Religion culture diversity and tolerance - shaping the new Europe

Archbishop of Canterbury -
’Religion culture diversity and tolerance - shaping the new Europe’
Tuesday 8 November 2005, by Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams last week visited the
European Institutions in Brussels the visit culminating with a call on
the President of the Commission, President José Manuel Durão Barrosa on
Tuesday afternoon.

In the course of a three-day visit Dr Williams held meetings and
consultations with politicians and officials from the European
institutions and delivered a major lecture - Religion, culture, diversity
and tolerance - shaping the new Europe.

The visit comes two months after Dr Williams addressed political and
religious leaders at a conference organised by the Sant’ Egidio community
in Lyons, where he spoke on questions raised of the European political
institutions by faith communities and also took part in a forum on the
future of Europe.

The Archbishop was accompanied by the Rt Revd Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of
the Church of England diocese of Gibraltar in Europe.

The Text of the lecture is as follows.

Recent discussions about the admission of Turkey to the EU have brought
into the open all sorts of concerns about the historic Christian identity
of Europe; and these in turn have given a little more focus to the wider
issue of what exactly Europe thinks itself to be in the current global
context. In what follows, I want to suggest a way of understanding
Europe’s Christian heritage that may open some doors for a common vision.
Our international situation is at the moment deeply uncertain and fluid.
There is widespread impatience with transnational institutions, from the
EU to the United Nations, yet equally widespread anxiety about the
dominance of a single power. We are increasingly aware of the issues that
cannot be solved by single sovereign states on their own - ecological
crisis, terrorism, migrancy - yet are uncomfortable with any notion of
global jurisdictions. We in the Northern/Western sphere are conscious of
facing (to put it as neutrally as possible) a highly critical, if
internally diverse, global ’opposition’ in the shape of the Islamic
world, and we do not know how best to respond to its presence outside and
inside our own borders. Enlightenment liberalism, the self-evident creed
of reasonable people, now appears as simply one cultural and historical
phenomenon among others. Its supposed right to set the agenda for the
rest of the world is no longer beyond question, however much the American
Right or the European Left assume that their positions are the natural
default beliefs of intelligent human beings, and that cultural and
religious variety are superficial matters of choice or chance.

The solution requires us first to retell the history of Europe. What we
mean by ’Europe’ culturally speaking tends to be the complex of
civilisations and language groups brought into political relationship by
two factors - the great Germanic, Turkic and Slavonic migrations that
destroyed the Roman Empire, and the emergence of new institutions that
sought to salvage the legacy of that empire. Among the latter, the
Christian Church is quite simply the most extensive and enduring, whether
in the form of the Western Papacy or of the ’Byzantine Commonwealth’, the
network of cultural and spiritual connections in Eastern Europe linked to
the new Roman Empire centred on Constantinople. As some historians have
argued, the emergence of Islam in fact produced a third competitor for
the imperial Roman legacy; but we shall be returning to that notion later
on.

In the West, the new Germanic kingdoms, governed by tribal law and feudal
obligation, engaged in a centuries-long conflict with the renewed system
of centralised Roman administration whose supreme court of appeal was the
Pope. For the Roman-centred Church, the fact of Christian identity was a
theoretically universal thing, which made it possible to legislate across
cultural, linguistic and economic frontiers, and which generated an
international civil service. Throughout the Middle Ages, the two models
jostled, bargained, quarrelled and reshaped each other; by the sixteenth
century, a new configuration was emerging, as the political world we
recognise as ’modern’ was born.

Although some scholars in the last century and a half have argued as if
the battle had been between a damaging centralism and a healthy local
independence, the truth is much more complex. The Roman system worked on
the basis that any local jurisdiction was subject to a higher law; the
local power of a monarch or an aristocracy could not be the last word,
and tribal or familial loyalties should not determine people’s
possibilities. It was this spirit that, for example, enshrined the
principle that consent was necessary for a valid marriage, challenging,
if only implicitly, some of the prevailing assumptions about the status
of women. It was this spirit that, in the hands of Thomas Aquinas,
reserved for citizens the right to criticise, and even in some
circumstances to replace, a monarch on the basis of universal law.

At the same time, the problematic result of the system was a legal
language that gave no place to concrete local tradition and the networks
of semi-formal mutual obligation which actually make up specific
societies, and a stress on the absoluteness of the ultimate sovereign
court as religiously sanctioned.

The Reformation produced a new map of the political territory. The
evolving nation-states of Europe were eager to appeal to local sentiment
in support of new levels of political independence, affirming the right
of the state to assert its own jurisdiction as beyond appeal. The Roman
Catholic Church emerged as still a resolutely international body as
against the new national churches of the Reformation, but with no very
clear account of how it saw the legitimacy of the new states. In due
course, the final revolt against traditional forms of authority, feudal
or ecclesiastical, led to the Enlightenment model of universal secular
legality - the principles of the French Revolution and, in modified form,
the Napoleonic Code. Both Catholic universalism and the remnants of
’common-law’ custom and mutuality were removed from public life in the
name of a universal system of legally conceived equality and freedom,
divorced almost entirely from religious sanction.

Now the point of this rather breathless (and by no means uncontroversial)
tour of Western European history is to try and identify what the argument
is that has made Europe the way it is. The history just summarised tells
us that the conflict of the so-called Dark Ages, the encounter between
the tribal kingdoms and the Church, the tangled relations of common law,
canon law and Romanised civil law guaranteed that political power in
Western Europe was always a matter of negotiation and balance. Despite
what some historical caricatures have maintained, sovereign state power
in Europe was never consistently treated as a sacred thing. Political
power is answerable to law and to God, and it is therefore right in some
circumstances to challenge it.

This is what I should regard as the central conviction of political
liberalism (as distinct from theological or social liberalism) - the idea
that political life can and should be a realm of creative engagement. It
is not, notice, a principle simply of democratic rights, nor of
individual liberties; it affirms rather that loyalty to the state is not
the same thing as religious belonging: not that the state has no claims,
but that it is a mistake to see those claims as beyond challenge in any
imaginable circumstances. And in this sense, to the extent that Europe
has pioneered such ’liberalism’, Europe is what it is because of its
Christian history.

Let me elaborate this a bit further. The Church of Christ begins by
defining itself as a community both alongside political society and of a
different order to political society. Its membership is not restricted by
race or class or speech, and in that way it puts questions against the
absoluteness of any local and tribal identity. Yet it does not seek to
set up another empire on the same level as the Roman imperium. It has
’citizens’, but their citizenship is not something that requires them to
set up societies in rivalry to the existing systems. Until the state
makes ultimate claims which Christians cannot obey, Christian citizenship
is largely invisible; in the Roman Empire, when the Emperor requires
worship from citizens, the hidden potential for dissent appears.
Martyrdom establishes the distinctiveness of Christian belonging over
against all other kinds.

That model of an alternative citizenship is what gradually produced the
systems of ecclesiastical law. But when the Western Empire collapsed, it
was only the Church that retained any sense at all of a unifying legal
frame of reference.

But this means that Western modernity and liberalism are at risk when they
refuse to recognise that they are the way they are because of the presence
in their midst of that partner and critic which speaks of ’alternative
citizenship’ - the Christian community. What I have been arguing is that
the distinctively European style of political argument and debate is made
possible by the Church’s persistent witness to the fact that states do not
have ultimate religious claims on their citizens. When the Church is
regarded as an enemy to be overcome or a private body that must be
resolutely excluded from public debate, liberal modernity turns itself
into a fixed and absolute thing, another pseudo-religion, in fact. It is
important for the health of the political community that it is able to
engage seriously with the tradition in which its own roots lie. To say
this is not to demand the impossible, a return to some past age when the
institutional Church claimed to dictate public policy. But without a
willingness to listen to the questions and challenges of the Church,
liberal society is in danger of becoming illiberal. Wholesale secularism
as a programmatic policy in the state can turn into another tyranny - a
system beyond challenge. The presence of the Church at least goes on
obstinately asking the state about its accountability and the
justification of its priorities. It will not do to forget that the
greatest and most murderous tyrannies of the modern age in Europe have
been systematically anti-religious - or rather, as I have already hinted,
have become pseudo-religions.

What I am arguing is that the virtues we associate with the European
identity, the virtues of political liberalism in the sense I have
outlined, will survive best if they are seen as the outgrowth of the
historic European tensions about sovereignty, absolutism and the
integrity of local communities that were focused sharply by the Christian
Church and its theology - a theology that encouraged scepticism about any
final political settlement within history.

It is, of course, such engagement that the draft European Constitution
envisages; and this needs to be affirmed and held on to. But we should
also note one important implication of the model that has been sketched
so far. If the state ahs no sacred character, it is not the sole source
of legitimate common life: intermediate institutions, guilds, unions,
churches, ethnic groups, all sorts of civil associations, have a natural
liberty to exist and organise themselves, and the state’s role is to
harmonise and to some degree regulate this social variety. This
’interactive pluralism’, rooted in the liberalism of thinkers like Acton,
Maitland and Figgis, would see the healthy state neither as a group of
suspiciously coexisting groups, nor as a neutral legal unit whose
citizens all possessed abstractly equal rights, but as a space in which
distinctive styles and convictions could challenge each other and affect
each other, but on the basis that they first had the freedom to be
themselves.

While it is essentially hospitable to the stranger and the migrant, it has
to confront the risk that it may find itself being hospitable to some sort
of bid to alter the foundational idea of Europe as a sphere of ’liberal’
interaction between communities within the frame of law.

And this, of course, raises the spectre that haunts so much of our
discussion, the fear of a militant Islamic ideology that seeks to replace
liberalism with a new theocracy. I noted earlier that Islam itself was
culturally and historically one of the systems that replaced the Roman
Empire, providing - only now on a profound religious base - the same
sense of belonging in a single culture of equality and justice. To be a
citizen of the umma was to be assured in principle of belonging to a
reality for which nationality and class were irrelevant to the
theological and legal status proper to a believer. It is true to say that
Islam is in its most robust historical form, both ’Church’ and ’state’;
and thus it is a challenge to any Muslim to make sense of living outside
that unitary reality. The uneasy and sceptical relationship between the
political community and the community of belief that has characterised
the Western Christian world (and often even the eastern Christian world
as well) is at first sight largely foreign to Islam.

Yet in fact Islam has had a history outside its historic majority
cultures. It has had experience of negotiating its way in other settings.
Its celebrated principle that there is no compulsion in religion means
that it is not absolutely and theologically committed to an imposition of
specifically Muslim law even in majority contexts - or so some would
argue. The work of Muslim thinker like Tariq Ramadan on the identity of
Western Muslims spells out some of the principles by which a Muslim
identity outside a Muslim majority state can be understood. On the basis
that cultural habits that do not directly conflict with Islamic precept
become Islamic in virtue of being practised by Muslims, it is possible
for a Muslim to see his or her Western cultural identity as integral to
their Muslim identity. There is, says Ramadan (Western Muslims and the
Future of Islam, p.53) no single ’homeland’ for Muslims: they can be at
home in any geographical and political environment, and they need to
avoid ’self-ghettoization’, becoming ’spectators in a society where they
were once marginalized’ (55). They need to be arguing and negotiating in
the public sphere. But the acceptance of such argumentation is
undoubtedly a development, as Ramadan agrees - a necessary recognition of
distinctions between primary and secondary concerns in social life, a
following-through of principles rooted deeply in classical Muslim
thinking about ijtihad, the labour of interpretation (43-48). In modern
conditions, this labour is something needed not simply in the context of
jurisprudence within Muslim society, but in relation to an irreversibly
plural and complex environment.(65-77). Ramadan can even say -
surprisingly for the Western reader - that the Muslim distinction between
religious and social authority, between what is enjoined for the good of
the soul and what is ordered for the stability of an external
environment, is really much the same as the Christian distinction between
Church and state. What is different is that the Islamic world has never
gone so far as to sanction the absolute institutional separation that
emerged in the Christian world (145).

I have devoted some time to Ramadan’s discussion of Muslim identity in the
West partly for its intrinsic interest and partly to reinforce the main
argument of this paper. ’Europe’ has introduced into the cultural map of
the world a particular habit of argument, a particular recognition of
diversity which carries with it also a certain recognition of the limits
of the state’s authority. By denying to the state an unquestionable
freedom to reshape the conditions of social life, by giving place to
arguments that call the state to account in the name of a higher law,
this political and philosophical tradition assumes that the political
realm will always be one in which mediation and mutual listening will be
normal and in which law exists as a means of such mediation. Where the
state is not an essentially religious unit and where the religious
community does not seek to become a universal executive, diversity is
inevitable. However, this does not imply the necessity of relativism, or
of what is sometimes called ’consumer’ pluralism (the availability of a
plurality of lifestyle choices). If religious communities are
acknowledged as participants in public argument, they are bound to some
level of creative engagement with each other and with the secular voice
of the administration, so as to find a solution that has some claim to be
just to a range of communal interests.

We misunderstand our situation, then, if we imagine that the world’s
current problem is a neat binary opposition between a totalising
religious culture (Islam) and a single ’enlightened’ or ’democratic’
world of rational neutrality. The reality is a lot more interesting - and
it is interesting precisely because of the theological roots of modernity.
A Muslim thinker like Ramadan helps us to see that, while it was
Christianity, for a variety of internal reasons, that crystallised in its
most extreme form the idea of the state’s relativity and secular
character, Islam itself acknowledges the same tension between levels of
human identity and aspects of human virtue and implies the same liberty
of criticism against specific political systems. But both equally allow
that loyalty to these systems is not inconsistent with the loyalty of
faith; commitment to the lawfulness of the processes of argument in a
society and acceptance of the outcome of ordered negotiation is
presupposed by the political ethics of both traditions. Without that, we
should simply revert to the ghetto ethics from which Ramadan is seeking
to liberate his co-religionists.

But we cannot leave the subject without revisiting the dangers of a
secularism that is equally forgetful of history. The political style that
seeks to keep religious communities in the private sphere, insisting that
religion is always and primarily an individual option related only to the
supposed wellbeing of that individual and like-minded private persons, is
at risk, as I have said earlier, of becoming itself a pseudo-religion, a
system that is beyond challenge. A mature European politics will take
another route, seeking for effective partnership with the component
communities of the state, including religious bodies. It will try to
avoid cresting ghettoes. It will value and acknowledge all those sources
of healthy corporate identity and political formation (in the widest
sense) that are around.

And perhaps this is the central contribution to be made to a future
European identity by the Christian tradition. It challenges the global
socio-political juggernaut - consumer pluralism combined with insensitive
Western promotion of a rootless individualism, disguised as liberal
democracy. It affirms the significance of local and intentional
communities, and their role in public life. It is able to welcome the
stranger, including the Muslim stranger in its midst, as a partner in the
work of proper liberalism, the continuing argument about common good and
just governance. When it is allowed its proper visibility, it makes room
for other communities and faiths to be visible. By holding the space for
public moral argument to be possible and legitimate, it reduces the risk
of open social conflict, because it is not content to relegate the moral
and the spiritual to a private sphere where they may be distorted into
fanaticism and exclusion. For Europe to celebrate its Christian heritage
in this sense is precisely for it to affirm a legacy and a possibility of
truly constructive pluralism. And for the Church to offer this to Europe
(and from Europe to the wider world) is not for it to replace its
theology with a vague set of nostrums about democracy and tolerance but
for it to affirm its faithfulness to the tradition of Christian freedom
in the face of the world’s sovereignties.

Source : The anglican communion

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