism, it is appropriate to offer a brief outline of its basic features in comparison with America and France. Britain is often conceived of possessing a tradition of moderate secularism with an Anglican establishment that has encouraged a shift towards multi-faith inclusion. France and America unlike Britain have a formal separation between religion and state. However, their political cultures could not be more different. Religion in American civil society is strong and has influenced politics directly, while in France it is relatively weak and has furthermore been actively discouraged by the state as a form of divisive communitarianism. However the French prefer to regulate religion from the top downwards by conferring institutional legal status on religions and denominations, including Islam;² while the British prefer to encourage religious interest groups to coalesce and to work together for certain common goods with the Church of England, a process which has arguably led to something akin to an informal multi-faith establishment. In Britain and France, political culture has often frowned upon open religious discourse, whereas in America, it has often been accepted as