Religion & Law

One consequence of the rise of radical Islamic movements is my own temptation to buy into the notion, often promoted by media coverage, that we are faced with a simple choice: embrace secularism or embrace theocracy.  If that's the choice, I'll opt for secularism, thank you very much.  That might explain my own initial "I'm smiling a little inside even though I know I shouldn't be" reaction to "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day."  I oppose censorship, and I am concerned that threats of violence are inhibiting free speech.  At the same time, I need to remember that respect for religion is not a sign of weakness but an act of strength.

The wonderful blog Get Religion analyzes some of the media coverage of the day, further underscoring that these questions are not simple ones -- e.g., does "Islam" really prohibit depictions of the Prophet?  More broadly, even though religious pluralism and religiously inspired violence make the full privatization of religion a tempting aspiration, it is a dangerous and ultimately misguided one.  So I think I'll celebrate "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" by rereading the Archbishop of Canterbury's marvelous 2008 lecture, "Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective."  An excerpt:

There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging -- even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a "covenant" between the divine and the human . . . . The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal.  It also occurs when a secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.  There is a position -- not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion -- which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behavior belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice.  As I have maintained in several other contexts, this is a very unsatisfactory account of political reality in modern societies; but it is also a problematic basis for thinking of the legal category of citizenship and the nature of human interdependence.

And a bit more:

The rule of law is . . . a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the human constitution never exists without those other determinations.

When it comes to speech in the West, the relevant "protocol of behavior" appears to be that there are no boundaries (or at best, only a few boundaries, generally involving racial or ethnic labels).  Among some Muslims, the relevant protocol of behavior is that certain boundaries cannot be crossed by anyone, even by those who do not share the commitments that give rise to the boundaries.   Navigating this conflict by intentionally and provocatively crossing the boundaries -- even when those boundaries seem ridiculous to the outsider, as with the case of the cartoons --  is unlikely to increase our sensitivity to the fact that our social identities are comprised by multiple memberships.

[Cross-posted on Law Religion Ethics]