| Religious Offences and Liberal Politics: From the Religious Settlements to Multi-Cultural Society (2005) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| In this paper I will argue that some of the key features associated with modern liberal political orders - particularly in the areas of religious toleration and cultural pluralism - are the result of specific political and legal arrangements arrived at by European states in order to contain religious civil war at the end of the seventeenth century. As such, liberal political and legal regimes contain features which are irreducible to their main modern forms of philosophical justification, some indeed which conflict with such justifications. One can of course respond to this state of affairs by declaring the actual historical arrangements to be merely factual or "non-ideal" in relation to the normative or ideal domain of political or moral philosophy. To do this, however, is to risk overlooking the normative dimensions of the historical arrangements themselves - in this case the early modern religious settlements. But it is also to risk a kind of philosopher's self-delusion, in which it is imagined that political norms arrived at through rational introspection have an intrinsic moral force, regardless of their capacity to engage the historical political-legal order and the personae engaged in its day-to-day operations. This paper explores the contrary course. It offers a sketch of the political and legal order established by some of the early modern religious settlements, and then argues its salience for understanding the character of multi-religious and multi-cultural governance in certain modern liberal states, with particular reference to such religious offences as sacrilege and blasphemy. The post-Kantian political philosophies developed by John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas can be cited in passing as prime examples of modern philosophies that fail to engage the political and legal orders arising from the early modern settlements, except to declare them in need of philosophical reconstruction or historical supercession. Rawls and Habermas are not topics of discussion in the present paper, and they are mentioned here only to illustrate the gap between modern justifications for liberal-democratic politics and the forms in which liberal political orders first emerged from the settlements that brought an end to religious civil war at the end of the seventeenth century. Despite important differences in method, Rawls and Habermas both assume that the heart of liberalism lies in justice, understood in terms of principles of political and social rights grounded in the rational consent of democratic citizens. On this view, the political and legal arrangements imposed by early liberal orders - toleration measures, church-state separation - will not be properly legitimate until they have been freely chosen by rational individuals who will see them as necessary for their own exercise of reason (Forst 2003). Yet, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out, the central norm of much early modern political thought was not justice but security or social peace (Geuss 2002). Further, many early architects of religious toleration regarded the notion of a single universal reason not as the foundation but as a threat to the cultural pluralism required for toleration, which they sought to ground in a suitably de-confessionalised political and legal regime, regardless of whether this was democratic (Hunter 2004; Thomasius 2004). If modern philosophical liberalism is significantly disengaged from the historical architecture of toleration and pluralism, however, then its communitarian critics are even more so. This is because they take Rawls at his word and assume that he is indeed the philosophical architect of the liberal political order, so that in attacking his philosophical discourse they are attacking something called liberalism. Catholic and Communitarian philosophers have thus taken it on themselves to attack something called liberal individualism, by treating this as the unfortunate product of the fracturing of communal moral identity during the Reformation (MacIntyre 1981). They have also criticised the supposed rational neutrality of the liberal conception of justice, in particular its attempt to ground religious freedom in the exercise of free rational choice, rather than in the right to pursue a substantive good characteristic of a group moral identity (Sandel 1998; Galeotti 1999). And finally they have attacked the presumed neutrality of key aspects of the liberal order itself, specifically the separation of church and state, arguing that this is simply a disguised moral commitment, similar to the commitment to theocracy, and that only full democracy can resolve the question of which commitment should determine the political order (Bader 1999). If, however, the emergent liberal order was not grounded in a conception of justice - Kantian or Aristotelian - then much of the communitarian critique of liberalism is beside the point, regardless of its standing as a critique of Rawls. Further, if security and social peace did indeed play a key role in motivating and justifying liberal arrangements for toleration and the separation of church and state, then it is idle to attack early liberalism for lacking substantive norms, even if these norms are not those of a moral community, are quite unlike Aristotelian conceptions of an inherent moral telos, and could not possibly have been arrived at through democratic deliberation. The reason that early liberalism looks so unlike that which Rawls defends and the communitarians attack is that it was not based in a set of arguments about the nature of human reason and morality. Rather, it was based in a set of political and legal measures designed to address a particular historical situation characteristic of central and western European states during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This situation was that of religious civil war in France and England, and, in the German Empire, a mix of two kinds of religious war, civil and inter-state. In what follows, it is argued that the key elements of early liberalism - varying degrees of toleration and church-state separation - formed part of the religious settlements that brought these wars to an end, a symptom of which was the increasing redundancy of such religious crimes as heresy, witchcraft and blasphemy. These settlements, it is argued, laid down the central cultural, political and legal protocols for the liberal governance of multi-religious societies. And if we are to understand the role of these protocols in the governance of emerging multi-cultural societies, then we must attend to their historical gravity and force, rather than to their philosophical defence or critique. To do this, I will begin by briefly looking at the context in which religious offences operated in pre-liberal confessional states, then sketch the manner in which such offences were displaced by the terms of the religious settlements, before concluding by looking at recent discussion of the crime of blasphemy in the context of multi-cultural societies. | |||||||||
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