By TANER EDIS - THE SECULAR OUTPOST
Added: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

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Post referred to below was posted on RD.net here.

Russell Blackford, editor of 50 Voices of Disbelief (which I have contributed to), is a strong defender of secular liberalism. In his blog, which I like to follow, he regularly responds to critics of secularism and nonbelief.

In his latest, he rips into sociologist and priest Gary Bouma, who has recently attacked secularists and active atheists as divisive elements that threaten social harmony.

I'm as dyed-in-the-wool a secular liberal as they come. But I want to argue that here, Bouma is correct and Blackford is wrong. Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.

Note that, as often in the liberal tradition, the main pragmatic argument Blackford uses to promote a secular regime is that it helps keep the peace between rival sects. Government has no competence to intervene in theological disputes. When the social reality on the ground is one of theological pluralism, so that imposing ideological conformity on society would come with an unacceptably high cost, the best policy is to accept plurality, keep an equal distance to sects, and keep sectarian concerns out of public policy.

Such arguments tend to overlook how such reasoning is difficult to generalize beyond the context of Western European Christianity in the modern era. When one overwhelmingly dominant faith tradition is in the process of fragmenting, and many social forces are acting to promote social differentiation and erosion of community, all this makes some sense. Governmental bodies will find it practical to deal with individuals and their worldly interests, ignoring faith labels. They may even actively promote individualism and the submergence of intermediate communitarian institutions such as those rooted in religion.

But today's multicultural urban environments are different. We have to deal with not one fragmenting religious tradition, but people thrown together from very different faiths, including various kinds of Muslims, Buddhists, African Christianities, indigenous traditions, etc. etc. Many of these have not adapted to individualism such as liberal Protestantism or New Age spirituality has. Indeed, it is hard to say that individualist tendencies are clearly dominant over desires to retain some measure of community identity and cohesion. Governmental bodies, unless driven by an explicit secularism in the French style, can effectively deal with representatives of religious communities as intermediaries. Keeping the peace often means ensuring that South Asian Shiites and Korean evangelicals and so forth do not feel disrespected and disadvantaged.
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TAGGED: ATHEISM, COMMENTARY