On The Value of Secularism

John Allen comments in the context of the synod on the Middle East:

Secularism is often the bogeyman of the Catholic imagination in the West. Say “secularism” to the typical European Catholic and they flash on the EU trying to cram liberal social policies down the throats of member nations, or the “Equality Laws” in the U.K. under Blair that made it illegal for Catholic adoption agencies not to serve same-sex couples, or the latest book attacking religion by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

Given those associations, secularism usually looms as the primary ideological and pastoral problem facing the church in the West.

Yet whatever one might think about it, secularism isn’t going away. Thus a towering challenge is to promote what Benedict XVI has repeatedly called a “positive secularism” -- a form of church/state separation that recognizes the positive culture-shaping role religion can play, without trying to drive it underground.

Arguably the most interesting laboratory on earth these days for Christian reflection on “positive secularism” lies in the Middle East.

Squeezed between two religiously defined behemoths -- Israel and the Muslim states which surround it -- the tiny Christian minority has no future if fundamentalism wins the day. As a result, nowhere on earth are Catholic leaders more zealous apostles of the separation of religion and state and the construction of a legal order that protects both pluralism and freedom of conscience.

In part, their advocacy reflects a basic law of religious life -- secularism always looks better to minorities who would be the big losers in a theocracy.

The working document reflects the input of Catholic bishops and other leaders across the region, and it reads like a manifesto for secular politics. It calls upon Christians to work for “an all-inclusive, shared civic order” that protects “human rights, human dignity and religious freedom.”

Twice, the document dwells on the concept of “positive laïcité” -- meaning a positive form of secularism. It cites a September 2008 speech in France by Pope Benedict, who borrowed the term “positive laïcité” from French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“Catholics, together with other Christian citizens and Muslim thinkers and reformers, ought to be able to support initiatives at examining thoroughly the concept of the ‘positive laïcité’ of the State,” the synod document says.

“This could help eliminate the theocratic character of government and allow for greater equality among citizens of different religions,” the document asserts, “thereby fostering the promotion of a sound democracy, positively secular in nature, which fully acknowledges the role of religion … while completely respecting the distinction between the religious and civic orders.”

In forceful language, the document urges Christians not to retreat into a “ghetto,” but rather to work for the construction of a new social order across the Middle East. Perhaps to disarm Muslim criticism that secularism erodes the religious and moral fabric of a society, the document asserts that “the rights of a person are not in opposition to those of God.”

The document offers an additional argument in favor of positive secularism. If Muslims had more experience of separation of church and state, it says, they might be less inclined to blame all Christians for the perceived offenses of Western governments.

In addition to political Islam, the document also warns of another potentially toxic form of fundamentalism spreading across the region: Evangelical Christians who “use Sacred Scripture to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine, making the position of Christian Arabs an even more sensitive issue.”

Admittedly, for the tiny Christian minority of the Middle East to try to engineer a social revolution in the direction of democracy and church/state separation is a tall order -- especially given its understandable historical reluctance to stick its head up.

“I don’t think people in the West appreciate to what extent the thematics of the synod are totally new to so much of the Church in the Middle East,” said Franciscan Fr. David Jaeger, an expert on the region.

“The whole discussion of the civic duty of the Christian ... is totally new. For thirteen centuries, Christians in the Middle East have been made to live in a kind of socio-economic ghetto,” he told Reuters Television in Rome.

Whatever its impact on Middle Eastern societies, the Christian experience in the Middle East can also help shape the culture of the global church.