Religion, Culture, Diversity and Tolerance - Shaping the New Europe

Address at the European Policy Centre, Brussels

 in which mediation and mutual listening will be normal and in which law exists as a means of such mediation. Where the state is not an essentially religious unit and where the religious community does not seek to become a universal executive, diversity is inevitable. However, this does not imply the necessity of relativism, or of what is sometimes called 'consumer' pluralism (the availability of a plurality of lifestyle choices). If religious communities are acknowledged as participants in public argument, they are bound to some level of creative engagement with each other and with the secular voice of the administration, so as to find a solution that has some claim to be just to a range of communal interests. Ramadan, it seems, agrees that this is precisely the path that must be taken by Islam in the context of modernity. And he pleads for better and more constructive alliances between diverse religious communities on common concerns – not to impose a theocracy by stealth but to ensure the fullest possible statement of shared moral goals and anxieties in the public debate.

We misunderstand our situation, then, if we imagine that the world's current problem is a neat binary opposition between a totalising religious culture (Islam) and a single 'enlightened' or 'democratic' world of rational neutrality. The reality is a lot more interesting – and it is interesting precisely because of the theological roots of modernity. A Muslim thinker like Ramadan helps us to see that, while it was Christianity, for a variety of internal reasons, that crystallised in its most extreme form the idea of the state's relativity and secular character, Islam itself acknowledges the same tension between levels of human identity and aspects of human virtue and implies the same liberty of criticism against specific political systems. But both equally allow that loyalty to these systems is not inconsistent with the loyalty of faith; commitment to the lawfulness of the processes of argument in a society and acceptance of the outcome of ordered negotiation is presupposed by the political ethics of both traditions. Without that, we should simply revert to the ghetto ethics from which Ramadan is seeking to liberate his co-religionists.

So if Europe is historically a Christian-inspired culture of argument and what a theologian would call 'eschatological reserve' about excessive political claims (reservation in the light of the inevitable imperfection of all that is achieved within history), there is nonetheless a European future for Islam within this discourse. The liberal heritage as we have been defining it, the welcoming of creativity and diversity in the political process and the social map, is not a polar opposite to the classical Muslim understanding of social identity. The real opposition is between a classical Muslim and Christian acceptance of interpretation and reflection in charting the believer's duties in the public sphere, and the crude and violent absolutising of a single narrow cultural expression of faith, devoid of any positive sense of history. The Islamist extremist is not a traditionalist in the proper sense, but someone who has simply fixed on a moment in the living tradition and frozen it.

But we cannot leave the subject without revisiting the dangers of a secularism that is equally forgetful of history. The political style that seeks to keep religious communities in the private sphere, insisting that religion is always and primarily an individual option related only to the supposed wellbeing of that individual and like-minded private persons, is at risk, as I have said earlier, of becoming itself a pseudo-religion, a system that is beyond challenge. A mature European politics will take another route, seeking for effective partnership with the component communities of the state, including religious bodies. It will try to avoid cresting ghettoes. It will value and acknowledge all those sources of healthy corporate identity and political formation (in the widest sense) that are around. The agnostic German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, said in a discussion with the then Cardinal Ratzinger in January 2004 that the liberal state needed resources with which to confront the depersonalising effects of globalization, and should 'treat with care all cultural sources on which the normative consciousness and solidarity of citizens draws' (quoted in Edward Skidelsky, 'Habermas vs the Pope, Prospect, November 2005, p.15).

And perhaps this is the central contribution to be made to a future European identity by the Christian tradition. It challenges the global socio-political juggernaut - consumer pluralism combined with insensitive Western promotion of a rootless individualism, disguised as liberal democracy. It affirms the significance of local and intentional communities, and their role in public life. It is able to welcome the stranger, including the Muslim stranger in its midst, as a partner in the work of proper liberalism, the continuing argument about common good and just governance. When it is allowed its proper visibility, it makes room for other communities and faiths to be visible. By holding the space for public moral argument to be possible and legitimate, it reduces the risk of open social conflict, because it is not content to relegate the moral and the spiritual to a private sphere where they may be distorted into fanaticism and exclusion. For Europe to celebrate its Christian heritage in this sense is precisely for it to affirm a legacy and a possibility of truly constructive pluralism. And for the Church to offer this to Europe (and from Europe to the wider world) is not for it to replace its theology with a vague set of nostrums about democracy and tolerance but for it to affirm its faithfulness to the tradition of Christian freedom in the face of the world's sovereignties.

Note: Dr Williams delivered a shortened version of this lecture in Brussels on Monday 07 November 2005.