Completing the Religious Transition? Catholics and Muslims Navigate Secularism in Democratic Spain by Aitana Guia (European University Institute, Florence) Abstract In Europe, Muslims are often seen as the enemies of secularism and laïcité, the strict separation of church and state pioneered in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. Yet the Spanish experience shows that European Muslims should not prima facie be considered opponents of secularism. Indeed, a majority of devout Spanish Muslims have demanded, rather than opposed, state neutrality on religious matters—this in direct opposition to a concerted effort by the Catholic Church and its supporters to maintain a privileged position vis-à-vis other confessions. In the protracted debates over the role of religion in the public sphere in Spain, devout Muslims have shown a preference for the secular Socialist Party over the militant Catholicism of Spanish conservatives. The leaders of the Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic federations demanded in 2011 that Spain complete its “religious transition” so as to ensure the equal treatment of all religious confessions by the state. Muslims in Spain, while they have echoed Catholic demands for the preservation of religion in the public sphere, have opposed Catholicism’s privileged status in the country. By demanding consistency of treatment and state neutrality on religious matters, Muslims have assisted, rather than hindered, the construction of secularism in Spain. Keywords: transition, Spain, religious rights, minority religions, secularism, education, Islam, Catholicism Religious Transitions The demands made by devout European Mus- state patterns within each of these countries” lims for religious rights should not be viewed in (2004: 7). The experience of Spanish Muslims, isolation from the larger historical and political in particular, demonstrates the extent to which contexts that have shaped, and to some extent Muslims’ deployment of collective resources in limited, Muslim life in Europe. Joel S. Fetzer and J. the struggle for religious rights, and their willing- Christopher Soper, in their comparative study of ness to take advantage of certain political oppor- the relationship between Muslims and the state tunities to implement and extend these rights, in Britain, France, and Germany, have shown that has been limited by the institutional pattern of the development of public policy on the religious church-state relations in Spain, as well as the rights of European Muslims should not draw resource mobilization of the country’s main con- solely on theories of resource mobilization, polit- tender for religious space—the Catholic Church. ical opportunity structure, and political ideology, Almost twenty years after the 1992 approval of since this relationship “is mediated in signifi- the Agreements of Cooperation between minor- cant ways by the different institutional church- ity confessions and the Spanish state, the leaders NEW DIVERSITIES Vol. 17, No. 1, 2015 ISSN ISSN-Print 2199-8108 ▪ ISSN-Internet 2199-8116 New Diversities 17 (1), 2015 Aitana Guia of Spain’s Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic fed- of secularization. According to sociologist José erations demanded that the country complete Casanova (2006: 16), for a long time scholarly its “religious transition” (Europa Press 2011). Yet debate was fruitlessly divided between North all major players in religious matters—minority American scholars arguing that secularization religious federations, the Catholic Church, and was an artificial European construct, and that the Spanish political establishment—maintain it did not follow directly from modernity, and vastly different ideas about what a complete European scholars claiming that secularization transition should entail. According to Jewish, was empirically irrefutable, a linear fait accom- Protestant, and Muslim leaders, the state must pli that originated in the European Renaissance, implement and enforce the democratic frame- was strengthened during the Enlightenment and work on religious pluralism that guaranteed the French Revolution, and became consolidated constitutionally-mandated state neutrality in with the liberal fight to separate church and state. religion and equal treatment of all confessions. In France, secularization’s coup de grâce came For the Catholic Church, however, state neu- with the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church trality and the equality of all confessions could and State, the backbone of the French principle only mean a loss of privilege for Catholics and of laïcité. Other European countries have fol- the further separation of church and state; the lowed their particular trajectories toward secu- status quo, with the occasional reinforcement of larization (Swatos and Olson 2000). the Church’s position during periods of conser- Casanova convincingly argued that to bridge vative rule, was the best possible scenario. The the divide between North American and Euro- Socialist Party, on the other hand, viewed Span- pean interpretations required decoupling the ish Catholicism’s privileged status as a result of concept of secularization on several distinct lev- the compromise implemented during the Transi- els. Secularization, in Casanova’s view, entails tion period (1975-82)—a necessary compromise, 1) independence from religious institutions, certainly, but one that was in need of revision. 2) the decline of religious belief and practice, and For the Socialists, the process of secularization 3) the relegation of religion to the private sphere. in Spain, understood as the “institutional and According to Casanova, even though on a global cultural changes that take people and organiza- scale the second and third components have not tions away from the institutional authority of occurred, the European case has been different the church and weaken their religious referents” to the extent that a “progressive, though highly (Pérez Díaz 1993: 119), had to be encouraged and uneven, secularization of [the continent] is an reinforced. undeniable social fact. An increasing majority While these positions reflect a particular bal- of the European population has ceased partici- ance of power between religious denominations, pating in traditional religious practices, at least the constitutional and legal framework that on a regular basis, even though they may still determined church-state interaction in Spain maintain relatively high levels of private individ- since 1978, and the positions and priorities of ual religious beliefs” (Casanova 2006: 17). New the two main political parties—conservative and scholarship is premised upon the idea that divi- socialist—, the larger debate over a religious sions between the religious and secular spheres transition has not been confined to Spain; it fits, have resulted from social dynamics that are rather, within a broader European, and indeed constantly renegotiated. Thus, “entanglements global, discussion of the meaning and scope of of religion and politics must be viewed as sites secularization and the place of religion in liberal in which the boundaries between religion and democracy. secular spheres are negotiated, challenged, and North American and European scholars have redrawn” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012: been engaged in fierce debate over the meaning 882). The ways in which these boundaries have 96 Catholics and Muslims Navigate Secularism in Democratic Spain New DiverSitieS 17 (1), 2015 been negotiated in democratic Spain form the lar culture. As Victor Pérez Díaz has put it, “all core themes of this article. these institutions implied a curtailment of the It took less than a decade after Francisco church’s power, a reduction of its influence, and Franco’s death, in November 1975, for the influ- competition for its souls.” Indeed, only in the last ence of the Catholic Church over ordinary Span- fifty years or so has the church “made its peace iards to decrease considerably. While 86 percent with [the] world, and only in the Second Vatican of Spaniards considered themselves Catholic in Council has it officially recognized this” (Pérez 1984, the number of practicing Catholics dropped Díaz 1993: 123). from about 56 percent to 31 percent between Political events delayed, and even limited, the 1976 and 1983. During the same period, Span- development of this process in Spain. The Franco iards came to accept: contraception (65 percent), regime (1939-75), seeking to legitimize itself the dissolution of Catholic marriages (47 per- at the close of the Spanish Civil War, adopted cent), and the relaxation of premarital sexual Catholicism, the majority religion in Spain, as the relations (45 percent). Moreover, 43 percent of official religion of the state. This brought about Spaniards believed the church should not have a symbiotic relationship between the church any influence over government (Pérez Díaz 1993: and the regime, known as national-Catholicism. 173-175). Thirty years later, in 2014, the number Under Franco, the Catholic Church was given a of Spaniards considering themselves Catholic had prominent role in shaping social policies, like dropped a further 16 percent, to 69.4 percent of education and marriage, and was incorporated the population, while only 13.8 percent attended into the state structure through the subsidies mass regularly (CIS 2014). While it is undeniable its cathedrals and parishes received and by the that the second component of Casanova’s defini- salaries of clerics and teachers, which were paid tion of secularism—a decline of religious