Abstract
There are two ways of reading the January 2007 controversy in the United Kingdom about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from antidiscrimination legislation that requires them to treat applications for adoption from same-sex partners no less favorably than those from heterosexual married couples.1 One way is to take it as an indication of how far liberal-secular political correctness is being imposed on those who conscientiously dissent from certain applications of it—to the point of forcing those that maintain their dissent out of business or public service. Alternatively, the controversy can be read as a reminder of how broadly and deeply the legal systems even of consolidated liberal democracies have until now been infused with ideas and principles that derive from long-established traditions of ethical thought rooted in religion. This is less a matter of whether glasses are half empty or half full and more a matter of whether they are either almost completely empty or still substantially full.
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Notes
J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 14.
P. Johnson, A History of Christirxnity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976 ),177. “By the ninth century ... the idea of a total Christian society had taken shape: the faith not only had answers, but definitive and compulsory answers, to questions on almost every aspect of human behaviour and arrangements” (Johnson 1976, 181).
R. Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press, 1978), ch. 2
B. Badie and B. Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 87.
Badie and Birnbaum, Sociology of the State, 88.
H. J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); S. Ehler and J. B. Morrall, Church and State Through the Centuries (London: Burnes & Oates, 1954).
Casanova, Public Religions, 15.
G. Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
P. Norris, and R. Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); T. Byrnes and P. Katzenstein, eds., Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See W. Cole Durham, “Perspectives in Religious Liberty: A Comparative Framework,” in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective, ed. J. D. van der Vyver and J. Witte (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,1996).
K. Ward, Religion and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 106. Ward is also careful to point out that the First Amendment was not born out of antireligious sentiment as such: “The institution of the secular state was not an abandonment of religion or a declaration of its unimportance to social life. It was a recognition of the fact that, in a society of many competing beliefs, no one set could reasonably be set up as normative. ... This form of secularism could be called a secularism of positive tolerance, since it regards religious belief as of such importance that it cannot be left as a matter of unconsidered tradition.” (Ward 2000, 106–7)
F. H. Littell, From State Church to Pluralism: A Protestant Interpretation of Religion in American History (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962).
R. Bellah, “Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic,” in R. Bellah and P. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harpers & Row, 1980), 10.
Bellah, “Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic,” 12.
D. Marquand and R. Nettler, eds., Religion and Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 1.
See A. Stepan, “Religion, Democracy, and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (2000): 37–57; J. Madeley, “European Liberal Democracy and the Principle of State Religious Neutrality,” in Church and State in Contemporary Europe, 1–22; R. J. Barro and R. McCleary, “Which Countries Have State Religions?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 4 (2005 ): 1331–70; and J. Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
R. Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 38.
A. Kuru, “Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies Toward Religion,” World Politics 59, no. 4 (2007): 568–94.
Stepan, “Religion, Democracy, and the Twin Tolerations.”
The turmoil after the First World War was a virtual “extinction event” for formal church establishment in much of Continental Europe. See J. Madeley, “Religion and the State,” in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics, ed. J. Haynes (London: Routledge, 2008).
M. Perry, Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
C. Taylor, The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), passim.
B. Boyle and J. Sheen, eds., Freedom of Religion and Belief A World Report (London: Routledge, 1997).
See, for example, S. Ramet, Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
D. Barrett et al., eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World AD 1900–2000 (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 96.
For a tabular presentation of these attributions and the changes in them up to 2000, see Madeley, “European Liberal Democracy and the Principle of State Religious Neutrality,” in Church and State in Contemporary Europe, 13, 16.
In addition, the support of “representatives of organizations recognized by law who extend moral services, on the basis of nonconfessional philosophy of life,” is provided for; see R. Torfs, “State and Church in Belgium,” in State and Church in the European Union, ed. R. Robbers (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1996), 30.
Nor was this just a matter of the preamble: until 1972, clause 44 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland also recognized, for example, “the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.”
J. Anderson, Religious Liberty in Transitional Societies: The Politics of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 95.
Madeley, “European Liberal Democracy and the Principle of State Religious Neutrality,” 13.
A table showing these shifts diagrammatically can be found in Madeley, “European Liberal Democracy and the Principle of State Religious Neutrality,” 16. A revised and updated version can be found in Madeley, “Unequally Yoked: The Antinomies of Church-State Separation in Europe and the USA,” European Political Science special issue on Church and State (forthcoming 2008). It should be noted that in these tables—with support from other listed data sources—Barrett et al’s categorization of 6 former Soviet bloc states as still de jure Atheist in 2000 has been changed.
In the judgment of Paul Avis, “[c]learly in English terms, the Church of Sweden is very far from having been disestablished.” See P. Avis, Church State and Establishment (London: SPCK, 2001), 20.
Anderson, Religious Liberty in Transitional Societies.
S. Ferrari, “The New Wine and the Old Cask: Tolerance, Religion, and the Law in Contemporary Europe,” in The Law of Religious Identity: Models for Post-Communism, ed. A. Sajo and S. Avineri (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999), 1–15, esp. 2.
On these problems, see J. T. Richardson, Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe (London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2004).
Ferrari, “The New Wine and the Old Cask,” 3. Emphasis added.
Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe, 215.
S. Monsma and C. Soper, eds., The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
R. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).
Ferrari, “The New Wine and the Old Cask,”11.
Barro and McCleary, “Which Countries Have State Religions?”; and Fox, “World Separation of Religion and State into the Twenty-First Century.”
Cole Durham, “Perspectives in Religious Liberty,” in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective.
In line with the Fox finding, Cole Durham points out that many scholars—McConnell, for example—argue that the United States should now to be regarded as Accommodationist rather than Separationist not least because “[als state influence becomes more pervasive and regulatory burdens expand, refusal to exempt or accommodate shades into hostility”; see Cole Durham, “Perspectives in Religious Liberty,” 21.
Cole Durham’s term Endorsed Religion (he actually uses the term Endorsed Churches) is preferred to Fox’s Civil Religion because of the latter term’s particular connotations in the work of Bellah and others.
V. Bader, Secularism or Democracy?Associational Governance of Religious Diversity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
Thus in 2002, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court sitting in Sacramento, California, ruled that, “[t]he Pledge, as currently codified, is an impermissible government endorsement of religion because it sends a message to unbelievers that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” Two years later the case was dismissed by the Supreme Court on a technicality, even though three of the justices, including then Chief Justice William Rehnquist, wanted the court to address the constitutional issue and to rule that the pledge did not violate the establishment clause. Rehnquist’s comment was that “to give the parent of such a child (sic) a sort of ‘heckler’s veto’ over a patriotic ceremony willingly participated in by other students, simply because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the descriptive phrase ‘under God,’ is an unwarranted extension of the establishment clause, an extension which would have the unfortunate effect of prohibiting a commendable patriotic observance.”
T. Modood, ed., Church, State, and Religious Minorities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997).
For more on this see J. Madeley, “Still the Century of Antidisestablishmentarianism?” European Political Science 1 (2006): 395–406.
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© 2009 Robert Fatton, Jr. and R. K. Ramazani
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Madeley, J.T.S. (2009). America’s Secular State and the Unsecular State of Europe. In: Fatton, R., Ramazani, R.K. (eds) Religion, State, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617865_7
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