The Limits To Freedom Of Religion

So, after a brief summer hiatus, The Conversationalist is up and running once again.  If you’ve been following us for a while, we’re glad to have you back, and if this is your first visit, welcome!  This blog is essentially an online supplement to the print version of Consider, and we on staff are going to do our best to provide you with various interesting things to ponder while you’re waiting for the next issue of Consider to come out.  We cover everything from politics to art, from pop culture to the latest trends in feminism.  We hope you’ll enjoy what we serve up, and we would love for you to respond to a post in the comments section.

To start us off, let’s talk about this piece by Josh Marshall on the Park51 “mosque” controversy that’s been so prominently reported on these days.  Marshall points out that there’s been an “odd confluence of interest” between far-right conservatives and radical secularists – people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris who go beyond liberal pluralism and express an intense hostility to religious faith in general.  Lately, both groups have taken up the banner against Islam in particular, singling it out as an especially nasty religion that needs attentive “taming and domestication,” as Hitchens puts it.  Understandably, Marshall sees this unlikely alliance as a threat to the tradition of religious pluralism in America:

Vandalizing the construction site of a new Mosque in Tennessee ain’t going to do jack to brush back whatever sleeper cell is planning an attack right now in Los Angeles. And the same is unquestionably the case for organizing another ‘we hate Muslims’ rally down at Ground Zero. This just seems so obviously the case to me that I don’t even see how you can debate it. However, I can very much see how a pervasive climate of hostility to Islam in the US can up the population of angry Muslim youth who are open to the seduction of violence and terrorism. So quite apart from what our values mandate, our interests seem to point in the same direction.

And I’m suspicious of this odd confluence of interest — radical religion and radical secularism — that seems to leave little room to the sort of accepting pluralism that I think our society is based on.

Marshall is right to bring attention to this “confluence of interest,” and, in a way, it’s not without precedent.  There’s a small but noticeable tradition of Lefists jumping ship to join the other extreme of the ideological spectrum: Irving Kristol, originally a Trotskyist Communist but later the “godfather of neoconservatism,” is a good example; Benito Mussolini is a more infamous one (not to suggest that either America’s Christian Right or radical secularists are Mussolini-esque).  I can’t put my finger or exactly why this is, but for some reason the extremes of the political spectrum sometimes come full circle and find points of contact with each other, and it is often troubling, as Marshall points out.

But I think this phenomenon obscures a more immediate concern raised by the whole Park51 controversy.  It’s easy to criticize the dogmatic intolerance exhibited by the far right and the radical secularists, but we should also remember that there are important dilemmas that we run into when trying to decide what gets protected as free religious exercise.  Some traditional religious practices are, in fact, directly intolerant or violent, and many of these ought to be excluded from the umbrella of “freedom of religion.”  The fact is that, even in a pluralistic society, civil law takes precedence over religious traditions, and religious groups will often have to make some compromises for the sake of the greater community.  It’s one of the more uncomfortable aspects of living in liberal societies, in that it conflicts with the liberal value of cultural neutrality.

I don’t want to get into this too much, though, because you should keep an eye out for an upcoming Consider issue on France’s recent burqa ban, which will also touch on this subject.  Be excited!

–Aaron Bekemeyer