Religious Diversity: In Europe, Cultural Consensus Often Excludes

RANDOLPH BELL TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Published: December 4, 2009

President Obama, in his speech about Afghanistan, appealed for troops and support from our European allies. For there to be a whole-hearted trans-Atlantic embrace of the Afghan war, important differences between American and European culture will have to be overcome.

A short distance north of Frog Level, Va., an unincorporated community along U.S. Highway 301, there is a Korean church whose signage is in Korean script. On Buford Road just east of Old Bon Air, there is an Islamic Center, as there is on Leesburg Pike in Fairfax County and, for that matter, in the heart of Washington on Massachusetts Avenue. Korean and Islamic Americans are right in asserting that there is nothing "foreign" about these buildings, which are intrinsically part of the diverse fabric of American life. The broad public increasingly agrees with them. In an earlier era, when cultural consensus in this country was more narrowly defined, it would not have done so.

In Switzerland in late November, a majority of voters described their own cultural consensus in opposition to Islamic minarets. The Swiss People's Party, a populist agglomeration that has held sway in the country's parliament since 2007, was able to secure approval of the minaret ban by describing the towers from which muzzeins call the faithful to prayer as "instruments of political Islam."

I spent a year of my Foreign Service career in Switzerland and was regularly deprived of my sleep by ubiquitous Christian church bells, but I don't recall anyone characterizing steeples as "instruments of political Christianity." I know that many Swiss, like Europeans in general, consider Americans to be at the same time chaotically diverse and excessively religious. Europeans have a different view than do we of religious diversity and of the role of religion in the 21st century.

It is possible that the European Court of Human Rights may find legal reasons for countermanding the Swiss referendum. If so, Europeans will in some measure have narrowed the trans-Atlantic difference which arises from the fact that relations between church (or synagogue, or mosque, or even coven) and state are in this country the subject of constitutional law more than they are of culture. In continental Europe, religions are administered by ministries of culture, since they are seen as cultural phenomena.

Because the U.S. First Amendment establishes separation of church and state and free exercise of religion, there has prevailed in this country for more than two centuries a free market in religion -- one which is often as assertive and competitive as is our free market in matters economic. That free market is as much anathema to many European elites as is the free market in fast food. To be sure, I recently visited a McDonald's in the heart of Bordeaux wine country and found it mobbed -- and Pentacostalism is experiencing a rapid growth in many European countries -- but you are unlikely to get elected to the European Parliament by advocating fast food and hot religion.

The fact that freedom of belief and conscience is a matter of constitutional law has had the effect of widening and strengthening those freedoms here. The fact that European freedoms are more often culturally anchored lends a surprising degree of arbitrariness to them. Most Germans expect themselves to be either Evangelical Lutheran or Roman Catholic, and cultural bureaucracies have proceeded cautiously in permitting evangelical denominations -- let alone Scientologists -- to organize. Statist and Roman-law traditions mitigate against that kind of free-market religious diversity. In cultures wherein the first names one may give one's children must be drawn from an officially approved list, it is simply unseemly that there should be "cults" out and about in the land. Freedom of thought and belief are therefore less often advanced by the courts in Europe than they are in the United States.

This isn't to disparage Europe or to praise chauvinistically how matters have evolved in the United States. Europe is the homeland of that Enlightenment from which so many of our own freedoms derive, and European culture is in countless ways still true to that heritage. French citizens genuinely believe that the secularism which impels them to ban the veils in schools safeguards the rights of all. But across Europe, speech about cultural, historical, and religious matters is limited in various ways so that conflicts may be diminished (governments hope) and consensus maintained.

This is true also in common-law Britain, where the absence of First-Amendment-style guarantees permits libel laws seriously to diminish what an author may say without fear of costly litigation and where the Home Department maintains a list of foreigners whose speech and views make them unwelcome in the U.K.

But we do have a very different legal -- and hence cultural -- framework in which to deal with matters like religious and ethnic diversity than do Europeans. The citizens of Henrico County have struggled with questions about building a mosque. In the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy, Americans ponder whether political correctness can be carried too far. There are, however, legal and constitutional norms to which decisions about these matters must ultimately conform, and they are never left to cultural and political consensus alone.

When we speak of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, or even freedom from religion, what we really mean is freedom for plurality and for religious pluralism. When we worry about the relationship between faith and terror, we are worrying about the presumption that only one faith may be tolerated.

For my own part, I see no more important link between Islam and al-Qaida than I do between Christianity and the Ku Klux Klan, but it is undeniably the case that a great many Islamic societies lack religious pluralism. Afghanistan certainly does. Unless Americans and Europeans can agree that they are fighting for a fundamental freedom in Afghanistan, the absence of which will endanger their own liberty and security, then they will lack common purpose.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and, subsequently, of the Soviet Union, it is precisely a spirit of common purpose which has leached out of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Middle-class Europeans have become increasingly pacifist and suspicious of American military actions. For a common spirit to return, there must be common principles and ideals. How wonderful it would be if the pursuit of full freedom for the individual human conscience could bind us together.

Richmond, where in 1786 Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was passed into law, providing the basis for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, has valuable experience in these matters. The First Freedom Center to be built on the site where that statute was passed, both as a building and as an institution, reaches out across the nation and the globe to speak from that experience.

Ambassador Randolph Bell was formerly special envoy in the Bureau of European Affairs at the State Department and is a trustee of the First Freedom Center.