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No future in the ghetto

Europeans take it for granted that modernisation and secularism go hand in hand. But the experience of the rest of the world tells a different story. The challenge is maintaining faith while living peacefully with those who do not share it. Retreat is not an option

In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor asks how we moved "from a condition in 1500 in which it was hard not to believe in God, to our present situation just after 2000, where this has become quite easy for many". Taylor contrasts secularism with religion. For him secularism sees human good and human flourishing as being focused solely in this world, while the religious outlook is transcendent.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is rather more specific. He describes secularism as opening a space, but also potentially closing a space. Positively a secular society would hold up ideals of freedom and equality. It would oppose any kind of theocracy, any privilege given to an authority that was not accountable to ordinary processes of reasoning and evidence. More negatively, secularism could rule out arguments that would arise from specific commitments of a religious or ideological nature. This approach is underpinned by the Enlightenment conviction that authority which depends on revelation must always be contested in the public sphere.

When getting at the meaning of secularism, Taylor rejects what he calls the "subtraction story" which sees science gradually chipping away at the credibility of faith. Instead he argues that secularism and faith come from the same well and that secularism emerges not through scientific discovery, but through history. In this way secularism is not pitted against religion but is part of a proper distinction between the temporal and religious realms.

Secularisation theory on the other hand attempts to describe a process of change ushered in around the time of the Industrial Revolution, whereby states modernise as they secularise. The idea is very simple: the more modernity, the less religion. It is broadly based on empirical data from north-western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For much of the twentieth century it went unchallenged. It was commonly assumed that the world was following a trajectory set off in north-western Europe at the time of the Industrial Revolution. But about 20 years ago it became clear that the statistics told a different story. Peter Berger, an eminent American sociologist and expert on religions, was long an advocate of the secularisation theory, but changed his view on the basis of the empirical data. He said recently: "We don't live in an age of secularity; we live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity."

So those who predicted the "Death of God", extrapolating the European experience to the rest of the world, were wrong. Rather than a correlation between economic, social and political modernity and decreasing religious practice, the evidence from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe points to religious practice  walking hand in hand with progress, and in some cases actually being the spur. Indeed, figures from the World Christian Database show that the greater part of the world, both developed and developing, is as furiously religious as ever. For example:

It is quite likely that by 2050 or so there will be three billion Christians in the world; the proportion of those who will be non-Latino whites, will be somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent.

In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians representing 10 per cent of the population; by 2000, that was up 360 million, to 46 per cent of the population. That is the largest quantitative change that has ever occurred in the history of religion.

In 1950 only 2.4 per cent of South Koreans were Christian; now the figure is 30 per cent. In Russia high majorities of people now say they are Orthodox. Estimates on China are difficult to come by, but experts speak of a massive increase in the interest in religion.

Based on current trends the largest Christian populations in 2050 will be in the United States followed by Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, Congo, Ethiopia and China.

So why is Europe exceptional? In part the explanation is historical. Europe has a particular structure of Church-State relations not found elsewhere. We have unique constitutional connections (or at least a history of such) between Church and State, and religion in Europe has over the centuries been identified with power. As people rejected different types of political power they also rejected religion because the two were so intertwined. 

There is one point, more than any other, however, that answers our question about why Europe is the exception and that is the very nature of the secular foundation that developed out of the European Enlightenment.

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb describes the Enlightenment, at least on the continent of Europe, as very anti-clerical and even to some extent anti-Christian. That was not the case in America. She writes that "in a sense, the French Enlightenment was a belated Reformation fought in the cause not of a higher or purer religion, but of a still higher and purer authority: reason. It was in the name of reason that Voltaire issues his famous declaration of war against the Church. This was not, however, the Enlightenment as it appeared in either Britain or America, where reason did not have that pre-eminent role, and where religion whether as dogma or as institution, was not the paramount enemy."

Another distinction feeding into the differing natures of the Enlightenment is that European religion was premised on territory. It was built largely on the parish system, which historically was civic as well as ecclesiastical. Religious life was profoundly dislocated by the Industrial Revolution. And it's at that moment that European religion is shaken to its core. To Europeans, it looked as if modernisation, urbanisation and secularisation were all part of a package.

America contrasted this in so many ways. It did not have a centuries-old parish system. The American cities were ever evolving. The migration was not from parish to city, but from diverse cultures, including religions. From the near outset, the US was at least in Christian terms, religiously diverse. Religion was an aid to the immigrant and not something to be liberated from (we are now seeing that too in Europe, where faith groups are often the first point of contact for immigrants arriving in the continent and a key vehicle to help immigrants integrate). The Industrial Revolution in the United States was accompanied by a sense of nation-building and a utility for religions which was to bind the populations together.

Writing in 1835 Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, contrasting the European situation - particularly the French situation - with the American one, said: "The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy. They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity, which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. This contributed powerfully to the establishment of a republic and a democracy in public affairs and, from the beginning, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved."

This was in marked contrast, Tocqueville said, to Europe, where those who were not Christians were vehemently opposed to the religion and its representatives, the clergy. This finds resonance today among many sociologists and theologians. Dr Williams might describe it as "programmatic secularism". "It assumes that the public expression of specific conviction is automatically offensive to people of other (or no) conviction," he said in a speech at the Vatican in November 2006.

Even with France, the citadel of laïcité, the nature and scope of secularism is under discussion (see Alain Woodrow, page 8). In a recent speech in Rome, President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "I am calling for a positive laicism, that is to say, a secularism that watches over freedom of thought, of belief and unbelief, does not consider religion as a danger, but as an asset." Such a move would bring the European Enlightenment, which is about "freedom from belief", closer to the American model which is about a "freedom to believe".

Rowan Williams says "wholesale secularism as a programmatic policy in the state can turn into another tyranny - a system beyond challenge". The risk of this intolerance within secularism can lead to the loss of a common grammar or language which society needs to function in the medium and long term. Here there are signs that all is not lost. Even those who acknowledge that they are tone deaf when it comes to faith can see a utility for religion even if they do not share its creed.

Faith does not have to be a casualty of the Enlightenment. How it turns out can be highly dependent on the reaction of faith groups themselves. If they fail to respond to the challenge of modernisation by refusing to recognise the changed environment, or if they attempt adaptation and go too far in becoming indistinguishable from wider society, they face demise.

Let me give one illustration of positive adaptation. At the start of the twentieth century, Catholicism had a very ambivalent attitude to democracy; and not until the 1960s was it at the forefront of support for religious freedom. Experience changed the stance of the Catholic Church towards democracy and religious freedom - the positive experience of Catholic minorities living in countries like the United States and other English-speaking countries, coupled with the negative experience of Catholics in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

In the early 1960s, the Church moved to embrace religious freedom, a shift marked by the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, as part of the Second Vatican Council. The position of the Catholic Church today is that freedom of religion is an inalienable human right. The crucial lesson is that change did not come from the Catholic heartlands on the European continent or Latin America. Rather these dramatic moves came from the then periphery of the Catholic world, the experience in the United States.

Faiths have to adapt to the new set of circumstances that modernisation presents, in particular pluralism and the distinction between Church and State. Faiths must learn to use a language and vocabulary that can deal effectively with those of other creeds, including those who profess a secular creed, while remaining faithful to their own traditions. Getting the shift right can lead to a flourishing of religious communities.

There really is no choice in all of this - modernity is our reality and faith communities cannot retreat from wider societal engagement. The challenge is to rediscover a shared foundation on which we can live and build, an accommodation that values our differences as complementing the whole.

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