Part 4: The Imperialism of the Religious Identity Marker

This is a condensed English version of the Dutch essay Deel 4: Het imperialisme van de religieuze identiteitsmarker. It follows on from Part 3.

I open the newspaper and read: ‘Vogue portrays American Muslim women in anniversary issue’. Curious, I leaf through the report, freely available online, of this 125th-anniversary issue. The statements of then president-elect Donald Trump about Muslims in America cast a shadow over it. The headscarf is omnipresent, in the pictures and in the short interviews. One woman says it had been years since she last wore a headscarf, but that she has put one on again purely in protest. Another tells how she had recently taken part in Black Lives Matter demonstrations and thought for a moment that her calling as a human being lay there. Born Black, she had converted to Islam at nineteen. ‘But then’, she goes on, she looked it up in the Qur’an again and concluded: ‘being a Muslim is first’. For ‘when we die, race and gender no longer matter, but God will ask us to account for how we have lived.’

Introduction

Religion as a greedy identifier

The report is revealing on several counts. It shows how outward features carry inward meaning (‘they say something’) and gain importance precisely as they are contested. If the headscarf was not ‘symbolic’ already, it has certainly become so. It also shows how ‘greedy’ the religious identifier is: it swallows other identity markers. The last testimony leaves no doubt. Race and gender must give way to religion, or at least be subordinated to it – with an appeal to the absolute character of her religious commitment: religion is not about ‘penultimate’ but about ‘ultimate things’, here the fact that one day you will die and must account for yourself before God. From there the whole of life is interpreted, valued and lived; the holy book provides the reminders. It is no coincidence, I think, that this testimony comes from a convert, someone who feels she has had to choose her own life (and so choose against other options). Here all identifiers – the facets of being human and impulses to act that make up one’s identity – are pushed into the background by the religious aspect. Being Black, being a woman, no longer count once the relation to the eternal presents itself. The hegemony of the religious marker veils the fact that a person’s identity has many facets, and that the same is true of the ‘sources of the self’ from which people draw meaning for their lives and their place in the world. The religious marker demotes the other sources to second rank or – more cautiously, but no less far-reaching – removes their meaning from view. The radical historicity of human existence fades under the weight of eternity. That is why I call the religious identifier ‘greedy’.

The Jan Leyers effect

Revealing too is that Vogue’s editors – una pro omnibus in media, I fear, and hardly to be blamed – speak in the headline without blinking of ‘Muslim women’, pinning the women portrayed to their ‘being Muslim’ in advance and giving the greedy identifier free rein. Everything the photographer records is linked by the headline alone to ‘being Muslim’: cultural aspects, roots outside America, personal taste, processes of growth – all filed under the religious umbrella term. I would not mind if ‘Muslim’ were a cultural marker, an open, inviting label for a broad spectrum of human behaviour that invites you to find out what lies behind it, allowing great internal diversity. That is clearly not the case. The reporter in fact deals with ethnic, personal, political and religious aspects, but instead of distinguishing and honouring them she lets the greedy religious identifier have its way – and the interviewees go along. Cast as a Muslim woman, you are one, or become one in reaction. Elsewhere I have called this the Jan Leyers effect, after his Flemish TV series De reis naar Mekka (The Journey to Mecca), in which he addresses everyone he meets on their ‘being Muslim’, whereupon almost everyone obediently switches into religious mode. Framing the question determines the answer. Thought experiment: suppose Vogue wanted to do a feature on ‘Christian women’. That sounds odd at once. What are ‘Christian women’? By what criteria would they be selected? Would they not have been tested on how decisive their faith is for them? Otherwise the epithet ‘Christian’ would make no sense; they would just be ‘ordinary American women’. By portraying a colourful, very diverse group of women under the heading ‘Muslim women’ and then addressing them on their being Muslim, Vogue sets them apart as Muslims and denies them the chance to be ‘just American’ – precisely contrary to its intention, which clearly resounds in the commentary and introduction. The subtext of the headline speaks louder than the text.

Unequal treatment

Why are we so naive with one religion that we immediately link everything its adherents do, say and feel to religion, while with another (notably the Christian) we cut away all externals with a filleting knife and file only deep inner convictions under the religious marker? Where does this unequal treatment come from? Convenience? Laziness? Lack of interest? Or do these religions themselves give cause? If the latter, we should think about freedom of religion, for then our system privileges a religion that declares all outward behaviour ‘essential’ over one that concerns itself only with the inner life. I merely point it out. That ‘Muslim’ in fact functions as an ethnic or cultural marker, denoting far more than religious affiliation, makes the use of precisely this identifier particularly problematic. Language is not innocent. It orders reality, brings things and acts under a particular heading – here the religious one – and steers our perception and behaviour. It also plays into the hands of those who want to make religion the most essential thing about being human. With Islam we are all guilty of this – let me call it – lazy language, daily, without thinking. We see a woman in a headscarf and think ‘Muslim’. Strange, really: we do not automatically think ‘Christian’ or ‘atheist’ at a Flemish woman without one. When Sweden plays Egypt at Olympic beach volleyball, the modestly dressed Egyptian players are ‘Muslim women’ while their bikini-clad opponents are simply ‘Swedish’. Had the commentators researched the players’ religion and established that beliefs mattered to them? I doubt it – though that would be the minimum condition for any other volleyball player to get a religious adjective added to her nationality. And if the two Swedes were Lutheran (baptised as infants, hence nominally Lutheran), would we find it relevant to call them ‘Christians’? No, because this is about sport, and there is no strong link between church membership and sport. Why then describe the Egyptian players so, and debate Islam for days afterwards? Clearly more is going on.

This imbalance has social consequences. With Islam we use the term so broadly that a whole culture sails under the name ‘religion’, while with Christianity we take only conviction seriously and call the rest ‘culture’, often with a devaluing connotation (‘just’ culture). That affects how adherents of both religions appear in public debate and legitimise their behaviour. The religious identifier can be greedy internally too. Everything I do I can, if I want, trace back to or connect with my faith – but that does not make everything I do religious. I can connect enjoying the fine weather with God the Creator, my work ethic with my Calvinism (à la Weber), my listening to music with thanks to God for this gift to humanity (à la Luther). Usually I do none of that. I just enjoy the sun, do my work with pleasure (or not) and lose myself in the music, like everyone else. I would find it odd if such things were reported with the word ‘Christian’ nearby. Yet with fellow citizens of Islamic faith we very often do just that. A few years ago I saw a news item on the first Berber festival in Antwerp (De Roma, 2015, VRT late news): people drinking in the sounds of their mother tongue, enjoying the music of their youth, struggling in a workshop with the script or learning a complicated rhythm on a traditional drum. Then the reporter suddenly started on Islam and asked an enthusiastic visitor: ‘And if you, being a Muslim, had to choose between being Berber and being Muslim, what would you choose?’ The man was confused; he did not understand why the journalist was suddenly talking about his being Muslim. Fortunately he found a way out: Berber was culture and Muslim was religion, two quite different things. The relief radiated from him. He had escaped, narrowly, the imperialism of the religious identifier – triggered, mind you, not by himself but by the journalist. A false choice, of course. At a Dutch evening in Canada with cheese, peanut butter and clog dancing, you would hardly ask: ‘If you had to choose between being Christian and being Dutch…?’

Religion is not everything

People may be hard-wired to see and experience life from a kind of religious perspective too, but that religious outlook need not push everything else aside or declare it second-rate. That religious authorities insist on it is logical; they have an interest in it. I know there are remarkably many religious rules that meddle with ordinary life (food, dress, human contact), and that theology bends over everything and determines morals too. But you need not adopt that imperialist discourse without blinking and so reinforce it. Theology is human work, no more; so is religion. It is interwoven with general human culture and co-determines a person’s identity, certainly. Precisely because the religious component already tends to swallow the other ‘sources of the self’, we should be alert and reticent about going along. Why uncritically adopt the religious claim that this part of identity is the most important? Why always make the religious component explicit? Most people simply do things because they do them – religious things too. Think twice, then, before stepping into the professionals’ religious discourse with which they try to get a grip on human behaviour – even when people themselves say they act ‘from their religion or faith, of course’. Religious people can fool themselves about their motives as well as anyone; they are human too. Anything can easily become religion, but religion is not everything. Focusing on the religious component does violence to the complex reality of how people live, and does not help them, religious people included, along in life. Cataloguing groups of people by their religious affiliation is not innocent. It plays into the greediness of the religious identifier (‘thank you’, says the religious leader) and makes living together in diversity needlessly harder than it already is, for the religious marker is not the handiest for getting people to live together; it reinforces the human tendency to form groups. If we call people fleeing failed states like Somalia and Syria simply ‘Muslims’, we mortgage their future integration more than necessary. Nominally most of them no doubt belong to Islam, but we are not researching the state of religion in their countries of origin, so why keep using the term? Why not just Syrians, Somalis? Most Poles are ‘Catholic’ too, but I never read articles about ‘those Catholics’ streaming into our country to fix our leaking pipes and plaster our walls. They are simply Poles, or plumbers, or plasterers – though there are proportionally at least as many nominal Catholics among them as nominal Muslims among the refugees. Language does not simply reflect reality (if it did, truth would dominate public discourse far more than it does). It betrays and determines the perception of reality and can work as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Address people on the religious aspect of their person, and the question will come back in their answers; the identifier you use will become identifying for the person concerned. Repeat it and focus on religion, and religion will become a major factor in public debate – and the groups who have to live together in the real world will be kept apart in that debate along religious lines.

From this double observation – the greediness of the religious identifier, and how religion is present in public discourse – I want in this chapter to look back on the religious experiences and expressions we have met along the way and how they have affected society, to see whether that sheds light on how we do, and perhaps had better not, respond to them. We saw that religious experiences can be enormously diverse. We did not manage to bring them under one heading, and deliberately did not try. We wanted to stay as close as possible to lived religion, everyday religion, and avoid the grand narratives of theologians and scholars of religion (expert religion, the learned religion of professionals and religious leaders who come on TV to explain how things are). It can be a deeply felt conviction, spiritual, philosophical, abstract, as much as physically joining a group dance or walking in a procession without any knowledge of dogma – and, I repeat, the one is no more religion than the other. We kept our suspicion of vérités vénérables and tried to stay close to reality.

We saw an enormous surge of religious energy when Luther made the definition of what ‘being a Christian’ really means a general topic. He contested the prevailing view (the institution), with consequences for just about everything; suddenly everyone talked about it, not only academics and clerics. Even peasants began to motivate and legitimise their revolt religiously, by citing Bible texts. The importance of religion apparently grows as soon as it becomes a separate theme (as in the sixteenth century), and exponentially so when a dominant articulation is contradicted. Palma sub pondere crescit – the palm grows under a weight (gardeners put a heavy stone in the crown so that it grows straighter and sturdier) – and that holds for the plant ‘religion’ too. No wonder there has been much strife over religious matters, and the tension is not out of the air today either. In the first chapter we saw that religious views, acts, experiences and patterns of behaviour used to be so wholly embedded in general culture (everything humans do beyond satisfying their primary needs) that they could not be separated. Religion did not exist apart from culture; the whole culture was steeped in it. And whoever thought he could isolate the religious components (and, if undesirable, cut them out) while preserving the culture was mistaken: the patient died under the surgeon’s knife. That was the story of mission in South America: the attempt to save people’s souls was the death blow to their culture. On the other side of the world we saw debate flare over whether the religious component could and should be named separately at all in meeting another culture. The attempt not to do so for once (the Jesuits in China), leaving the whole complex intact and merely seeing whether a Christian component could be added, was nipped in the bud as betrayal of one’s own identity. Here too it became all or nothing. The greediness of the religious identifier led to cultural imperialism.

To resist this you almost have to take up an outside position towards your own culture, as the Jesuits in China de facto did. That is not simple – it is really only possible by relativising your own culture, which cannot really be done. Culture is imbibed with your mother’s milk, including its religious or non-religious aspect. In Western Europe, stamped by Christianity, religion was totally interwoven with culture too. As church towers mark the landscape, so the Christian religion dominated the culture. As long as this was not problematised or set apart, there was hardly any need to distinguish cultural from religious aspects (if that can be done at all). Watch old films of Flanders and you cannot miss it: the clergy appear everywhere, not only in religious processions but at civic, cultural, sporting and recreational events. Religion was everywhere and self-evident – leaf through Jozef van Haver’s Voor u beminde gelovigen on rich Catholic life in Flanders or, for Holland, Het woord in beeld by C.W. Mönnich and Michel van der Plas. How simple life still was, and how thoroughly culture was steeped in religion (and vice versa). This awareness is essential for dealing with religion, because you touch things acquired in the first years of life: basic trust. Any developmental psychologist will confirm it: touch elements from childhood, and expect strong reactions.

Religion as part of culture

Culture and religion you do not choose; you are part of them. You are ‘born into’ them and take part as soon as, and because, you live. So it is always first your parents’ culture (and religion) that becomes yours. ‘Theologising with children’, popular in some forms of religious education, is not really what the word says: it is working with children on the ‘theology’ of their parents (and teachers). Only later, through a process of awareness and rationalisation, can you vary on it and develop your own thoughts. Both assent and rejection presuppose a certain distance, the condition for choosing – and even then you remain stamped by what you experienced and felt as a child, even after distancing yourself from it. You never lose that stamp; ask Etienne Vermeersch or Maarten ’t Hart. In the construction of the new world view, the structure and contours of the old remain visible – Jesuit and Calvinist in these two examples – and both know it. A child imbibes the religious component of culture with its mother’s milk and finds everything it receives equally self-evident: praying (or not) before meals, going to church (or not), making friends with Jesus (or not), ritual washing (or not), manners, dress codes – as self-evident as food, school, football, Saint Nicholas and family visits. At the age of discretion some reflection may follow, but do not expect too much: by then the religious identifier is installed and calibrated. This mother’s-milk aspect of every world view (theist or not) should make us wary of reducing religion to ‘deeply held convictions’ freely chosen by the individual (voluntaristically) – with the option of choosing a transcendent component in or out, as opinion makers pro and contra so easily suggest. People are not that free and sovereign, least of all regarding what they acquired when young. This is one of those reality-veiling vérités vénérables, almost untouchable because it also dominates human-rights discourse. Much research on religion does not take enough account of it, nor do legislators and courts – which will occupy us later in this chapter, when we look at how we try to regulate religion peacefully by law. There too the mother’s-milk aspect of religion (communally experienced, often far more oriented to acts than to views) is often overlooked or not taken seriously. Put more formally: that religion is embedded in a general culture into which one is born, and which one did not consciously choose, is far more decisive for religious experience than much public and courtroom discussion of religious ‘choice’ suggests.

Religion in a monocultural society

As long as one particular religion dominates a society, few problems arise – to the eye, at least. Everyone imbibes the same religion; it is omnipresent and self-evident. Why make difficulties – or rather, how could you, when you are hardly aware of it? The religion contains a total vision of how the world works, why things are as they are and what your place is – descriptive and normative at once. Living inside it, you are hardly aware of its limits, like a fish in a bowl. All roads lead to Rome | Mecca | Geneva | … (delete as appropriate, add as desired). As long as few wiseacres or troublemakers stand up, such a society seems at rest; the do’s and don’ts are fixed. Yet to take part you need not be personally convinced that it is all right or true; it rarely comes to that, for the do’s and don’ts come in with upbringing and are internalised before they can be problematised. The notorious saying ‘Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man’, put by Voltaire into the mouth of Ignatius of Loyola, may be exaggerated, but it is not entirely unfounded. A recent report on religious education for the European Union (The Future of Religious Education, 2015) flags precisely this as one of the aporias of educational freedom: the rights of the child clash with cultural (and therefore often religious) views in which children have no rights of their own but are socialised as part of the family according to fixed patterns – an aporia because parents’ right to raise their children in their religion is guaranteed in the European Convention as formally and absolutely as religious freedom itself.¹ In a monocultural society the rule is: ‘whoever wants to come with us must understand our ways; such are our ways’, and no other. Culture feels natural because almost everyone shares it, and so does the religion that is part of it. For a long time the religion embedded in our Western culture was the Christian one – its exponent or its guarantor, depending on your analysis. We saw in Part 1 how far that entanglement went, and how absurd it is to regard the religious component of such a culturally grown complex as unchanging and pure. Christianity was and is no abstract religion, always identical to itself, but a concrete historical human phenomenon, constantly changing. It drew its vitality from that embedding in culture.

Concretely, religious identity in our part of the world took shape within a culture stamped by the dominant religion (Catholic or Protestant). You took on that colour automatically, even if you did not want to. Even if you belonged to a minority opposing the dominant religion, you had been born into the same culture. Religious identities fitted each other, even and precisely when they fought each other; you took part before you were even aware of it. The pillarised society built once toleration came to prevail in religion and was guaranteed by law was supported by a shared culture, which was far more important than the ideological divisions suggested (a veiling effect). An outsider would see at once how much the Christian and the secular-humanist pillars resembled and mirrored each other: with a different set of beliefs, one built a similar pillar. A pillarised society is also a way of shaping a pluralist society – living apart together, and more together than people often realised. And that is not so long ago: half a century, perhaps. Morals, ethics, high and low art, social life, customs, politics and education – above all education – were permeated by the dominant form of Christianity (or marked precisely by fighting it, with or without an alternative).

The religious marker becomes social

An important consequence of this symbiosis of culture and religion is that moving to a country or continent where another culture dominates suddenly raises a host of questions. Which aspects of your behaviour, views, morals and customs are ‘just’ culture (and can therefore be given up, people often silently add – far too hasty a conclusion, in my view) and which belong to ‘the religion’ (and would therefore be non-negotiable – an equally debatable implication)? The question, as you will have gathered, is wrongly put, because it cannot be answered. The religious impulse cannot simply be separated from its cultural shape; it is itself a cultural expression, interwoven with all sorts of other behaviour. Protestants easily fall into the trap of thinking it can. Culture is merely ‘incidental’ according to their theology (expert religion): it is about ‘faith’, something personal, of the heart; forms are only relative, ‘mere externals’. (Really? Ever wondered why so many quarrels are precisely about psalm-singing, Bible translations and rituals?) In theory you should be able to do without them, so they see few problems: give us the Bible and let us meet, and the essentials are named and easily transferable to another culture. But when they too took up mission, they soon discovered that many customs – relations between men and women, marriage, dress, the rhythm of the day, child-rearing, etiquette, attitudes to work and property, not to mention psalm-singing and organ-playing – may be culturally determined but are not therefore detached from religion and simply exchangeable. In theory yes, in practice no. So much of what we call ‘externals’ was transplanted to foreign soil, with the result that Papuans in New Guinea sang psalms to sixteenth-century French Renaissance melodies that had long lost their original musicality through Dutch inculturation in the seventeenth century. Protestant mission, like Catholic mission in South America, very often transplanted a total package; large parts of Western culture (all of it?) were take it or leave it. That gradual inculturation or acculturation might also be possible was often discovered too late.

That said: put yourself in the shoes of a Syrian or Somali moving to Europe. He too brings a package of ‘culture-in-which-religion-is-embedded’ to the new world. When he arrives and is asked to ‘adapt’ to our culture, he will no doubt want to – but what is culture and what is religion? For, he is told, what belongs to your religion we will not touch; you can get an exemption; indeed you may practise it freely here, for ‘we have freedom of religion’. What would you do? Since for me everything hangs together, I would go for the maximum option: not just the set of beliefs and a few rituals neatly behind the closed doors of a ‘sacred space’ (what is that, asks the Protestant?), but also relations between the sexes, dress codes, child-rearing – they all belong together. And in case of doubt I would ask the scribes, the religious professionals; they studied for it, didn’t they? And – are you surprised? – they always take the maximum option, for the service of God permeates and determines the whole of life, or ought to. Whether you are a Senegalese Christian or a Syrian Muslim, there is a good chance that after a move (forced or voluntary) a considerable part of the cultural markers of country x will live on in country y as religious markers – certainly if the receiving side keeps addressing part of the newcomers by their religious marker, as ‘Muslims’. Ergo:

When moving from culture A to culture B, cultural elements easily acquire a religious connotation.

Religion as a group label

In the past religious, cultural and ethnic markers usually coincided; hence ‘Protestant Holland’, ‘Catholic Belgium’, ‘Christian Europe’. Reality was always more complex, but culturally it made some sense: the dominant religious marker covered the whole. Anthropologists know that when different identity markers occur together for a long time, they can take each other’s place. And the religious marker is not only greedy but also tends to be exclusive. It binds a group together (religion is cohesive, social glue), but unfortunately it quite often does so – as we saw in Parts 2 and 3 – by emphatically distinguishing itself from others (‘the rest of the world’, or at least the rival religion). How far this leads to separation varies by religion, country and time, but the principle is always present in the discourse; even the most inclusive rhetoric about ‘elements of truth’ found in other churches or religions (the official Catholic view) cannot hide it, however generous one tries to be. Religion binds by including and excluding. You belong or you do not (or not quite), and the Old Maid is always expertly passed to the out-group. We saw the dramatic force of this when Luther put Christian identity on the table: within decades new dividing lines ran through society at micro and macro level. Families split; villages, cities, countries and kingdoms went to war. Groups strongly bound internally by the religious identifier faced others bound in the same way, and the fault lines quickly hardened precisely because people focused so consciously on the religious component. The age of confessionalisation set group identities in concrete for centuries; confessionalisation is always also the fixing of oppositions. We followed the ever-further splitting of Protestantism in England and saw the repeating break come to a halt only in New England. Here the Protestant adage came true: one Protestant is a conviction, two Protestants a church, three Protestants a schism. Nor is this limited to Christianity – it holds for Sunnis and Shiites, and there too that break is only the beginning of much more division. Whoever gets to know other ‘established religions’ will find this internal diversity always present, usually to the regret of the professionals, who do everything to minimise it or subsume it under an original or theoretical unity – both fictions that blur the reality of lived religion.

We can go a step further. In the past one could assume that the religious label roughly matched at least nominal membership (‘sociological Christians’); in time the religious marker can lead a life of its own, take the place of ethnic, cultural or any other group label, and survive long after the strictly religious reference (tied to a form of cult) has evaporated. The most striking example is ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ in Northern Ireland, where the terms have lost all religious connotation and become pure group labels. Christopher Hitchens captures the absurdity in an anecdote in his scathing indictment of religion, in the chapter ‘Religion kills’.² Belfast, during the Troubles. A man is stopped at a checkpoint. ‘What religion are you?’ barks the soldier. ‘I’m an atheist,’ says the man. ‘A Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?’

The punchline shows that the markers do not refer to religious practice or lived faith but only serve to distinguish ‘ours’ from ‘theirs’.³ That religion lends itself very easily to dividing the world into us and them, and is very handy for pouring oil on the fire, I leave for what it is; Hitchens has a point, but not the only one. My point is that a religious marker can lose its religious meaning and live on perfectly well as a cultural, social, ethnic or political marker. In Northern Ireland it was not religious affiliation, let alone a ‘deeply held religious conviction’, that distinguished a ‘Catholic’ from a ‘Protestant’. You could be an atheist and a Marxist (like many IRA members) and still count as a militant Catholic; IRA members were excommunicated several times by the competent bishop in the early years, without the slightest effect on their ‘Catholic’ identity. And you could (and can) march with Orange banners through Catholic streets (yes, even streets can have a world view!) without ever having touched a Bible – surely, after the chapter on Luther, the absolute minimum for being called Protestant in a cultic sense. The religious marker has shrunk to the name of your camp, a party label, even a nom de guerre. As a group label the religious marker seems particularly suitable: Christians against Muslims, we like to summarise the Crusades. It is easy and clear; whether it does justice to reality is another question. More sharply: using a religious marker to name the parties in a conflict veils, for it covers the complexity underlying all human action. Whoever thinks the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was a religious war between Protestants and Catholics, as many schoolbooks say, will often be bewildered, studying the actual alliances, intrigues and campaigns, to see who is fighting alongside whom against whom. The religious marker here does not uncover but covers up, sometimes deliberately; then it becomes propaganda, a rallying cry. That does not trivialise the religious component – it is the ultimate fuel for the war machine – but it must be brought forward correctly. Fuel is not the same as source. Precisely because I am convinced religion plays a large role in conflicts, I want to know how. Skip that analysis, and any attempt to counter the harmful use of religion is a shot in the dark.

When religious and ethnic (or political, or national) markers occur together long enough – when one religion has dominated (part of) a society for centuries – the religious marker can simply take the place of the cultural one. We speak of Poland as a Catholic country (four centuries ago it was largely Protestant), assume Russians are Orthodox and Tibetans Buddhist. Whether they are remains to be seen; certainly not all of them, nor all in the same way. Closer to home: after centuries of ideological apartheid between the northern and southern Low Countries we easily speak of ‘Calvinist Hollanders’ and ‘Catholic Flemings’, though we all know there are so many exceptions that the statement only makes sense if we read the religious markers as cultural ones. Which means that secular humanists in Flanders are still Catholic (culturally), and Catholics in Holland have something Calvinist about them. Interesting thought. The religious identifier can remain in use when religion itself has all but vanished from society. Denmark is one of the most secularised countries in the world, yet it still appears on the religious world map as Lutheran, with all of Scandinavia and large parts of Germany. Meaningless religiously, the marker sticks to the identity.

Administrative classification and religion

That can have strange consequences – to pick up the thread from the beginning – when, in one unified world, the strictly religious reference is sometimes relevant and sometimes not, without anyone accounting for it. I pointed to the difference between ‘Christian’ (only when faith is involved) and ‘Muslim’ (the whole culture). As a result, wearing a headscarf (an ordinary garment in large parts of the world) is labelled ‘religious’ without blinking, while a Christmas tree (a fairly common tree that appears around 25 December in large parts of the world) is ‘not religious’ but ‘part of Western culture’. It would be more correct to begin by stating that headscarf and Christmas tree are both cultural things that can both have a theological meaning, depending on context, and both are deeply rooted in a culture in which the associated religion was dominant for centuries. Theology can claim them, of course, and does; the religious identifier is greedy. But whether it is wise to let that happen in every context, let alone to foreground it, is the question. Anything can be linked to religion, but religion is not everything. It seems to me hardly the most suitable category for ordering society, precisely because it divides – which is what the category was invented for (see Part 1): both to order society and to distinguish. Religion binds people by placing them in subgroups on the basis of a marker whose central feature is to distinguish one’s own from the others. Religion always works with in-group and out-group. If you want to strengthen the social fabric in a pluralist, diverse society, you had better invest in things people can share across the boundaries of religious views – and such things exist, for society consists of people, not of the religious. Some restraint in labelling activities, behaviour and customs as ‘religious’ seems a good start. How far-reaching the consequences of ordering a society by religious identifiers can be is seen particularly well in former British colonies, for the idea of using the religious identifier as a sociological (neo-ethnic) category is a British invention.⁴

The British Empire as ‘manufacturer of religions’: India

The registration of British subjects in British India (then comprising today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – you can feel it coming) is a telling, not to say ominous, example of the consequences of classifying groups by ‘religion’.⁵ Simply to collect taxes (a census), officials had to classify Indians – not easy in a land made up of hundreds of states as diverse as European regions were a few centuries ago (India, too, does not ‘exist’; we are obsessed with unifying categories, so much so that we soon believe realities correspond to them). To sort out who belonged where, reality had to be simplified. Here and there were groups distinguished from their neighbours by having been influenced in one way or another by Islam – I put it vaguely on purpose, for these groups differed greatly among themselves and often hardly or not at all accepted each other as co-religionists. Actual religious practice was very diverse and often syncretistic, shaped by its surroundings in a balance of participation and distinction sought and adjusted over centuries. But the officials did not want too many boxes. So it was ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’ – the latter category coming in as many colours as the rainbow and hardly a meaningful religious marker, rather an ethnic term (‘those people from India with their strange customs I don’t understand much of’ – see the end of Part 2). Classification could begin, the basis of every government that wants to exercise power. The greatest common denominator – actually very weak as a shaper of personal and group identity – was brought to the fore. From then on the inhabitants of British India were neatly labelled ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’, both types of religion the good Englishman meddled with as little as possible, for he was ‘Christian’. The divisiveness and greediness of the religious identifier then did their work. The religious component became ever more decisive, group formation stronger, plurality smaller. When the coloniser’s iron fist weakened, the bisection of society along the simple religious marker was a fact. A weak identity component (Muslim or not) had become a strong one that stuck to people. Religious leaders and spokesmen made sure their view of what Islam was or was not was spelled out; through upbringing and schooling the identifier became ever more inherent and the palette poorer, monochrome. The Muslims of Bengal, for instance, who often had Hindu names and addressed God not as Allah but by a Bengali equivalent, began naming their children Ahmed and Yusuf and calling on God as ‘Allah’. (Language too is a cultural identifier that easily coincides with the religious one.) In the early twentieth century British standardisation of the religious marker was linked to the creation of electorates by religious affiliation, making religion a party-political matter as well. Add a reform movement within Islam that also sought standardisation and a more precise definition of religious identity (a fundamentalist tendency – also a modern phenomenon), in order to organise and profile itself better in the late-colonial world, and which reinforced, not to say hijacked, the ordering of society along religious lines. Zealous Muslims thought it high time to turn those half-hearted, syncretistic Muslims (Muslim in the way many Flemings were and are Catholic) into ‘real Muslims’ who would ‘return to their religious roots’ – historically misleading, for what one claims to return to never existed. The ‘weak cultural Muslim marker’ that mixed so well with other local markers had to be replaced by a pure, purely religious one. Feel the violence in such language, the judgement passed on the other’s piety, the pressure on ‘cultural Muslims’ (a pejorative term, like ‘cultural Christians’). The religious marker is greedy, it swallows, it takes, it has a totalising tendency. Together with the British administration as ‘manufacturer’ of the religious category as a political element, this casts a harsh light on how this British colony – despite intense opposition from people like Gandhi – fell apart into two states segregated along religious lines: the Partition of 1947. The human suffering and political disruption that followed – some half a million dead and ten to twelve million displaced persons – tore the social fabric completely, and the consequences are felt to this day, not least in Pakistan.

The effect on identity construction

Let this example (alas, one of many) serve as a warning. Using religious markers as social categories is not harmless, and that we do it so thoughtlessly is, given history, unforgivable. When we notice that this language not only shapes our perception of reality but begins to create reality, it is time to pause – and I feel that moment is near. We see ‘Muslims’ everywhere, and the spokesmen who come to explain their presence in the world and in our society are almost always theologians (religious professionals). When there is tension with young people in deprived neighbourhoods, religious leaders are called in to put out the fire. Where are the sociologists, the anthropologists? I do not mean those who explain the religious component away by reducing all behaviour to socio-economic or socio-psychological factors, but those who include it in their analysis of human behaviour in general. If we give the floor only to the religious, we strengthen ‘Islam’ as an identity marker and should not be surprised when, in response, the religious component really does become important for many people. Paradoxically: calling in religious leaders to put out a social fire, you throw oil on it with the water, because you give the religious identifier free rein.

From the moment we call ‘them’ (in fact a highly differentiated group with whom we have all sorts of things in common and from whom we differ on some points, differently per person – identity is always composite) ‘Muslims’, we not only lump these fellow citizens together but place them outside our group, through the most divisive identifier there is. We pin them to a religion that may not be theirs at all (or not yet decisive for their self-understanding, just one identifier among others). Religion then weighs ever more heavily on their self-image, and we are in a vicious circle: the religious component shapes our perception (self-fulfilling prophecy), and before long other groups will define their identity more religiously again too. Before you know it we stand facing each other as ‘Muslims’ and ‘Christians’. The impact of this sloppy use is greatest among migrants, who have had to leave behind much from which they drew their identity: profession, colleagues, work, house, family, city, nation. What they can do and are is hardly appreciated here (education, profession), so they feel unsure who they are and what they are worth; they have to reinvent themselves. Addressing them as ‘Muslims’ steers the construction of their identity in a religious direction – and that, I admit it is getting monotonous, is not harmless, because a whole battery of religious spokesmen stands ready to help fill the gap. Our lazy habit of naming people after the religion we presume works positively on the practice of that religion. Offer an employee the chance to interrupt work for daily prayer, and he will consider doing so, even if it had never occurred to him that he could, should or ought to pray at work. Before you know it a subgroup has formed in your company along religious lines. Not bad in itself, but not necessarily good for cohesion. And among religious professionals the fundamentalists are the most fervent, ready with their politico-religious construct (Salafists, for instance) to hijack the discourse, keen to strengthen the weak religious marker (cultural identity) into what they call a real, serious religious identity – with the feeling of being ‘somebody’ again (self-worth) thrown in free. I am not waiting for that, and I suspect many of those we call ‘Muslims’ are not either; think of the Berber in De Roma and the Egyptian volleyball players. But protect yourself against it if you do not know how it works – you already feel guilty for not being ‘pious’ enough. People are impressionable. High time, therefore, for some general house-training in the use of religious terms in public debate. All the more since the debate on religion has meanwhile become strongly juridified. Whoever so much as touches something someone experiences or names as ‘religious’ is at once beaten about the head with ‘constitutionally anchored freedom of religion’. This historically immensely important right (which protects people against religious coercion and gives them the chance to work with their religious talent themselves) has become the instrument for claiming all sorts of prerogatives that suit one’s identity. Judged by how it is used, this fundamental right (a defensive right) seems to have turned into its opposite; it is very easily invoked to give internal religious rules a semblance of law. This is connected with the fact that in working out this right we have given the claim-right precedence over the defensive right, and have not sufficiently realised that freedom of religion can only be guaranteed if a real hands-off policy is taken seriously at the same time, parallel to the non-establishment clause of the American Bill of Rights. The rest of this chapter substantiates that far-reaching statement, beginning with a résumé of how freedom of religion came about.

Freedom of religion (résumé)

Every so often the question arises, especially in the media, whether ‘freedom of religion’ is still workable given the enormous diversity of phenomena that present themselves as ‘religion’. Pastafarians and Jedi regularly drive judges into a corner. Wikipedia’s list of ‘religions’ is very long, makes no claim to completeness, and its classification seems rather arbitrary: recognised religions? world religions? other? Why one and not another? The world is one big village; switch on your screen and you can watch the most exotic variants live. What are the criteria? What is religion? The question with which we began looms large. When the right was introduced into the US Constitution – we evoked its turbulent prehistory in Part 3 – the situation was very different, which matters when judging its present use. Its framers could not foresee globalisation; they had their situation in mind, and what was at stake was more or less clear to all. The religious impulse was considered a natural given, inherent in being human, and its expression therefore a natural right, unalienable and in theory valid for all people worldwide. The tenor of the First Amendment is straightforward: the state would not meddle with the exercise and shaping of religion. Full stop. It had done so before, by privileging and financing one church and not others, which had caused much misery and a sense of religious unfreedom. In the new federation that would be over. In religious matters the government would support nothing and hinder no one; nor would it decide ‘what’ was desirable for society. Hands off: cobbler, stick to your last – and religion was not the state’s last. Government would do what it had to do: regulate the living together of free citizens, secure primary goods (security, education), and, with the courts, see that nobody’s rights were violated. It had its hands full with that, was mandated by the citizens for it and could levy taxes to finance it – not for religious matters. Freedom of religion plus non-establishment is the short summary: hands off. To all religious organisations (churches, and an occasional synagogue at first) the state said: you sort it out yourselves; don’t count on us for money or logistics. Most citizens were won over because this freed them from some irritations: their taxes would no longer finance a church not their own (or one they thought pernicious) – in the former British colonies the Anglican (Episcopalian) or a Presbyterian church, depending on the charter – and one church could no longer obstruct another through political lobbying, by having certain ‘sects’ banned (as the established church invariably called unwanted rivals) or otherwise hampered through regulation. Outright persecution still occurred, for laws are only paper: the Mormons were driven out of the country in the nineteenth century (Utah then lay outside the United States), and lawsuits involving Jehovah’s Witnesses still take place. Calling unwelcome groups ‘sects’ does not make the problem go away. Freedom of religion means you may adhere to and shape a variant that right-thinking rulers consider reprehensible – within the law, of course. That was exactly the point: Baptists and Quakers had been persecuted as ‘sects’. Hands-off also means accepting that unwelcome religious groups have a free hand.

Freedom of religion and non-establishment

Today, especially in Europe, we focus on freedom of religion and find the non-establishment clause less important; many think the two can be separated without endangering religious freedom, and that a system of well-regulated state support is compatible with it. That the framers of the Bill of Rights experienced them as two sides of one coin gives pause for thought. Can you have the one without the other? I think this poses big questions for Europe, which is why I discussed the debate at such length in Part 3. In the US, before the Bill of Rights, people had done the thought experiment and tried forms of multiple establishment (de facto the most common European model), in practice or on paper, and rejected them because they saw it did not work and caused tension. A government that meddles with religion in any way gets entangled in internal disputes and will de facto limit religious freedom or steer it in a particular direction. Many, George Washington among them, did not see it that way at first – it sounds innocent, even sympathetic – but when discussion began on criteria religious groups had to meet to qualify for support, many changed their minds. It remained the same tug-of-war as under the established church, only with the cards dealt differently, and – Washington noted – society as a society suffered, because theological debate was far from non-committal when political and financial advantages hung on the outcome. Church and political power were mixed again, leading to more or less subtle domination of one group by another. And the unavoidable question: how on earth should government decide which religion is ‘socially acceptable’? Every preference in religionis implies a disapproval and is thus substantive interference – in the Founding Fathers’ eyes a violation of religious freedom, if only through the administrative form used to channel support.

Within its religiously neutral constitution, Belgium chose multiple establishment. The exercise of religion (culte, eredienst, in legal terms) is supported on condition of recognition. Though set up for one church, the Roman Catholic, the system turned into multiple establishment, and its inherent problems are clearly visible. Recognition and financing are tailored to the Catholic church – unavoidably, since it was the dominant church. Religion is cultural, its roots in Flemish soil are deep, and it naturally became the model, the mould others would later have to fit – just as the Protestant model in the US forced other religions into its mould (personal faith, choice, independent congregations, flat organisation), not easy for the Catholic church; to Chesterton, American Catholics behaved like Protestants. It could hardly have been otherwise; laws are written by people in concrete situations. When the system was set up in Belgium, the Catholic church was almost the only player; Napoleon’s legacy lay on the table, and under King William I (1815–1830) multiple establishment with tight government control had been the norm. Financing was designed for a hierarchical, unified church with an episcopal structure, and it shows. Because the core identity of the Roman church is bound up with a separate class, the priesthood, financing ‘ministers of worship’ is a structural part of the legislation; then there must be buildings and other ‘material’ to give the liturgy its required form (church buildings, liturgical furnishings), so that the people (the laity) can enjoy these goods. Other religions must squeeze into this mould to enjoy the same advantages, which is not as self-evident as it seems. Historically normal, but is it not structural discrimination? Many people counted as Protestants find precisely these things unimportant for their religion, to say nothing of Jews and Muslims, or adherents of unrecognised religions large and small (Mormons, Kimbanguists, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Raëlians). Such policy can hardly be called neutral, and whether it guarantees all citizens’ religious freedom equally is doubtful. Supporting religious institutions strengthens institutional religion, and it is by no means certain that institutions best secure the right to develop the religious impulse freely; that so many people have felt ‘coercion’ in the church is a sign on the wall. Belgium is not alone: virtually every European country except France (since 1905, laïcité) and the Netherlands (since 1983, buying off the state’s last material obligations) has its own variant of multiple establishment (church tax in Germany, the tax choice in Italy). I wonder whether one root of Europe’s problems with religious freedom lies here. Besides the logical impossibility of defining objectively what in religionis qualifies for support, government involvement in religion evidently always leads to quarrels over ‘what does, what doesn’t’, reinforcing the social divisiveness dormant in religion even when the intention is the opposite. The opposite of ‘good’ is not ‘wrong’ but ‘well meant’. The net result of multiple establishment is, in my view, that religion is less free than it would be under a hands-off policy. Evidence follows.

The ‘wall of separation’: idée fixe, mirage?

In the United States one can speak of separation of church and state in the sense that they do not interfere with each other at the institutional level. In Tocqueville’s day this went so far that combining a church office with a civil one was out of the question (later America too compromised and began nibbling at the institutional separation legally). That was very different from Europe, where far into the twentieth century the churches had very short lines to the seats of power and helped shape legislation. Yet in America the metaphor of the ‘wall of separation’ often dominates debate in a way that makes people forget that separation there is not absolute either. How could it be? The view of life one learns in church (or anywhere) always co-determines one’s political choices, consciously and unconsciously. Separation in the US is limited to non-interference with each other’s institutions. That forbids neither church nor state to concern themselves with citizens’ behaviour, living together, relations between the sexes, upbringing and education; there may be a vigorous tug-of-war over those. Only the believer’s voice will never count for more than any other; it must work through persuasion. In a parliamentary democracy citizens have the right to bring their ideas, wherever they get them, into social and political debate and so influence legislation; that this happened so actively in the US is what Tocqueville admired – a participatory democracy. The specifically religious part of human views influences decision-making not through state-installed channels but indirectly, by educating people into free, articulate citizens encouraged to think along and have their say. As Tocqueville shows, the famous wall did not ban religion from society, as some European freethinkers wanted; the whole society, legislation included, was leavened by it. America was the land of the WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and that Protestant religion, however articulated, was part of the broad American culture. The ‘second table of the law’, ‘natural law’ and ‘every man’s conscience’ (the usual term then for the subjective side of the rights of freedom) were believed to run on the same track. Only in hindsight, or from outside, is it clear how particularistic (Protestant Christian) that general moral sense was – in child-rearing, gender roles, relations between men and women, master and slave, property and race. The first real test of religious freedom as an unalienable right came with the great influx of Irish Catholic settlers, who soon found that laws on paper did not automatically mean rights in practice. Conflicts in state schools, where ‘of course’ a passage from the King James Bible was read every morning (‘that translation is the best there is, what are those Catholics whining about!’), led them to build their own network, a mini-pillar. And it worked; even the most rabid anti-Catholics could not stop it, though they tried. The Constitution did protect the right, but you had to make the effort yourself to give it shape. The Catholics, though centrally steered from Rome, succeeded in settling religiously in the New World and shaping their church within ‘the laws of the people’. Freedom of religion together with the government’s hands-off policy gave them a chance, and they seized it – even if it took until John F. Kennedy for the president to be anything but Protestant.

Multiple establishment (Europe)

The problems of ‘governed religion’

This form of religious freedom anchored in law made history in Europe too, with one striking difference: the freedom clause appears in modern (post-Napoleonic) European legislation and certainly in the post-war human rights instruments, but the non-establishment clause never really caught on. Europe developed a whole range of forms of state support, different per country and usually well explained by history. Religion is a cultural given passed on in a long tradition, so it is not strange that legislation grafts itself onto it; it must regulate reality, not formulate ideals. Almost everywhere people thought (and often still think) that multiple establishment, legally regulated support for several religious institutions, would not harm religious freedom. I doubt it. The Belgian example showed that even something as innocent as setting a legal framework within which to support religious expression already affects a person’s freedom to shape his religion. As soon as you formulate religion as a category meant to capture a piece of human reality, you must take care not to do violence to religious freedom. Saying you do not is not enough; the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We should not expect a comprehensive scholarly definition of religion from judges and lawyers – how could they succeed where scholars of religion fail? But it is the judiciary’s task to see that, if there is support for religious institutions, it does not lead to discrimination against, or the crowding out of, other forms of religion or religiosity. Using an open concept of religion and allowing a wide ‘margin of appreciation’ is how they try. Whether that is enough I doubt; the point deserves more attention than it gets. Whoever has some feel for the greediness of the religious identifier soon sees that it leads not only to an impoverishment of the ‘sources of the self’ but to the religious aspect of personal and group identity becoming monochrome. The identifier best able to profile itself pushes other articulations of religion into the background, within the same religious current too; here again there is subtle interaction between how society perceives ‘religion’ and how religious institutions respond. Many of the social tensions around religion in public space can, I think, be traced to a lack of awareness of the mercurial character of the human phenomenon we call religion. Moreover, ‘governed religion’ (the legal construct politicians and judges work with) is caught between ‘expert religion’ (the theological and religious-studies construct with which scholars of all kinds assist politicians and legislators) and ‘lived religion’ (the activity of people interacting with religious authorities, texts, rituals and fellow humans as they try to find their place in the world, whether or not it fits either construct). The enormous tensions this produces become very clear when we look at how religious freedom functions as a human right.

Religion as a human right (UN and ECHR)

After the horrors of the Second World War the UN produced a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including religious freedom – entirely in the line of the American Bill of Rights, an ‘unalienable’ right everyone has simply by being human. (Human rights become enforceable only where a state ratifies them.) Since the European version is the most recent and the reference for our legislation, I focus on Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Typical of the Convention is that each article has two paragraphs, the second setting the limits of the freedom described in the first:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief (conviction) and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship (culte), teaching, practice and observance (les pratiques et l’accomplissement des rites).

2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Notably, freedom of expression is regulated separately (Article 10). ‘Thought, conscience and religion’ are thus a category of their own, worthy of protection as such; religious convictions are something other than ‘opinions’. That is one of the recurrent criticisms of the article, especially from atheists, for religious convictions are opinions too – and not only in their eyes. Religious people think so as well, mainly regarding religions other than their own; as Etienne Vermeersch says, believers are selective atheists. Hence some find it unfair that people who profess a religion (for whatever reason) can claim more rights for their behaviour and convictions ‘in public or private’ than someone who does not identify with a religion. As a vegan I cannot demand that a conference serve me a vegan alternative with a smile; as a Jain (my veganism being part of my religious conviction) I can at least try, by invoking discrimination on grounds of religion. Not that I will win at once – proportionality and so on apply – but I can make a case of it. Put cynically: in Belgium everyone commits an offence by slaughtering a sheep without stunning, unless you are a Muslim or a Jew; then you can fall back on Article 9. So much for equality before the law! The right to religious freedom gives privileges to certain groups on grounds that are not really an objective basis for privilege. From a strictly neutral, hands-off perspective – including on definition – religious convictions are just convictions, opinions, as well covered by Articles 10 and 11 (freedom of assembly) as any others. Mentioning religious freedom separately places religion too high, among the primary goods without which humans could not live (the basic assumption behind ‘human rights’), whereas in fact people function perfectly well without religion; it is a secondary good, one of the things that help people perfect their lives (‘perfectionist goods’).⁶ But the soup is not eaten as hot as it is served: in a long series of judgments the Court has tried to meet these objections.

Religion… and belief

There is a tendency to treat religious, philosophical, ideological and even political convictions ever more equally before the law.

Among political and legal philosophers the communis opinio is that we need no longer worry about this discrimination, because case law has bracketed the transcendent connotation clinging to the standard definition of religion (reference to some sort of ‘god’ with a legitimising, explanatory story). The opening was the phrase ‘religion or belief’ (French conviction). I suspect the term was originally meant to explicate freedom of conscience, but since ‘belief’ is also used more or less as a synonym of ‘religion’ (like Dutch geloof), it can also denote a secular set of beliefs; when conscientious objection mostly concerned military service, one could invoke ‘pacifism’ as a belief.⁷ Be that as it may, the judges used the term to meet the atheists’ objections, drawing them ‘into the article’, and it became the breeding ground for very creative applications of Article 9. The Court’s official guidance stresses that the article covers far more than religious views; it becomes an umbrella concept under which religion is subsumed, putting religious convictions on a par with ‘philosophical, moral and political convictions’.⁸ From a supposedly neutral perspective that sounds convincing and will reassure many non-religious people: the discrimination seems lifted. Religious views lose their separate status and become human ‘convictions’ of a religious character. ‘Belief’ is then often developed further towards deeply anchored conceptions of the good life (Rawls), and non-religious people too can claim room for their beliefs and convictions under Article 9, as the Court explicitly allows. In Dutch the word levensbeschouwing began a fine career as an umbrella term covering religious and non-religious beliefs alike. Article 9 then grants everyone the right to his own world view, religious or not, and the state must see that all can develop it freely (within the law). As long as it imposes no ‘conception of the good’ on its citizens, not even the atheist one, it is doing well: its task is to guarantee ideological pluralism, and every citizen can go to court with a ‘deeply held conviction’ if he feels discriminated against. Equal treatment is the touchstone. The UN too systematically uses ‘religion or belief’ in its human-rights reporting, thereby including the protection of atheists. All laudable – but it only seems an elegant solution. It is not; on the contrary, the implicit definition of religion used here narrows the view and discriminates.

Religion defined as a ‘set of beliefs’

This definition veils what ‘religion’ (as visible in people’s behaviour and experience) is really about. By pairing ‘religion’ with ‘belief’ and ‘conviction’, the subject the law claims to regulate is filled in tendentiously and one-sidedly: religion, the implicit suggestion runs, is about a set of beliefs and convictions – human views. Where has lived religion, everyday religion, gone? I mean those strange things people do: painting themselves with henna, hanging up crosses, dancing in the street, going to Santiago or Mecca. That is now even further out of view than when lived religion only had to interact with expert religion. Nor has the definition problem been solved; it has merely moved. The question now is: what must human convictions satisfy to claim the rights covered by religious freedom? How do you distinguish ‘beliefs’ and ‘convictions’ from the ‘opinions’ of Article 10? Indeed the inclination grows to abolish Article 9 altogether as redundant. The choice of ‘belief’ and ‘conviction’ also bodes ill for the freedom of religion, for we know both terms all too well from Part 2. There they marked precisely the narrowing of the traditional concept of religion (with its communal, participatory and ritual elements) to a set of beliefs with derived rules of conduct – what we called the Protestantisation of the concept of religion. That narrowing already played a big role in formulating religious freedom, because it was the tacit common denominator of all the Protestant groups involved in the Bill of Rights debate. They could manage their (deep) differences by reducing them – with all respect – to differences of opinion. Theological disputes and evangelisation campaigns were always about the set of beliefs and whether you really ‘believed’ it. They disagreed on content, but agreed on how to define the subject: a coherent list of articles of faith, based on foundational writings, with practice compellingly derived from them – what we called the confessionalisation of religion. Strip this already narrow Protestant concept once more by secularising ‘belief’ (‘set of convictions’) and you are left with exactly the Court’s definition: more than loose opinions, ‘views that attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance’, based on a formal content of convictions.

A very strange choice where religious freedom is concerned, certainly through the eyes of a theologian and historian of religion. For in recent decades – even in Protestant circles – the awareness has grown that the fixation on the set of beliefs was misleading. Even in the Protestant religion, as Part 2 showed, it is not necessarily about accepting a number of truths with the intellect, but about an act of trust: faith, not beliefs – and there is a great difference between them. Many believers certainly also ‘believe’ that the sentences of the Apostles’ Creed are true in the simple sense of describing a state of affairs (fides quae). But faith does not stop when one begins to doubt them; then its ‘faith’ character reveals itself (fides qua), which has more to do with a feeling than with a conviction. Faith refers to fiducia, a kind of basic trust that can be shaken or damaged but goes deeper than the tenability of ‘convictions’. How odd, then, that political philosophers from the secular side come up with a ‘set of beliefs’ once again. And the further criteria found in the case law for whether a non-religious belief qualifies for equal treatment do not cheer me up. Citing various ECtHR judgments, one often reads a list of five: the belief must be genuinely held (1); be more than an opinion based on the information available (2); concern a weighty and substantial aspect of human life (3); attain ‘a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance’ (4); and be worthy of respect in a democratic society (5).⁹

Subjective value judgements

I do not know about you, but I have rarely seen so many subjective value judgements in one paragraph. How can a judge pass a supposedly objective verdict on such things? By what yardstick? How does he establish whether someone ‘really believes’ it? How on earth do you measure the ‘weight’ of a view? How do you judge the internal coherence of something that transcends reason – for if it were ‘simply reasonable’ it would fail the second condition anyway. Arbitrariness lurks, and not just round the corner. And you can, if you wish, frame your complaint so that it fits the criteria in advance. In 2009 Tim Nicholson, an employee of Grainger plc, the UK’s largest residential landlord, challenged his dismissal by invoking his ‘belief that climate change exists’. Head of sustainability until made redundant, he claimed the dismissal was connected with that belief. His lawyers poured his defence into the right mould: his belief was more than an opinion, more than a lifestyle matter, and its seriousness and depth were beyond doubt – neatly, all five criteria. The judge could hardly do otherwise than agree that this was more than an opinion. Once the matter was settled, Nicholson assured the assembled press that views on climate change were not ‘a new religion’, as a journalist suggested, for they were based not on ‘faith’ but on ‘science’. Had he said that in court, he would have lost his case.¹⁰ A perverse side effect of this courtroom victory is that the ‘belief that climate change exists’ was thereby qualified as a ‘belief’ rather than a state of affairs based on available knowledge; had the lawyers argued the latter, the appeal to religious freedom would have been inadmissible. Talk about backfiring. The secular extension of religious freedom by pairing ‘religion and belief’ means you can no doubt get environmental concern recognised as a ‘belief’, and veganism too (and Jediism and Pastafarianism?), provided you dress it up properly. But does that help humanity forward?

Overvaluing ‘expert religion’

The problem is that this articulation of religious freedom privileges world views that are well worked out and can be verbally underpinned (convincingly or not). Governed religion and expert religion join hands. That also suits talk shows, current-affairs magazines and discussion forums perfectly, which can invite articulate believers, theologians and scholars of religion to explain the various sets of beliefs. Debate on the place of religion in society is almost entirely dominated by these ‘experts’ and religious professionals, both to set out positions (convictions) and to talk with each other – usually switching automatically into debate mode, especially when someone advocating fully secular legislation (laïcité) is present. This is reinforced because old and new militant atheists, in their attacks on religion, always hammer on the set of beliefs and the truth claims of believers, as if that were the core of religion. Like flies to honey, all rush at the ‘convictions’ – probably because that is how they themselves stand in life. They are often scientists and teachers, professionals, and the ideological component automatically acquires a rational, philosophical character, with the science-versus-faith discussion running awkwardly through it. So there is a bidding war of ‘deeply held convictions’, each – indeed – worth as much as anyone else’s. Using ‘deeply held convictions’ as the common denominator for religious and non-religious claims, the discussion can then turn to who is right – as if religion were about truth claims. They are in it, but for most people that is not what it is about; and with those for whom it is, you should precisely not debate. In Flanders both the old freethinkers (Etienne Vermeersch) and the new (Patrick Loobuyck) keep falling into this trap. A dialogue of the deaf results. Reducing the religious to an individually accepted set of beliefs (choice) narrows the view, and in the end the conversation is no longer about lived religion at all, and only very rarely about ‘how we all try to come to terms a little with the finitude of our lives’, to name a typically religious topic with an anthropological basis. A pity.

In the media, then, you hear experts explain how things are, and abstractions are endlessly discussed. People forget that most people are not passionate about the ‘theory behind their supposed religion’ (expert religion) but are all the more attached to lived religion (everyday religion, folk religion). How lighting a candle or saying a prayer (to Mary or not) works, most people could not care less; they just do it. And even when it does not work, it evidently still works, for they keep doing it. Religion is free. It will not be caught, not by its own theologians, nor by the anti-theologians. Religious freedom as a human right means, in my view, that a person is free to decide for himself what he does or does not do with his religious impulse. No one has the right to take another’s measure here, least of all the state. Yet this happens endlessly – not only among people of related views (Christians among themselves), but very often people of set of beliefs A explain to people of set of beliefs B that they are not doing it right. You hear atheists say: ‘Most Christians don’t know their essential dogmas and sacred texts, so they are not really Christians any more.’ It is not only presumptuous for a non-participant to judge what a person within a living religion should or should not do; it is above all stupid simply to take the fundamentalist variant of a religion as the norm. Of course anyone may note that for many who call themselves Christians today the dogmas of the fourth and fifth centuries no longer mean much, and that many believers treat their holy book rather selectively. But that should be no reason to pass judgement on the quality of their being Christian. Better to marvel at the freedom with which many Christians handle their religion, and say: ‘Hey, that’s interesting!’ That invites conversation. People – fortunately – use their religious freedom to decide for themselves how to fill in their religiosity, and do not pay much attention to the institutions under which others classify their religion. That is what the right to religious freedom was invented for: to be free, and frank.

With the concentration on ‘deeply held convictions’ as the core of the religious question, the turn that took place in the wake of Luther’s radical contestation of institutional Christianity reaches its final form: partisan confessionalisation, religious shaping concerned mainly with delimiting itself from the other variant. As we saw in Part 2, Luther turned away from the complex tradition of the church (a mix of beliefs, customs and communal habits) to the holy book, and set about developing a consistent Christian doctrine from it, leading – not so much with Luther as with his followers – to a neatly delimited confession (a consistent set of beliefs) with a consistent moral code grafted onto it, embedded in a general view of life that a person accepts through a deeply felt personal choice of faith. Luther’s view would certainly qualify as a ‘belief’ in court. Catholics with their more communal, ritual faith would have a harder time, to say nothing of millions of ‘nominal Christians’ – and Muslims and Hindus and Baháʼís and Caodaists. Consistent? Serious? Deeply held? Personal?

This narrowing has big consequences, especially because the state believes it may and can strengthen ‘the good’ in religion and belief for the common good, without discriminating, of course: multiple establishment. It also hopes thereby to manage the ‘dangerous sides’ of religion (assumed as easily as the good ones). Governed religion as a panacea for real social problems – with, as the state’s advisers, policy experts who get their ideas from the professionals (expert religion). I tremble to think what that means for reality, which consists mainly of ordinary people with a usually not very consistent form of everyday religion whose centres of gravity often lie quite elsewhere than the policymakers, advised by the experts, think.

Backfire: less freedom in religion

Of those who invoke religious freedom (because they feel discriminated against or hindered in shaping their religion), those who can explain it well get their way. If you can prove that a set of beliefs obliges you to certain behaviour, you have a case – provided you can show you are serious (exit the Pastafarians). Within every ‘recognised religion’ (or, non-religiously, every known philosophical tradition with a solid package of views) there are latitudinarians and precisians. What the latter consider essential (wearing a headscarf, hijab or niqab) may be an adiaphoron for others in the same religion – something that does not really matter. The judge cannot and may not rule on that; it is an internal matter of the religion. In the nature of things most complainants will be the kind of believer who ‘takes everything seriously’. Muslim women who wear no veil, or a loose scarf but not always (the latitudinarians), need not go to court; they do not get into trouble. The precisians do. They also consider themselves the ‘real’ believers – otherwise they would not do it – and in their hearts look down on those who take it less strictly. Every time they win a case, religious freedom for the more liberal, compromise-seeking believers shrinks a little. When a judge says you must be allowed to wear a headscarf at school or at work, there is a very strong subtext: ‘real Muslim women wear headscarves, not only when it suits them but above all when they have to fight for it’. The religious identifier grows best against pressure, doesn’t it? The general human right of religious freedom, once invented to protect people against mono-religious coercion, guaranteed every citizen that the government would not interfere with how you fill (or do not fill) your religious space. In our pluralist society that human right increasingly works as a fixing machine for religious identities, which by their nature tend towards clearly delimited sets of beliefs (with codes of conduct): fundamentalist ones. More diffuse religious expressions, religious souls who are not articulate or feel no need to be, the more mediating, often somewhat eclectic forms of religion, do not appear in the legal system and cannot appeal to the constitution when they feel slowly overruled by the more fundamentalist currents in their own religion. If you think I exaggerate, I fear not. I observe a reification, a Verdinglichung, a petrification in the religious debate. There is a constant suggestion that you must be able to say what Islam is and is not, what Christianity is and is not – and in its wake, what does and does not qualify for protection under Article 9. The playing field on which all those diverse ideological impulses meet and question and fertilise each other grows ever smaller, as the boundaries grow sharper. I experience it in my own small Protestant pillar, and I see it in the Catholic one: essentialists have the wind in their sails. Those who know ‘what Christianity is’ and can put their opinion clearly on the table are on the move. They are (in their own view) ‘the real believers’; the media parrot them thoughtlessly, and the courts amplify their voice a thousandfold. Ordinary people, just muddling along, religious customs included, do not appear in the story. Painful to see how a right meant to guarantee the free development of a human disposition leads in practice to strengthening the voice of fundamentalists of every kind. Two concrete examples of this backfire to close the chapter: one on a macro scale (Sri Lanka), one from everyday life.

Legal regulation hardens oppositions (Sri Lanka)

When Ceylon became independent (1948) it was felt, logically, that the new constitution should do justice to the island’s religious reality, in which the most deeply rooted religion was and is Buddhist in colour.¹¹ British rule had, people felt, wittingly and unwittingly damaged Buddhism’s dominant position – through administrative rules for monasteries, expropriation of religious property, abolition of traditional political structures, not to mention Christian mission. The new legislature did not want to turn everything back out of rancour, and sought a reasonable compromise. It adopted the freedoms of thought, religion and conscience just formulated by the UN, but also felt a historical duty towards Buddhism, which had suffered most under colonisation and deserved some form of redress. So, besides the ‘negative’ freedoms in the American spirit, it seemed fair to write a particular state commitment to Buddhism into the constitution as well. The proposed formula ran (my italics): ‘In the Republic of Sri Lanka, Buddhism, the religion of the majority of the people, shall be given its rightful place, and accordingly, it shall be the duty of the State to protect and foster Buddhism, while assuring to all religions the rights granted’, followed by a reference to a clause closely akin to the UN text on religious freedom, including its public exercise. Thus people hoped to do justice both to social reality (plural) and to history (Buddhism as a culturally embedded religion). None of the parties in Sri Lanka was illiberal, and there was broad support for ‘doing something’ for the Buddhist monks. But whoever thought that settled it was wrong. Some Buddhist groups (!) found it not enough; the largest Tamil party (mainly Hindu, but also Christian), claiming to represent all Tamils (!), felt discriminated against, since Buddhism was clearly privileged (‘protect and foster’) and recognised as a religion, while the others had to make do with the individual right to religious freedom. Legislative proposals and legal complaints produced a small downgrade: the preference no longer rested on Buddhism being the ‘majority’ religion, nor on a ‘rightful place’, but only on the historical fact that it occupied the ‘foremost place’. Some years later, after more tug-of-war, came a significant semantic change: some Buddhist groups (!) found the term ‘Buddhism’ too Western and too focused on a set of beliefs, and wanted a broader term including folklore, customs, practices and property, arguing that the Buddhist tradition cannot be put on a par with other religions, since it encompasses a whole way of life; was not the whole culture of Sri Lanka stamped by it? They would not be compared with ‘foreign religions’ like Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. They got their way: a term was introduced that brought the whole Buddhist culture into the religious privilege.¹² At the same time the religious-freedom section was raised to constitutional level. The balancing act of favouring one religion (established religion) without disadvantaging the others was kept up, despite international criticism that it fell short of the UN standard.

Did this regulate the religion-related tensions in Sri Lanka so as to further people’s living together? Here we see the strange phenomenon that the attempt to regulate religiously connoted conflicts by law led in practice to a hardening of religious oppositions – not only because the factions in the civil war (the Tamil Tigers) also used the religious marker to keep enemy images alive (compare Northern Ireland); then tensions should have eased after the war ended. They did not. On the contrary: ever more often, more widely and with ever more public resonance, lawsuits were brought between religious groups or by religious groups against the state, and it became normal to ‘recode’ social tensions between population groups as violations of religious freedom and take them to court. The legal tools the Sri Lankans had devised and fine-tuned to manage those tensions deepened and hardened the dividing lines between Buddhist and non-Buddhist Sri Lankans (you sense these are the parties that formed over time on the basis of the legislation). What we see everywhere happened: first a reification of ‘religion’, ever more precisely defined by the litigants and their experts; then ever sharper delimitation of positions, the opposition fixed in religious language. It came out very sharply when an MP of a Sinhala Buddhist party introduced a bill to ban the supposed proselytising zeal of Christian missionaries on constitutional grounds – the state had a duty to ‘protect and foster’ Buddhism, after all. The country was in uproar: violation of religious freedom! Newspapers filled with opinion pieces; no fewer than 21 people, very diverse but all non-Buddhist, petitioned the Supreme Court to declare the bill unconstitutional, and various parties grouped against them, each claiming to have the welfare of Buddhism in the broadest sense at heart. Both sides insisted they had nothing against religious freedom in principle, but there are limits. The Buddhists argued they violated no one’s freedom – everyone was free to change religion, as the constitution said – but that it belonged to Buddhism to ‘live in an environment where one is left alone spiritually’, and guaranteeing that was part of the state’s mandate to protect and foster Buddhist culture. The Christian bodies held that bearing witness is essential for a Christian and that the same constitution therefore forbade the state to ban it. Benjamin Schonthal, who describes the case, notes that there was no link to any concrete case at all: the examples of proselytising cited were anecdotal, taken from newspapers; not a single witness was heard. The courtroom battle was abstract, detached from lived reality; real local tensions had been ‘recoded’ as global conflicts over unalienable fundamental rights and universal freedoms – ‘the West versus Sri Lanka’, ‘Christianity versus Buddhism’.

Every pitfall I pointed out above was fallen into. Living religious traditions, internally very colourful and diverse, were turned into fixed, stable, unchanging concepts; expert religion took the place of lived religion. Not only did the many colours disappear, but groups increasingly acted as if they were the legitimate representatives of all, so that a few Buddhist groups could speak for ‘Buddhism’, and likewise on the other side. Through the juridification of religion as a separately regulated business (governed religion), a diffuse social and cultural concern that really existed was reformulated in religious terms and fought out in a debate polarised in advance over world views frozen into concepts, abstract ideas and hypothetical situations. The court tried to keep ‘the church in the middle’ and defuse the matter by giving both parties partly right and ruling on nothing of substance; no faction could claim victory. Good or bad, it was at least a judgment that took the context into account; the judges were not unworldly. But then Sri Lanka was rapped on the knuckles by the UN Special Rapporteur for falling short of the standard: Buddhism’s privileged position really cannot be squared with ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’. The circle is closed. More rule of law will solve the problem, lawyers believe – trusting more in abstract transnational concepts (liberal legal principles) than in historical arguments that try to take account of local reality (colonial legacy, minority positions). Schonthal is not really satisfied with the judgment either, but notes that it is in line with how tensions in Sri Lanka have been ‘managed’ since independence. The crucial question is not whether the judgment deserves a beauty prize but whether Sri Lankans are served by how religious aspects of their society are regulated. He suspects ‘more law’ alone will offer little relief – on the contrary, continuing to seek vindication through the courts will harden positions and deepen the social gap, because recoding social reality as clear religious oppositions fixes those oppositions. That is all the more a pity, he argues, because at the grassroots (lived religion) Sri Lanka has a long cultural tradition in which the boundaries between religious currents are very porous, with much border traffic, encounter and mutual influence – to the great annoyance of ‘some Buddhist monks’ (!) and ‘some Christian missionaries’ (!), who call it syncretism and disapprove. They are the ones bringing the lawsuits. Even the line between religious and non-religious was not strict in Sri Lanka, since the dominant religion does not draw it clearly either (see the end of Part 2 on whether Buddhism is ‘a religion’ in the Western sense – a question the law has now rendered moot). Religious identities there were relatively open: you find Hindu deities in some Buddhist temples, and many Christians who go faithfully to church on Sunday take part zealously in local Buddhist festivals; many sites are sacred to several religions at once, some even with ‘plural worship’. ‘Buddhism’, which has manifested itself through legislation as a collective power bloc, is no such thing in practice; like every religious institution it is an amalgam of competing factions, each with its own rituals, sacred texts and followers. Now that power and advantages are to be had (governed religion), the tendency to present itself as one bloc has grown – you stand stronger in society and in court. So it is not innocent when lived religion is simply overwritten by the construct ‘religion’ in the statute book. The way case law on religious freedom speaks about religion does not cover the reality of human religious activity; it even threatens to destroy it. What holds for ordinary language (that it can influence the reality it claims to describe) holds exponentially for legal language: it can change social life, for the worse too. Schonthal ends with a thought-provoking sentence: ‘If Sri Lanka’s religious communities are to have a harmonious future it may be in spite of the law, rather than because of it.’

I take from this that the application of rightly praised human rights in religionis must be done carefully: taking account of the real situation on the ground, and aimed at increasing citizens’ freedom to shape their religion in their own way (let a thousand flowers bloom), not at the power of religious institutions to propagate their version of a religion. In Sri Lanka we saw how wrong choices encourage social divisiveness along artificial religious lines – politically disastrous for a country whose social cohesion is still so fragile.

Irregular religiosity falls between two stools (Boca Raton)

Besides these large consequences for a society, the juridification of religious freedom (governed religion steered by expert religion) also leads to a quiet discrimination of irregular religiosity – a restriction of the religious freedom of individuals who do not fit a religious box (or, alternatively, a ‘respectable belief’). A famous example is a case brought by residents of Boca Raton, Florida, against the managers of the public cemetery.¹³ It was a logistically very efficient modern cemetery in the form of a park, all gravestones flat and, for aesthetic reasons, covering only part of the plot. Some people found that hard and had marked out their loved ones’ plots with posts and rope; others had decorated the space in between – a shrub, a cross, pebbles on a Star of David, a statue of the Virgin. This was tolerated for a long time until the management felt it was getting out of hand. The rules were brought out again, information meetings held, and the vertical memorabilia removed. Some relatives independently went to court, invoking freedom of religion. They therefore had to convince the judge that their view of how to shape a memorial for their dead was rooted in a ‘deeply held conviction’ connected with the views, doctrines and practices of a known religion (or ‘belief’) – consistently, coherently and seriously; we know the criteria by now, and in the US they differ little from Europe’s. The purchase contract was clear: anything other than flat markers was forbidden. The families asked for an exemption on grounds of religious freedom. The judge finally rejected their claim, ruling – after hearing expert witnesses (theologians, historians of religion, clergy) nominated by both sides – that the urge to set up vertical memorials on a grave was ‘a matter of purely personal preference regarding religious exercise’. To establish this he applied a fourfold test the plaintiffs’ ‘deeply held convictions’ had to meet.¹⁴ He questioned the plaintiffs, sometimes almost as in cross-examination, about ‘how they motivated their acts’ (they did so clumsily, as you can imagine – emotionally, with every argument they could think of), set their testimony beside what the expert witnesses (expert religion) had told him, and concluded that erecting vertical signs could not be counted among the essentials of the plaintiffs’ ‘religion’: it was not prescribed in an authoritative text of the various traditions, not a universal practice, not a custom continuously present in the tradition to this day. That grave monuments are in practice usually vertical he did not consider relevant; that the relatives themselves said it was essential to their religion did not count. It was and remained ‘a matter of purely personal preference’, and so it stayed on appeal (2004).¹⁵ The judge was rather pleased with his reasoning and even published an evaluation of the case afterwards. Nowhere does he show any awareness that he had pressed the plaintiffs’ religion into the mould of his concept of religion, that by deciding what is essential and what accidental he had acted as a theologian and so interfered with other people’s religion. The record even shows him regularly speaking condescendingly of their religious experience, despite explicit assurances to the contrary at the outset. He had fond memories of the trial; he had enjoyed putting a little order into the theological field. His Protestant spectacles, his doctrine-fixated blinkers: he was not even aware of them. The legal scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, an expert witness at the trial, wrote a vivid account of it in a book with the provocative title The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. She is not against religious freedom – on the contrary – but doubts whether ‘religion’ as it now functions in the legal context still protects it. She notes that case law increasingly, against the spirit of the law, concerns itself with what does and does not qualify as religion, so that judges in practice seem more occupied with restricting free exercise than with safeguarding it. For every definition (literally, delimitation) of religion restricts religious freedom; saying what religion is not is also a substantive statement about religion, and thus interference. Sullivan puts the question that lawyers and judges cannot avoid if they want to remain impartial: can a judge still judge objectively, given the hyperdiversity of what presents itself as religion today and invokes freedom of ‘religion or belief’ for particular behaviour? Many judges themselves dislike having to sit in the theologian’s chair regularly to reach a verdict. It does not feel right; it is not just.

Should religious freedom then be abolished, as some argue? I think not – better the devil you know – but it is high time to create more clarity here and at least become aware of the side effects of the practice of governed religion. To conclude, a first step.

Rethinking the concept of religion

Expert religion, governed religion, lived religion

In this chapter I have functionally dissected the concept of religion, taking it apart according to the context in which it is used – a concession to the complexity of the subject. Nobody can define religion; we knew that. I refused to do so at the beginning of this book and stand by that, for only so does reality get a chance to present itself. But here it was precisely about that complex reality, and to tell the story I needed structure. Even if we cannot define religion convincingly for all contexts, we can say something more precise depending on the context: working definitions, heuristic tools for exploring how religion works in every field. Three terms, derived from the contexts in which the word occurs, have guided our analysis: expert religion, lived (everyday) religion and governed religion. I borrowed them from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, who uses them in Beyond Religious Freedom to sketch, through case studies, the impact of brandishing ‘religious freedom’ on social and political relations in a country or region. I hope their use above has shown their relevance. All that remains is to describe these three (which do not exist separately but constantly interact) a little more closely.

• Expert religion is religion as described by professionals – internal experts (theologians, ministers, monks) and ‘connoisseurs’ in general (philosophers of religion, scholars). In public debate it is very often these experts who are involved in how religion is to be ‘controlled’ or ‘managed’: they are policymakers or are consulted by them, answering questions such as: how is it with you? Is it like that everywhere? How does it work? How important is it? Their knowledge is enlisted in the ‘reassurance discourse’ (religion, they assure us at every turn, is at bottom ‘peace’, a source of morality, indispensable for social cohesion) and in the ‘control discourse’ (since religion can also be a source of violence, we advise…). You know them. You cannot get them off the screen.
• Governed religion is religion as it appears in legal texts, in jurisprudence and politics. By its nature this definition is rather flat; it must above all be functional and serve the legislator. Yet together with expert religion it has much influence on reality; it steers it. Besides the strong historical determination of how religion is governed, political and religious authorities provide the input; hence also ‘official religion’ or ‘law’s religion’. Its link with expert religion is close – the experts advise lawyers and politicians – and religious institutions (representative bodies) are naturally very keen to feature in this category, especially when state support is possible for part of their programme (churches, schools).
• Lived religion (or everyday religion). Though also a paper term, it is meant above all to resist the two constructs above. It is religion as practised and experienced by ordinary people, privately or in groups. Of course it does not stand apart from the other two; there is a constant to and fro, attraction and repulsion, between all three. Authorities play a role in everyday religion, as do rituals, texts, buildings and places. It includes all kinds of human activity, relations, commitments, views and acts (rituals, behaviour), not limited to those officially recognised by institutions or experts. Expressions of lived religion easily stay under the radar of governed religion, and its relation with institutions and experts is often somewhat strained. It is sometimes called ‘popular religion’. It often looks more like what people do spontaneously when deeply moved – after a disaster or an attack, say – than like what is in the church books. Familiar dealings with ‘the holy’, irreverent in the officials’ eyes (the statue of Saint Anthony on the mantelpiece turned to face the wall when he has not done what was prayed for), are typical too.

From these three perspectives I have looked at how we deal with religion, and you will have noticed that I have tried above all to plead the cause of the third, because I feel its voice is heard too little. ‘Ordinary people’ do not proclaim, campaign or write opinion pieces about religion. Only when personally affected do they act, and then often clumsily (Boca Raton). Their convictions often deviate from the official discourse and are not always very coherent, and much of what they do and value does not go down well with religious officials and experts. The relation between popular religiosity and church theology is always somewhat strained – more so in Protestant than in Catholic circles, to stay within Christianity. Terms like ‘folk belief’ and ‘superstition’ are quickly used, and pejorative. That makes it hard to fit lived religion into the legal categories ‘religion or belief’. Religious leaders (expert and governed religion) rarely speak for these people, busy as they are defending the interests of the institution (based and built on expert religion). Why would they? These are only people whose behaviour ‘fails to qualify as religion worth protecting by law’, to quote the Boca Raton judge once more. By extension I count among this forgotten group those who do not fit the simplistic division ‘religious or secular’ – a fast-growing group that feels at home in no official religion, feels no need at all to bind itself to an institution, but would not dream of joining organised secular humanism either. ‘Cultural Christians’, ‘somethingists’, postmodern bricoleurs, they are sometimes called – all badges of honour, I would say. In the conversation about religion, anyone who does not master, or does not want to speak, the language of official religion does not take part; or if he raises his voice, he is not heard or not understood. That deserves more attention, it seems to me.

Furthermore: official statements about ‘freedom of religion’ land in the field of lived religion (and belief) and have consequences there – generally positive ones, let that be said first. Without human rights, large parts of the world would be even less free. But those rights are worth only as much as they can achieve on the ground, and we saw indications that human rights have acquired the status of vérités vénérables about which nobody may say anything. The implementation of the human right of religious freedom turned out to be anything but straightforward. The Protestantisation of the concept of religion, reinforced by stretching it to include ‘philosophical, political and moral convictions’ without reference to ‘god’, caused some short circuits. It may accommodate the non-religious and remove a serious discrimination, but as a side effect much of what is also religion drops out of view, and one aspect of religious activity is overexposed: the doctrinal side. Having a set of beliefs with acts based on it became the model, the mould that must fit everyone who wants a say in ‘religion and belief’. Religious organisations or ideological associations that can present themselves that way are seen; they qualify for ‘recognition’ (official religion) and can then profit both from legal protection (the constitution) and from support under multiple establishment. Quite apart from the discriminatory aspect, this strengthens those faith communities that can profile themselves clearly and state precisely what they want from their followers and what not: sharply delimited religious communities. The paradoxical conclusion is that religious freedom thus de facto promotes fundamentalism and strengthens religious (ideological) institutions, while it does not respond when more free-floating religiosity within those institutions is squeezed. All religions (religious expressions) are equal before the law, but some are more equal than others. Moreover, the sharply delimited religious identities thus created seem in practice to confirm (even fix) social differences rather than help bridge them. The grey zones that abound in lived religion, where many social tensions are naturally softened, disappear from view. Not very conducive to the much-desired social cohesion. Continue with the Afterword.

© Dick Wursten – fair use policy: all use permitted, provided the source is acknowledged.