Four Calls for Reason

Today, said Rob Hagendijk, Dean of the ISHSS, in his opening remarks, we would try to go beyond the “for and against questions and either-or choices” and attempt to get into a more subtle debate. This lofty ambition was scuppered in the first moments by Maarten Huygen’s description of Prof. Herman Philipse as “the most famous atheist in Holland”.

After an introduction like that, Prof. Philipse could hardly be blamed for attempting to court controversy. Presenting his three theses – the need for a renaissance of Enlightenment ideas; the breakdown of Holland’s state-funded ‘pillarized institutions’ into secular bodies; and the danger of religions’ claims to absolute truth – like a wannabe Martin Luther, Prof Philipse handed the floor to Prof. Hakan Yilmaz. Under harassment from the moderator and his ticking clock, Prof. Yilmaz valiantly tried to stun us with statistics. The gist of his presentation was that while people in Turkey are attached to Islam, theirs is not a version of the religion that seeks to dominate modern lifestyles and impose itself on others. “There is religiosity,” he told us, “but there is also tolerance”.

Prof. Laurence Moore’s position in the debate, dominated as it was by questions of Islam in Europe, was somewhat ambivalent, but he took on the mantle of a detached observer. He put forward the idea that a secular state should be compatible with a pluralistic society and tolerance of many faiths and backgrounds: after all, “what was America but immigration?” However, religion had no place in politics.

The final statement was left to Mayor Job Cohen, the self-described “man who’s going to keep the mess together” in Amsterdam. “Room – that is what it’s all about,” he argued, saying that a just society had to leave room for religion and room to be different, but also “freedom to live without or with a faith”.

The Devil in the Detail

Unfortunately there wasn’t room in Mayor Cohen’s schedule to really get his teeth into the debate itself, as he left early to perform other duties. He did at least have time to join some of the proceedings, which began with a strangely specific question from Maarten Huygen about whether the Dutch authorities could prevent the establishment of radical mosques in the Netherlands. A little perplexed, the Mayor made the distinction between the government, the council and the builders, all of which had different responsibilities: the government mustn’t influence the institution yet a private building company could manage its buildings how it liked.

This should not happen in Turkey, Prof Yilmaz noted, where in principle the government did have control over imams to the point of writing their sermons for them; in America, added Prof Moore, the tax authorities would see to it that any religious institution did not morph into a political one. Finally, Prof Philipse described the case of the ‘Devil’s Church’ in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, which the authorities did ban on the grounds that the sexual depravity it promoted wasn’t really a religion.

This was somehow a green light for Prof Philipse to go for the jugular and make the remarks that he would spend much of the afternoon defending. Islam compared unfavourably with other religions, he said, most notably in its demands that those apostates who leave the faith must be put to death. Wasn’t that in part a criminal attitude that the Dutch government had to deal with? If Philipse was asking whether he could use his Mayoral powers to address religious questions, answered Cohen, he could only do so where there was violation of the law – but that applied to anything.

In response to an audience question, Mayor Cohen conceded that in a tolerant state, fundamentalism would always arise – within the boundaries of the rules of society you just had to give room to different views, and that included both the orthodox and the radical. Muslims were becoming part of society, he said, pleading for “time to get acquainted with each other”.

Just look at the Spanish Inquisition, argued Prof Yilmaz. Surely all religions had “criminal” elements, but “none was more criminal than the other”. Turkey even went too far the other way in the name of rationality, he said – preaching Creationism could get you jailed!

The Mayor had not won this argument, but there is a difference between discussing these matters in the groves of academe and actually implementing them. Prof Philipse later admitted that he wouldn’t be able to come out with such remarks on the “criminality” in Islam if he himself were a politician.

Pillarization or Secularization?

The pillarization of Dutch religious institutions and discrimination walked hand in hand, responded Prof Philipse to an audience question. While the separation of Dutch Protestants and Dutch Catholics had worked for centuries, the case was different for immigrants whose children were not brought up to be part of Dutch society at all. Schools, for example, should be “integration machines” not “separation machines”. The Mayor disagreed: the most important standpoint for Muslims was their belief, especially after 9/11, and it brought together Turks, Moroccans and other groups.

No, said Prof Moore. The idea of pillars was too “stonelike” whereas finding a secure sense of self required a more “porous” model of society. The Mayor found no support from Prof Yilmaz either, who asserted that forcing people to choose the Islam ‘pillar’ was like “creating an identity from above”. Governments shouldn’t categorize people in terms of their religion: France and Germany had done this because, naively, they wanted just one person to talk to, one representative of all the diverse minority groups, a categorization that would have “consequences”.

But in the US, remarked Prof Veit Bader from the floor, Christian institutions often were indirectly financed, and there were religious political parties. Prof Moore stuck to his argument that the US Constitution created a secular state. The sticking point was whether a church-based government-sponsored drug rehabilitation programme was only that, or whether it was also an indoctrination programme too – could it still be said that the state did not fund religion?

The Dangers of Secularisation and the Limits of Free Expression

With the Mayor departed, the discussion continued after the interval with Prof Philipse fighting something of a defensive withdrawal. First of all, he said, atheist states (such as the People’s Republic of China) were to be opposed just as much as religious ones; the state should not even have a position on religion. Well, asked audience member Bas Heijne (a speaker at the New York debate), weren’t there dangers of secularisation too?

Prof Philipse agreed that secularism shouldn’t become dogmatic and voiced concerns about how secularism was becoming opposed to religion. This prompted Prof Yilmaz to join in with the point that Turkey really had become a state opposed to religion, at the symbolic level at least; and while Islam had made a comeback, fundamentalists were still a tiny minority.

The conversation naturally turned to the question of how far one could take the limits of free speech. With “zillions” of religious people out there, said Prof Moore, you might as well say what you liked: “the freedom to criticize is absolute”. This was backed by European law, added Prof Philipse, but there was a moral angle and the issue of “elegance of expression”. One should never speak out just to insult – as had murdered film director Theo van Gogh. Morally speaking, intentions were relevant.

Yes, but hadn’t Philipse done just that with his remark about criminality, asked Prof Yilmaz? The latter admitted that with no central authority in the Islamic world, uniform doctrine was a difficult issue, but he still didn’t see why the death-to-apostates clause could not just be abolished. He continued to modify his “criminality” claim, saying that he knew of no legal school in Islam that advocated the practice of killing apostates. “I’m not saying Islam is criminal,” he said, “I’m saying it’s criminal in this specific area.” All religions had counterproductive tendencies, for example the Vatican’s outdated ideas on contraception.

The Last Word

By then, members of the audience were lining up to challenge him and Prof Philipse tried to reduce his closing remarks to “empirical issues”. When institutions had real power, then they could make absolute claims to truth that ultimately justified oppression – this was true of religions and communism alike. Democracies could only arise after centuries of criticism, so it was right to challenge religious institutions.

But even though religious claims had no empirical justification, noted Prof Moore, they still refused to die. In reality, he said, there was no such thing as a neutral state – the best you could hope for was and end to intentional discrimination. Yet when religious people acted on principle or a sense of duty, it was never simple. Wearing a headscarf didn’t hurt anyone in France, but were Muslims so special they had a right to break the law?

The privilege of the last word fell to Prof Yilmaz. While the headscarf was an expression of one’s religion, he said, it created an “absolutist dominance” in the classroom that was bad for other students, he said. The Islamic “uniform” was effectively an impediment to free speech. It seemed that two freedoms were in contradiction.

So closed the international debate series on Faith and the State, a series that brought together sixteen speakers from four different countries on two continents. But if one were to summarize the lectures in one sentence, it would be that in questions of religion and politics, there are no answers.