But it would minimise them, and provide the fairest foundation on which to build a peaceful, plural society. He has a particular interest in the major changes taking place in the British religion and belief landscape, and the role of open and constructive interactions between people with humanist and religious worldviews.
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To accept cookies, click continue. They were fully aware of the obstacles which would come if India becomes religious state because religion is beautiful only if it is kept separate from state and government.
If religion mixes with state and government it will become a poison which would destroy the whole country. Many people especially from the right wing groups argue that our country was not secular and the word secularism was added in preamble by a constitutional amendment in I totally agree with them but they are failing to understand that our constitution was fundamentally secular even before addition of that word that is why it guarantees freedom of religion and right to equality.
We must not forget that Pakistan which was divided on religious lines broke in two parts within 40 years and new nation Bangladesh emerged with the principle of secularism. So it is very important to keep religion separate from state. Studying 3rd B. Views are personal. Akshay G Paraskar.
Gaargi Tomar. Abinaya Suresh. In the United Kingdom and other countries, there is no general interdict, but the individual schools can decide. What are the reasons for this variation?
Plainly in all these cases, legislators and administrators were trying to balance two goals. One was the maintenance of neutrality in public institutions seen rightly as an essential entailment of goal 2: equality between all basic beliefs.
The other was goal 1, ensuring the maximum possible religious liberty, or in its most general form, liberty of conscience. Goal 1 seems to push us towards permitting the hijab anywhere. But various arguments were made to override this in the French and German cases. For the Germans, what was disturbing was that someone in authority in a public institution should be religiously marked, as it were.
In the French case, an attempt was made to cast doubt on the proposition that wearing the hijab was a free act. There were dark suggestions that the girls were being forced by their families, or by their male peers, to adopt this dress code. That was one argument which was frequently used, however dubious it might appear in the light of the sociological research carried out among the pupils themselves, which the Stasi Commission largely ignored.
This was the meaning behind the introduction of the concept of signe ostentatoire. A smaller discrete sign would be no problem argued the Stasi Commission, but these attention- grabbing features of dress were meant to make a highly controversial statement.
So on one level, we can see that these different national answers to the same question reflect different takes on how to balance the two main goals of a secular regime. Perhaps the most pernicious feature of this fetishization is that it tends to hide from view the real dilemmas which we encounter in this realm, and which leap into view once we recognize the plurality of principles at stake.
We should be aware that this fetishization reflects a deep feature of life in modern democracies. We can see why as soon as we ponder what is involved in self-government, what is implied in the basic mode of legitimation of states that are founded on popular sovereignty.
For the people to be sovereign, it needs to form an entity and have a personality. The revolutions which ushered in regimes of popular sovereignty transferred the ruling power from a king to a nation, or a people. In the process, they invented a new kind of collective agency.
These terms existed before, but the thing they now indicate, this new kind of agency, was something unprecedented, at least in the immediate context of early modern Europe. But for people to act together, in other words, to deliberate in order to form a common will on which they will act, requires a high degree of common commitment, a sense of common identification.
A society of this kind presupposes trust, the basic trust that members and constituent groups have to have, the confidence that they are really part of the process, that they will be listened to and their views taken into account by the others. Without this mutual commitment, this trust will be fatally eroded. And so we have in the modern age a new kind of collective agency. Of course, in pre-modern societies, too, people often identified with the regime, with sacred kings, or hierarchical orders.
They were often willing subjects. But in the democratic age we identify as free agents. That is why the notion of popular will plays a crucial role in the legitimating idea. This means that the modern democratic state has generally accepted common purposes, or reference points, the features whereby it can lay claim to being the bulwark of freedom and locus of expression of its citizens.
Whether or not these claims are actually founded, the state must be so imagined by its citizens if it is to be legitimate. The question seems to make no sense applied to, say, the Austrian or Turkish Empires — unless one answered the whom for?
This is distinct from the identities of its members, that is the reference points, many and varied, which for each of these defines what is important in their lives. There had better be some overlap, of course, if these members are to feel strongly identified with the state; but the identities of individuals and constituent groups will generally be richer and more complex, as well as often being quite different from each other.
In other words, a modern democratic state demands a people with a strong collective identity. Democracy obliges us to show much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryear. In the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish peasant in Galicia could be altogether oblivious of the Hungarian country squire, the bourgeois of Prague or the Viennese worker, without this in the slightest threatening the stability of the state.
On the contrary, this condition of things only becomes untenable when ideas about popular government start to circulate. This is the moment when subgroups which will not, or cannot, be bound together, start to demand their own states. This is the era of nationalism, of the breakup of empires. I have been discussing the political necessity of a strong common identity for modern democratic states in terms of the requirement of forming a people, a deliberative unit.
But this is also evident in a number of other ways. Thinkers in the civic humanist tradition, from Aristotle through to Arendt, have noted that free societies require a higher level of commitment and participation than despotic or authoritarian ones. Citizens have to do for themselves, as it were, what otherwise the rulers do for them.
But this will only happen if these citizens feel a strong bond of identification with their political community, and hence with those who share with them in this. From another angle again, because these societies require strong commitment to do the common work, and because a situation in which some carry the burdens of participation and others just enjoy the benefits would be intolerable, free societies require a high level of mutual trust. In other words, they are extremely vulnerable to mistrust on the part of some citizens in relation to others, that the latter are not really assuming their commitments — e.
This kind of mistrust creates extreme tension, and threatens to unravel the whole skein of the mores of commitment which democratic societies need in order to operate. A continuing and constantly renewed mutual commitment is an essential basis for taking the measures needed to renew this trust.
The relationship between nation and state is often considered from a unilateral point of view, as if it were always the nation which sought to provide itself with a state. But there is also the opposite process. In order to remain viable, states sometimes seek to create a feeling of common belonging. This is an important theme in the history of Canada, for example. To form a state, in the democratic era, a society is forced to undertake the difficult and never-to-be-completed task of defining its collective identity.
Free societies require a higher level of commitment and participation than despotic or authoritarian ones. Thus what I have been calling political identity is extremely important in modern democratic states. And this identity is usually defined partly in terms of certain basic principles democracy, human rights, equality , and partly in terms of their historical, or linguistic, or religious traditions.
It is understandable that features of this identity can take on a quasi-sacred status, for to alter or undermine them can seem to threaten the very basis of unity without which a democratic state cannot function. It is in this context that certain historical institutional arrangements can appear as untouchable.
They may appear as an essential part of the basic principles of the regime, but they will also come to be seen as a key component of its historic identity. The irony is that in the face of a modern politics of multicultural identity, they invoke this principle as a crucial feature of French identity.
This is unfortunate, but very understandable. It is one illustration of a general truth: that contemporary democracies as they progressively diversify will have to undergo redefinitions of their historical identities, which may be far-reaching and painful.
Thus the crucial move that we see in the modern West from the 17th century, the move that takes us out of the cosmic religious conceptions of order, establishes a new bottom-up view of society, as existing for the protection and mutual benefit of its equal members. It enshrines basically three principles on one possible enumeration : 1. These basic norms have been worked out in a host of different philosophical anthropologies, and according to very different concepts of human sociability.
They very soon transcended the atomism that narrowed the vision of the early formulators, like Locke and Hobbes. But the basic norms remain and are more or less inseparable from modern liberal democracies. The rejection of cosmic-religious embedding thus was accomplished by a new conception of the political, a new basic norm, which as Lefort suggests involved its own representation of political authority, but one in which the central spot remains paradoxically empty.
If the notion of sovereignty is retained, no one person or group can be identified with it. Democratic societies are organized not necessarily around a civil religion, as Rousseau claimed, but certainly around a strong philosophy of civility, enshrining the three norms, which in contemporary societies are often expressed as 1.
But in certain cases, there can be a civil religion: a religious view incorporating and justifying the philosophy of civility. This was arguably so for the young American republic. Or it can alternatively be part of a non- or even anti-religious ideology: as with the First French Republic one can even argue that all-englobing views of this kind seem more natural to many of our contemporaries.
After all, the principles of our civil philosophy seem to call for deeper grounding. Or so it may appear, and the centuries-long tradition of political life seems to testify to this idea. Democratic societies are organized around a strong philosophy of civility, enshrining the three norms, which are often expressed as human rights, equality and non-discrimination, and democracy.
For indeed the overlapping consensus between different founding views on a common philosophy of civility is something quite new in history, and relatively untried. It is consequently hazardous.
We are condemned to live an overlapping consensus. We have seen how this strongly motivated move to fetishize our historical arrangements can prevent our seeing our secular regime in a more fruitful light, which foregrounds the basic goals we are seeking, and which allows us to recognize and reason about the dilemmas which we face. But this connects to the other main cause of confusion I cited above, our fixation on religion as the problem.
In fact, we have moved in many Western countries from an original phase in which secularism was a hard-won achievement warding off some form of religious domination, to a phase of such widespread diversity of basic beliefs, religious and areligious, that only a clear focus on the need to balance freedom of conscience and equality of respect can allow us to take the measure of the situation.
Otherwise we risk needlessly limiting the religious freedom of immigrant minorities, on the strength of our historic institutional arrangements, while sending a message to these same minorities that they by no means enjoy equal status with the long-established mainstream. This is maybe the wrong message to inculcate in children in a rapidly diversifying society. This is the place to establish the main thesis of this paper — what I have called the convergence of secularism and multiculturalism.
It ought to be evident that while the main challenge which called for secularism in the past in many Western countries was that of a dominant religion, today the dominant feature of religion in advanced liberal societies is its diversity and plurality. The formerly dominant religion, generally some denomination of Christianity, has in general a weak hold on its ex- members or in the case of the United States, the denominations are so many and varied that none can pose a real threat to the freedom of others.
And those religious identities which at least appear stronger belong to small minorities. So the call for a religion-focused secularism is close to non-existent. But the need to deal fairly and democratically with a historically unprecedented diversity of religions, cultures and world outlooks, including believing and atheist forms, and all possible variants in-between, is obvious and pressing. In this context, the tendency which we see in a number of Western countries to focus on and even target new and unfamiliar religions, especially Islam, in the name of secularism appears both ill-founded and dangerous.
It seems to me to be a profound mistake to address the problems of integration posed by new and culturally and religiously unfamiliar immigration through the prism of traditional type-A secularism, rather than through that of multiculturalism.
But what do I mean by multiculturalism? The word easily causes confusion. First, it can be used to describe a situation of fact, one in which there exists in a given society a great diversity of cultures. But the term also indicates an area of policy, covering attempts to deal with this diversity, and here the confusion and cross-purposes seem to be at their most severe and damaging.
I want to use the term in its second sense, as a domain of policies. But as such it suffers from almost terminal discredit in a number of European societies.
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