Tuesday, November 2, 2010
"Serving Two Masters"
Stanley Fish's recent column, "Serving Two Masters: Shariah Law and the Secular State", will be of interest to MOJ readers, I think. He considers, among other things, this question:
“How far can liberal democracy go, both in accommodating minority groups in public policy, and, more profoundly, in granting official legal recognition to their beliefs, customs, practices and worldviews, especially when minority religious conduct and values are not congenial to the majority,” that is, to liberal democracy itself?
The question is, of course, an important one. To be sure, Christians will want to ask themselves a related, but different, question, namely, "how far can Christians go, in submitting to, or embracing, the demands made by contemporary understandings of liberal democracy?"
Fish also notes John Milbank's suggestion (which is consonant, I think, with the proposition that animates Dignitatis humanae) that
"only a distinctly Christian polity — not a secular postmodern one — can actually accord Islam the respect it seeks as a religion.” The italicized phrase is key: the respect liberalism can accord Islam (or any other strong religion) is the respect one extends to curiosities, eccentrics, the backward, the unenlightened and the unfortunately deluded. Liberal respect stops short — and this is not a failing of liberalism, but its very essence — of taking religious claims seriously, of considering them as possible alternative ways of ordering not only private but public life.
Christianity, says Milbank, will be more capable of deeply respecting Islam because the two faiths share a commitment to the sacred and to a teleological view of history notably lacking in liberalism (again, this is not a criticism but a definition of liberalism): A “Christian polity can go further in acknowledging the integral worth of a religious group as a group than a secular polity can.” Christianity can acknowledge the worth of Islam not merely in an act of tolerance but in an act of solidarity in the same way that Christian sects can acknowledge each other. . . .
Fish's column, no surprise, prompted lots of comments; here is Fish's response to those comments.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/11/serving-two-masters.html
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The question that occurs to me is how credible it is that Christianity would be able to deeply respect Islam -- in practice, not just in theory -- when there are many different Christian sects that don't get along with each other (as well as many branches of Islam that don't get along with each other) and when there is so much hostility aimed at Islam right now in our society? It seem to me that the natural inclination among religions is to fight against one another. How many religious wars have there been between one Christian group and another, and how many non-religious wars were between Christian nations?
I do think it is interesting, though, to look at issues such as freedom of conscience in the United States from a Muslim point of view instead of a Christian point of view. It removes the Christian "bias" and gets closer to discussing freedom of conscience in the abstract. Should a Muslim cab driver be allowed to refuse passengers with dogs or passengers carrying alcohol, for example? Many feel their religion forbids it. In Minnesota, after some conflict and attempts at accommodation, it finally became law that a Muslim cab driver who refused a passenger for having a dog or carrying alcohol would lose his license. (I had this though: Would we expect a cab driver who was *allergic* to dogs to accept passengers with dogs? I wouldn't. Is an allergy more important than a religious belief?)
I wonder how many Catholics or other Christians would actually be willing to give up liberal democracy.