Secular Society Threatened?

[Louis VI the Fat]

A nice read cher Louis. I always enjoyed Habermas. His idea of discourse as a means of enacting reality was and is the best answer to all that post modern stuff. The piece you cite here is a good one -- and very much embodies the attitude I take to the issue.

Trust me to not just link to an article that disagrees with me, but to link to Europe's most influential living philosopher, one of the few to be at all interested in secularism, who has reached a diametrically opposed opinion on this matter to mine.

Echochambers are teh boring, and more's the fun.

I am putting Habermas into practise simply by having brought him to attention in this thread.

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As the adage goes: American tradtion wants to protect religion from the state, French tradition wants to protect the state from religion.

(As another adage goes - other states are not important, because France sees the West as consisting of two competing poles of equal import: France and the US, with all the other states mere spectators.
Though it is my understanding that this opinion is not universally shared outside of France)

Religious America, Secular Europe?
A good book. Or so I think, because I haven't read it yet. Several reviews are promising, notably this review essay:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas, Ashgate, London, 2008; and “A Christian Europe? Europe and Christianity: Rules of Commitment” by JHH Weiler in the journal European View, Vo. 6, n.1, December 2007, Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg.

“Advocates of multiple modernities recognize two very simple things: first that is more than one way of being modern, and second that not all modernities are necessarily secular…the United States and Europe should be seen simply as different versions of modernity.” (Peter Berger, p. 44).

“In the name of freedom, individual autonomy, tolerance and cultural pluralism, religious people (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) are being asked to keep their religious beliefs, identities and norms ‘private’ so that they do not disturb the project of a modern, secular, enlightened Europe” (Josè Casanova, p. 62).

The above statements by Peter Berger and Josè Casanova from the book Religious America, Secular Europe? hint at how topical, and relevant to present day cultural contrasts and tensions between Europe and America, is this particular book. It tackles head on a very important question: why does religion flourish in America, but languish in western and central Europe?



Why are some issues about religion and public life in America nearly incomprehensible to Europeans (such as the use of religious language in political campaigns), and vice-versa (such as the French controversies over head-scarves)? The authors look at history, institutions, and the intellectual ethos of the two areas across the Atlantic pond. They also point out that "Europe" is not presently a religious unity as it might have been in medieval times.


Europe is a relatively secular part of the world in global terms. A 2004 study by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari, a research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research at Harvard, states that “Europe is the only part of the world which has a general hostility toward religion. Europeans tend to explain every sign of backwardness in terms of religion…” Why is this so? And why is the situation in Europe so different from that in the United States? These are the key questions, clearly articulated in the first chapter, that the authors try to answer.


Subsequent chapters explore the nature of Euro-secularity in more detail (the variations on the theme) - paying attention to its historical, philosophical and institutional dimensions. In each chapter, the similarities and differences with the American case will be carefully examined. These are the basic question analyzed by Peter Berger, the eminent Professor of Sociology at Boston, Grace Davie, of the University of Exeter, and Dr Effie Fokas. The final chapter explores the ways in which these features translate into policy on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, the question of Euro-secularity as related to social difference (class, ethnicity, etc.), is also explored in depth.




[More of this interesting review essay here: http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ta...2/Default.aspx ]

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Not that even Habermas will deter me from some fireworks:

Honestly,this is not surprising. Besancenot is doing his best to cater to all the embittered and resentful crowd. This dude can go to hell. But to be honest, we've had people using a Bible in the Assembly, it could hardly get any worse than that.

I knew you wouldn't dissapoint.

Laicité provides the same rights to every religion, precisely because it is intolerant and doesn't favor open mindedness or discussion. That was the aim from the very beginning, and guess what? Jews and Protestants applauded the idea. They never had any issue abbiding to it.
The point was specifically to prevent people from enforcing their religion on others (as catholics had been doing in France for centuries). That's precisely one of the reasons why islam cannot swallow laicité, for it constantly needs to show-off and pretend to be though and better than the others.

Good points. No other European country has been as succesful as assimilating Jews and other minorities.
While Jews were pogromed in half of Europe, we had a near civil war over the honour of a single one. (Then dismantled the stranglehold of one religion over the others)
Where everywhere else Jews lived in ghettoes, we elected them as heads of government. Such is the power of uncompromising equality and a refusal to reduce people to religious affiliation.

To drop a bomb (has WWII reared its head in this thread yet? Don't know. It's already page six, so about time it does) - perhaps if other European countries had protected their religious minorites as much as French laïcité does, their Jewish casualty rate in WWII might not have been several times that of France.

Now, as I'm quite a tolerant and open-minded person, please provide me with an example of something nice we're missing out because of laicité? Teachers with headscarves? People calling for murders in the street? Different public offices for different religious groups? A large population of reactionary nutjobs? Creationism taught at school?

Quite.