Abstract
‘Accommodating an American secularism: Jacques Berlinerblau’s agenda for a secularish future’ by William Arnal
In April 2011, a very courageous young woman named Jessica Ahlquist filed suit, with the backing of the ACLU, against the city of Cranston, Rhode Island, and its school board, on the grounds that a prayer displayed on a banner in one of the Cranston high schools violated the establishment clause of the constitution. The following year the United States District Court for Rhode Island ruled that the banner did indeed constitute a violation of the establishment clause, and must be removed. The reactions were mixed. Ahlquist received death threats, a local flower company refused to deliver to her home, and a Rhode Island state representative referred to her, publicly, as “an evil little thing.” On the up side, her action inspired similar lawsuits at other high schools; she has received various awards and scholarships from humanist, atheist, and civil liberties organizations; and she became one of my personal heroes.
In sharpest contrast, and meanwhile, the Louisiana State Legislature passed House Bill 976, establishing a voucher system in which public monies could be used, at a parent’s discretion, to fund private religious schools. The new law has been the subject of protests of various sorts, and lawsuits, and arguably is unconstitutional. An interesting response to it developed this past summer. Valerie Hodges, a Louisiana state representative, suddenly came out against the bill, which she had initially supported. “I [had] liked,” she said, “the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school.” But it turned out, much to her dismay, that “religious” was not precisely equivalent with “Christian,” and included such baleful entities as Islam. Hodges complained about the voucher system that “unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion. We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools … I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.”
According to Jacques Berlinerblau’s new book, How to be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, the sector of the informed American public that is committed to secular values has more to learn from the lamentable Valerie Hodges than from the inspirational Jessica Ahlquist. Berlinerblau is very clear: “secularism needs to change course” (p. 195). To use his terminology, to effectively oppose establishmentarian threats, secularists should try an accommodationist rather than a separationist approach. The enemy is not religion: The ideal secular state is not an establishment [of atheism or irreligion], but a referee. Its job is not to cater to a particular religion’s worldview, but to make sure that no single religious worldview gains unfair advantage over any other through exploiting the apparatus of the state … Religious liberty blossoms when there is no “collusion,” or “match fixing”—when the state judiciously refuses to favor one team. This permits everyone, from atheists to Zoroastrians, to play. (Berlinerblau, 2012: 202)
As the means to this desirable state, Berlinerblau argues, a strict separationism—the doctrine that all religious phenomena must be rigorously segregated from all forms of state expression, from the public sphere, and from access to the instruments of coercive discipline—is a non-starter, at least in the US. For one thing, it is unclear whether the Constitution and particularly the First Amendment should be read, or will continue to be read by the courts, as a genuinely separationist document. For another, this form of secularism is intrinsically self-contradictory: as the example of France reveals, and as Winnifred Sullivan has argued with respect to the US (The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, Princeton, 2005), the separationist government must get deeply, actively, and perpetually involved in regulating and defining religious institutions in order, ironically, to maintain an impermeable “wall of separation.” To grind one of my own axes for a moment, it seems to me that this necessity of entanglement may simply be a logical corollary to “religion” only existing as an effective category by virtue of its placement within a religious−secular binary: no religion without secularism, and no secularism without religion—each creates the other. Regardless, and on a pragmatic note, Berlinerblau also argues that strict separationism is simply unpopular. Most Americans do, in fact, think that religion has a place in public life, and it is unclear how they could be convinced otherwise. This is a political fact with which any realistic secularist must cope.
If not separationism, what about accommodationism?—that is, the active government assistance of religious groups, such as the diversion of federal funds to “faith-based providers,” or even Louisiana’s school voucher system. Berlinerblau appears to be deeply suspicious of the motives of such initiatives, and, I think, rightly so: they erode what seems, at least to my secularist sensibilities, like the proper separation of church and state, and make of government an ally of religion. Worse, Berlinerblau admits, accommodationism is probably a stalking horse for Christian revivalism, with government promotion of and assistance to religion translating de facto into government collusion with or match-fixing for Christianity, especially evangelical forms thereof. Nonetheless, he suggests, secularists should be more open to a rigorous accommodationism, in which the role of religion in public life is accepted, but in which, insofar as it is consistent with public order, “the state … exhibit[s] scrupulous equanimity in dealing with all religious groups” (Berlinerblau, 2012: 202, emphasis added). Doing so may broaden the appeal of secularism more generally, but perhaps more importantly, can actually serve as a bulwark against tendencies to the state establishment of any one religion. Berlinerblau says, with all due qualifications, “authentic accommodationism … if practiced correctly, is a far bigger threat to Revivalists than it is to secularists” (p. 203, emphasis original). Efforts to get the government to weigh in, in favor of religion, can be used against those who seek to impose any particular state-sponsored religion, simply by ensuring that the government’s assistance is provided to all religious comers equally. “Were the secularists to pursue a genuine accommodationism … it might have the paradoxical effect of leading Christian conservatives to pine for separation!” (p. 147). And this lesson is precisely what the contrasting stories of Jessica Ahlquist and Valerie Hodges so nicely illustrate. For all of her bravery, alas, and despite actually winning her case, all that Ahlquist accomplished was the removal of an obscure banner in an obscure high school, a banner that probably had no effect on anyone until attention was drawn to it. Aside from stirring up the ire of much of the public, and meriting a mention in my own Big Book of Awesome People, her victory has no real consequences. By contrast, Valerie Hodges, whatever we may think of her, made the quite public discovery that government support of religion did not necessarily end up only supporting the right religion, her religion, and so maybe this support is not such a good thing after all.
A broader point is also being made here: one about strategy, and not just tactics. Yes, a strict and consistent accommodationism may frustrate the hell out of revivalists and establishmentarians. But more than this is at issue. The argument also points to a more general current running throughout the book, which is, again, that religious people are not the enemies of secularism. Skeptics and atheists are a tiny minority in the United States; religious people who have cause to fear government interference with religion, including active support or endorsement of religions other than their own, are much more numerous. These people are secularists’ natural allies. And this in turn means that anti-religious rhetoric is poison for secularism as a political movement. To accomplish the aims that secularists in fact share with the religious majority of Americans, they need to be able to distinguish the ordinary religious identifications that are a meaningful part of most people’s identity from the hijacking of the state’s power to sectarian ends. Secularists can appeal to Americans’ general distrust of extremism rather than falling afoul of it. The so-called “new atheists” are exactly wrong: moderate religion is not the enabler of religious fanaticism; it is the most powerful force against it. As regards politics and popular discourse—and these are precisely the targets of his analysis—I think Berlinerblau is probably right.
Having said this, I offer three desultory reservations, qualifications, or perhaps tangents.
First, Berlinerblau notes in his book that one of the goals of a realistic secularist movement must be to fight prejudice against atheists (pp. 206−207). A robust secularist movement should make the option not to be religious as important and recognized a dimension of religious freedom as the right to pursue the religion of one’s choice. Yet Berlinerblau has little patience with the “new atheists.” Preaching to the choir, and selling a lot of books, they manage to accomplish nothing politically, unless it is to make secularism, by association, seem even less appealing to most Americans than it already is. In spite of my basic agreement with this assessment, I can’t help but wonder if there is a silver lining to the cloud—if in fact the new atheists are not doing us all a big favor, notwithstanding their many, many failings. To fall back on an example that Berlinerblau uses several times in his book, consider the gay rights movement—to my mind the very model of a successful effort to transform public perceptions, and to create a respectable social space for a once-despised group. If it is hard to find today a class of people more generally loathed than atheists, it would have been much easier four or five decades ago, when homophobia was straightforwardly and openly expressed by respectable people, when gay sex acts were crimes, homosexuality treated as a mental illness, and gay public figures had to remain firmly in the closet. One way that gay men and women accomplished the huge shift in public perception that has occurred since that time was by demonstrating that they were not extreme, that they wanted the same things that straight people did: marriage, equal treatment under the law, and the right to pursue their lives free of harassment. But that was not the only strategy used. From Stonewall to today’s gay pride parades, there has also been an “in-your-face” dimension to the movement as well: a deliberately provocative confrontation of “Main Street USA” with the fact, the reality, of the existence of a significant body of people who may not act precisely in the manner you do, but who need to be recognized as part of the social landscape: “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” And we have. An outspoken public atheism, whatever its flaws, could have the similar effect of refusing to stay in the closet, and thus making atheism more normal to the everyday experience of most Americans. It remains true that an effective secularist movement will need to distinguish itself very clearly from the kind of atheism that repudiates and mocks religious beliefs of all varieties; but having that outspoken atheism out there, visible, part of the social landscape, is probably an important step toward normalizing it, and thus toward eliminating prejudice against it. Second, regarding secularist experiments with accommodationism, at least one very critical problem occurs to me in advance. The problem revolves around how to balance the state’s commitment to basic human rights with an accommodationist approach to religious traditions that actively and on principle discriminate against identifiable sectors of the population. Funding an explicitly sectarian organization’s contribution to the shared social goal of, say, treating alcoholism, which they accomplish by, say, reading the Bible together, is one thing; especially as long as we also fund treatment of alcoholism via Quran readings, as well as more genuinely therapeutic approaches. But what about government subsidies for pregnancy counseling services that attempt to frighten teenaged girls out of getting abortions? What about funding for “pray the gay away” regimens? What about racist religious organizations? Will the government fund religiously-accoutremented celebrations of “white pride”? Will it contribute to programs that explicitly spurn the “blue eyed devils”? It is hard to make a case that these sorts of activities actually constitute a threat to public order—none of them is against the law. But under a strict separationist paradigm, religious institutions are required to discriminate on their own time and on their own dime. An accommodationist approach could put government in the unsettling position of either having to sponsor forms of bigotry directed against a proportion of the citizens they purport to represent, or, conversely, regulating and limiting the practices of the religions they fund—invoking the strange contradictory pattern of French separationism. And this could be just the thin end of the wedge. What about state protection of the religious “right” not to be offended? What about “religious freedom” from blasphemy and sacrilege against one’s treasured symbols? We are actually facing a situation right now in which respectable liberal essayists are urging that freedom of speech does not extend to mockery of religious figures; in which the United Nations has considered resolutions that could criminalize criticism of religion; in which the government of Canada has opened a rather sinister-sounding “office of religious freedom” that seems poised to use appeals to religious practice as rationalizations for foreign policy. It is not clear to me, in short, how an accommodationist approach could as adequately protect freedom from religion, including religiously-rationalized prejudice, as it does freedom of religion. Third, and probably most important, there is the question of the relationship between secularism and the academic study of religion. How to be Secular could not be more clear about its subject-matter: the role of religion in politics. While it makes important points about the character of religion and its interaction with politics today (and over the course of the twentieth century), its target is religion, not scholarship on religion. So in commenting, as I am about to do, on the applicability of the book’s argument to scholarship on religion, I am taking this argument in a direction it was not originally intended to go. The following remarks, therefore, should be taken less as critique than as a comment on a potential application. Intentions notwithstanding, How to be Secular addresses a topic and an issue that can be easily transferred from its political point of reference to the rarefied scholarly discourses on religion as well, and that worries me. For I fear that conclusions that apply very well to politics do not apply—at least not without significant reservation—to the academic discourse on religion, in part simply because of the different goals of politics and scholarship. Scholarly accommodationism, understood as the even-handed promotion of religion, reduces the study of religion to cross-cultural cheerleading for diversity, ecumenism, the universal appreciation of the Sacred, and the cultivation of a generic liberal religiosity. And if you’re wondering why that sounds so familiar, it’s because it is a fairly accurate description of what we do as a discipline. Like a political accommodationism, we too often base our legitimacy on a notion of fairness in which all comers to the game are given an equal shake, but in which the game itself is not really subjected to critique or scrutiny. My point is not that scholars of religion should be in the business of adjudicating sectarian claims over against one another. The point rather is that our desire to avoid this shouldn’t shade over into an uncritical refusal to theorize and to explain religious data—including a thoroughgoing critique and genealogy of the notion of religion itself—in terms that insiders would not themselves endorse. I am repeating, that is, Don Wiebe’s accusation from 1984 that our field suffers from a “failure of nerve,” and am claiming that a kind of scholarly accommodationism is at the root of this failure, that the nominally even-handed “appreciation”—the bland desire to accommodate all by offending none that seems to characterize organizations like the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—is at least partly to blame for the appalling under-theorization of our alleged subject matter. For academia, as opposed to the public sphere writ large, and against the backdrop of the AAR, the new atheists start to look good again—not, I stress, because their theories of religion are especially viable, well-informed, or intellectually coherent, but because the new atheists are not afraid to try to explain “religion” writ large: they are not afraid of big theories, theories that dissolve religion as an entity into the ebb and flow of characteristically human practices. They thus allow us to see the scope of what we might be doing, of what might be intellectually possible, were we to set aside our reserve about saying things that are not “nice” or strategically wise. We must be willing to allow that there may be nothing especially religious about religion—that the very idea of “religion” may be an artifact of historical, contingent, all-too-human processes. If a secular politics must focus on freedom for religion, a secular academia must place front and center a freedom from religion. Strict separationism—the treatment of academic inquiry into religion as uncompromisingly distinct from any religious practice whatsoever—looks very attractive in this context.