Engaging with a “Clash of Civilisations”

GAVIN D’COSTA ENGAGING WITH A “CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS” Liberal Views of Religion in the Public Domain and Catholic Approaches Introduction Samuel Huntington’s deeply insightful (if flawed) thesis helps situate our interreligious situation on a complex global map. After the drawing open of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Berlin wall, Huntington argues that future global conflict will operate on a cultural, not ideological axis—with religion play- ing a decisive role. Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements that define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenian emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the [Indian] Subcontinent. (Huntingdon 1996: 42) The three cultural-religious clusters are the Asian (China, Japan, and East Asia), the Western Christian (North America and Western Europe) and the Is- lamic (the Middle East, Africa, parts of East Asia). In Europe all three clusters meet, and indeed clash, and a fourth element also enters the picture: modernity. How might I as a Christian reflect on this situation: tense, dangerous, and yet full of new opportunities and blessings. In what follows, I shall give the European Christian-Islamic dimension special attention as otherwise the canvas becomes entirely unmanageable. In the first part of this paper, I will briefly isolate two particular currents of thought that have shaped modern Western Europe (and Western societies more widely), that together can be named “secular modernity.” 1 I will indicate how modernity has positioned Christianity—and indeed, other religions in the pub- 1 The debate on secularisation is very alive. See, for example, Bruce 1992. 31 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 17 (2007) 1 lic arena. I will argue that modernity has tried to make “religion” a private matter in the alleged interests of the common good, even though precisely the opposite is true. In Europe, in practice, we have very different variations of this template, such that religions are sometimes granted more space in the public square, but the situation is always precarious as we saw recently in England in the case of Catholic adoption agencies and their operation in the public square. What I am keen to do is isolate basic operative paradigms and subject them to questions. In the second part, I will briefly isolate two stages within Roman Catholicism in response to these currents. I choose Roman Catholicism as any attempt to speak of “Christianity” ends in abstraction and lack of historicity— and it is the tradition out of which I work. I will argue that the Roman Catholic Church, after its own teething problems with modernity, provides an alterna- tive between theocracy and the social privatisation of religion desired by modernity in its fear of theocracy. It, like other Christian churches and ecclesial communities, has the resources to offer religiously pluralist Europe an alterna- tive to the predicted “clash of civilizations.” Only in this mode is intercultural and interreligious engagement possible. Elsewhere, I have argued against the secular study of religion and instead, for a theological “religious studies” (D’Costa 2005). Modernity’s Conversion of Europe Western Europe is an amalgam of five cultural layers: Greek, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, the Latin West, and modernity.2 Modernity has nearly succeeded in erasing the previous four layers except in legal and political terms. This ex- plains the Vatican’s strenuous efforts to have the new EU charter acknowledge the Christian heritage of Europe. The refusal of this acknowledgement (which is now poised to change with Germany’s chairing of the EU) is just one exem- plification of my point. Admittedly, modernity has also brought many good things in its wake: the most important is the emancipation of women. I am not interested in modernity-bashing but rather the phenomenon of secularism that shaped the emerging nation states. The philosophical names behind this current run through Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Comte: establishing the domain of the secular, a political space that is autonomous from religion and present for the service of man (and eventually women).3 The actual word 2 There is considerable debate as to whether Islam should be counted as a fifth here. Peter Antes outlines the complexity here in Antes 1995. Ratzinger (1988) defends these four and excludes Islam, which also accounts for his resistance to Turkey’s inclusion into “Europe” prior to his becoming Pope. In what I say I assume that Judaism is inherent in the Christian tradition as well as a separate cultural-religious force. 3 See this history narrated in Milbank 1990 and MacIntyre 1990. 32 ENGAGING WITH A “CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS” “secularism” emerged in 1846, with the Birmingham-born agnostic George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), who is not anti-religion, but pro-natural reason and humanity. He writes: Secularism is that which seeks the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest possible point, as the immediate duty of life—which inculcates the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism, or the Bible—which selects as its methods of procedure the promotion of human improvement by material means, and proposes these positive agreements as the common bond of union, to all who would regulate life by reason and ennoble it by service. (Holyoake 1860: 17) I would suggest, based on various empirical surveys regarding organised religion in Europe, that this basic philosophy underpins most civilised Europeans who seek material prosperity within the new European Union (recall Holyoake finding this aspect, “the promotion of human improvement by material means” the “common bond” of people). This does not preclude care for the poor and downtrodden, through what Holyoake calls “service.” And apart from the material improvement, the only other “common bond,” at least procedurally, is the use of “natural morality” and “reason,” but only when it avoids theism and the bible (and more recently the Quran). Holyoake’s inclusion of atheism along with theism and the Bible is interesting, for it indicates his concern to avoid all “ideologies,” to promote thus a free society. This can be done only through the promotion of his own agnosticism that he believed to be neutral. I think I’ve already shown why it was not. In fact, in another publication, Holyoake explicitly says that “Secularism is a code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely human, and intend- ed mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable” (Holyoake 1896: 35). Admittedly, many of my theology students at Bristol might also think this of the discipline. Holyoake campaigned vigor- ously for the secularisation of education in all public schools—a key he thought, to producing a new culture of religious and non-religious plurality. There are elements of this tradition running through most European countries and also the United States, and also non-Western countries like India, and each instantiation brings out very variable dynamics, so no easy generalisations are possible.4 We can distinguish three strategies. 4 Indonesia, interestingly, opted for a secular, although theistic, state system while maintaining a clear separation between religion and state in Suharto’s Pancasila – to try and bring harmony to its radically pluralist society. 33 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 17 (2007) 1 Sidestepping Pluralism through “Neutrality” Hence, one conclusion is that there is an agnostic strand of modernity that is not explicitly hostile to religion but simply asks that the public space be neutral to accommodate the religious and non-religious pluralism of modern societies. Without this mediating neutrality, it tends to look back at history and see the wars of religions (Christianity and Islam, and intra-Christian clashes) and therefore promotes this route to peaceful co-existence. This philosophically de- veloped is the early position of John Rawls (Rawls 1973). Socio-politically, it is the position of the French Republic with its clear demarcation between the secular and the religious. I would argue that in this position we find simply the promotion of one ideology as the only acceptable public face of dealing with religious and non-religious pluralism, thereby sidestepping the real issue of pluralism rather than tackling it. For religions it spells the end of intercultural or interreligious dialogue as the public square is contracted to exclude the religious, which is doomed to an impossible a-culturality. Atheist Secularism In 1870, Holyoake publicly debated with Charles Bradlaugh (1883-1891), a re- nowned atheist who succeeded Holyoake as president of the London Secular Society in 1858. Bradlaugh nicely indicates the telos of secular agnosticism in his argument against Holyoake: Although at present it may be perfectly true that all men who are Secularists are not Atheists, I put it that in my opinion the logical consequences of the acceptance of Secu- larism must be that man gets to Atheism if he has brains enough to comprehend .... You cannot have a scheme of morality without Atheism. The Utilitarian scheme is a defiance of the doctrine of Providence and a protest against God. It is interesting that John Paul II agreed with Bradlaugh’s claim regarding Util- itarianism; that it is finally incompatible with Christian ethics, even if the Pope actually turns on its head Bradlaugh’s initial premise, arguing that atheism cannot sustain ethics as it is both reductionist regarding the dimensions of the human person as well as not being able to ontologically ground the “good” (see John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor), Bradlaugh was adamant that Secularism could be established only with the disproof of religion.

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