Isabella Thomas - Religion vs. Civil Society: The Right Question?

Multiculturalism may be variously interpreted, and it is difficult to discuss this term in an international context, knowing that some societies have very little experience of diverse societies, which can be deadening, while others experience a cacophony of different cultures in their midst which do not always meet. In Britain, many have taken it to imply simply the coexistence of different cultures living happily and easily alongside each other without mutual tension. This is popularly known as the ‘rainbow’ theory of multiculturalism and in London today, it is becoming increasingly criticised for its distance from the harsh realities that surround the integration debate today. Not only is multiculturalism building walls between people, it emphasises segregation and stalls integration, but it also has the effect of fostering “monoculturalism”. The expression of group rights rather than individual rights tends, it is alleged, to empower “community leaders” who can impose highly regressive versions of cultural practices to their audiences, which are anything but multiple. Increasingly, in Britain, one sees evidence of new immigrant groups who possess no sense of association to the place they currently live, and a distrust of people from ethnic groups that are different from theirs. 

Differences can be fostered in different ways, but religion can, at least, be partially responsible for divisions in society. Civil society is potentially more inclusive in the sense that any individual of whatever culture or ethnicity can seek to belong to organisations that might be understood as part of ‘civil society’. But the word ‘versus’ may be misplaced. I am not convinced that Religion and Civil Society are necessarily in any kind of conflict or competition: religion can undoubtedly be a part, a segment of civil society. In the years after the fall of the Berlin wall, religion was associated in this way as a part of civil society: it was emphasised at that time that it was important for societies emerging from communism to thicken the sources of loyalty to different entities, so that an individual could be German and Christian and European and a lover of theatre and a chemist all at once: rather as if one were giving advice to a capital investor to spread their assets widely. 

Like the former communist world, the State and the public sector in the West, are, for better or worse, disengaging from all sorts of spheres of public life. This is not just a facet of privatisation; it is a reflection of a changing climate: there is room not just for the private sector but for civil society to step into the breach. That includes religious affiliations and organisations as well as NGOs and sporting groups. On the other hand, the current debates in Europe over multiculturalism and its alleged failures beg the question about how far religious groups should play a role in our societies. Multicultural sceptics have argued that we have done too much to emphasise the things that separate a society, at the expense of the things that may bind them together. Figures such as Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister of the UK, Trevor Philips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, are talking this language now, a factor that is extraordinary, as these sorts of preoccupations were once the preserve of the Right. Because religious groups exercise strong exclusive affiliations, the question has to be asked whether religions can have a divisive influence while civil society can be more unifying? 

Although Britain is a state with an established religion, where the Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and national rituals have religious references, the state church is none the less weak and precisely because it is a state religion, it is required to be inclusive. In contrast, France has no such established church because the dominant religion, Roman Catholicism, has, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, been kept at bay from French public life. This central difference between British and French relations to their dominant religion has key implications for the way both countries relate to their minority religions. It is the relation of religion to the State which seems to herald the nature of the relationship of religion to other elements of civil society. Certainly if you compare the experiences of France and Great Britain in recent years in terms of the treatment of religious minorities, this seems an important factor. 

In spite of its established church, the Church of England has lived alongside other religious affiliations since the Act of Catholic Emancipation in 1827, by which Catholics became free to practice their religion after hundreds of years of discrimination since the Reformation. The toleration of Catholics and other dissenters marked a breakthrough in relations between those of different faiths. In the course of the twentieth century the State has acted to accord other religions their own institutions to keep them on a similar footing to that of established church. This is a very different denouement to the state of affairs in France where religious affiliations are banned in public spaces, again for good sound historical reasons. 

Britain has often done as the French have not done; sometimes we have not done as they have done in conscious counterdistinction. War between the two over many centuries may have made that inevitable. And many displays of British tradition were devised (or ‘invented’) in the early 19th century in an effort to establish that we were not French, not Napoleonic, and not Revolutionary, thereby to stall incipient revolutionary instincts in Britain. Even in the absence of war, large off-shore islands off a continent can have grandiose ideas of their difference to the continent looming on the horizon: Britain, Cuba, Taiwan and many others one might think of, all do so. It is a way of preventing the mainstream continent from absorbing you into their bosom and of preserving your identity. But in the case of Britain and France, it goes further than that. For long, the British view of France with regard to its politics, has affected and reinforced British self-perceptions. For the Whig tradition in England in the 19th century “the chief foil to English political development, the cautionary tale which in modern history replaces Rome as history’s greatest warning, is France”. (John Burrows). 

These differences are so marked that even when France and Britain begin to agree, they do so in such a way that instead of converging, they change positions instead. Britain and France have sometimes changed positions and acquired the manners of their counterparts just as the counterparts were giving up theirs and acquiring the others. 

One sees signs of this when it comes to the question of the integration of immigrants and the role of religious groups in French and British societies. The two have had very different approaches. Just as the British are beginning to see the weaknesses in multiculturalism, the French are taking to it. The French tradition has been to establish as soon as possible that the newcomer is a French citizen in all dimensions; immigrants from former colonies often had that status when they arrived anyway. But even those that came from elsewhere were to experience the religiously neutral apparatus of the French state so that they could accommodate Frenchness to their train of identity more readily. Even if the reality was more complex, the notion was that religion was to be your private matter, not to be trumpeted in State institutions. Religion, in French experience, was divisive. It was illegal to state your religion in schools, on forms, in censuses. The 1905 law that had made all French state institutions secular, (whose original purpose had been to draw a line under the continuous rumbling of the French revolution) had a new purpose in the post-war religious diversity in France. 

It may have been that the French had a more confident sense of the superiority of French culture that it was easier for immigrants to grasp what it was to be French – even if they chose to dislike it. Pride in France had never been affected by the post-imperial self-doubt as it had been in Britain. Whatever doubts the 1968ers may have had about the ethos of the previous generation, it did not diminish the strength of French patriotism. In schools immigrants were required to learn French history, and there was a greater general strength of belief in French cuisine, French style and the French way of life. 

In the UK, the situation was different: you didn’t have to know very much about the British empire to feel Empire guilt. It was an attitude of mind that was associated with a desire to shake off the presumptions and the pomposity of the previous age. It was associated with the liberation movements of the 1960s. With it went the view that imposing British culture on others via the Empire had had disastrous consequences and that we should encourage and learn from other cultures instead. Imposing British culture on newcomers – many of whom had come from the former Empire – would be considered similarly vainglorious. Notions of multiculturalism were born in this high-minded vein. The sense that Western cultures were all becoming far too alike also encouraged the idea that we needed a plurality of values or we would all be sucked into one vast American dominated miasma, and would have nothing to choose between. In addition, the Church of England was never uncoupled from the State, so there was no sense in emphasising the secularism of state institutions: other religions thus deserved to have their own such institutions and their own schools. 

For different reasons, but at rather the same time, both the British and French are beginning to think that perhaps the other country had a point on some of these issues. The British are beginning to realise that the problem with multiculturalism is that we may have emphasised the themes that divided the plurality of people now living in the UK at the expense of the things that drew us together. That we may have been guilty of a different sort of racism in seeking not to share British culture with newcomers. The riots in Birmingham last year between Asians and Black youths, who felt that they did not belong to the same society, seemed to emphasise this. The sense that a vast majority of Muslims in this country do not feel as if they belong to Britain or it to them is another signal of multiculturalism’s failure. And according to the latest polls 81% of British Muslims believe themselves to be Muslim first and citizen of the UK second. The British have begun to draw up lists of Britishness in a faintly embarrassing non-British way. The British are exhorting each other to be prouder and firmer of who they are. The British are, without recognising it, looking to the French. 

The French have had riots of their own which made them believe that their policy of integration has also not worked: that there were in fact thousands of alienated Muslims in the banlieux who had no conception of what it was to be French. The French, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, have begun to think that perhaps ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ had a point after all. Perhaps multiculturalism (or diversité as they call it) may have answers that they could draw on. They have set up institutions which parallel British ones. French politicians are beginning to turn to Muslim ‘leaders’ as a way of establishing what Muslims think instead of getting them to involve themselves in mainstream politics. 

Both have come to this position after the expression of violence in, and against, their societies. Both may be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The French tragedy is that their principles are noble ones, but that the reality in France is more racist than the principles are. The idea that newcomers should be initiated more quickly into French society is a good one; the principle of the secular state and the independence of the state from religion are valuable ones in an age of religious diversity; emphasising individual rights over community rights is in many ways a more liberal way of proceeding. But French immigrant populations are not being drawn into the mainstream French culture out of a remaining snobbery and rigidity that keeps all sorts of outsiders outside – not because the principles themselves are bad, but that they are badly applied. And inflexible labour markets make it more difficult to absorb immigrants into that mainstream. 

The British, in contrast, may be so worried by the evidence that British Muslims have no sense of belonging in Britain that they seem to be all too prepared to accept the facile assessment that British Muslims are alienated by British foreign policy per se. Whatever one might think of the Iraq war, it is simply incorrect to suggest that British foreign policy has been anti-Muslim, even in Iraq. If anything, quite the reverse: the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were fought to ensure that Muslim societies could coexist in the Balkans; Saddam was a murderer of thousands of Muslims etc.; the war to displace the Taleban replaced them with more responsible Muslim leaders. The tragedy in the British case is that British Muslims are alienated by Britain’s perceived anti-Muslim bias. It is a tragedy of miscommunication. The British need to be firmer in pointing this out, and in making Britishness more easily accessible and recognisable to newcomers, as the French have done, while listening to some of the very valuable complaints that immigrants may make about the problems in our societies. 

The riots and the bombs and the ensuing panic have both countries scurrying in the opposite direction. They should recognise what is good in their own experiences of integration, and borrow from the practice of the other where it can correct its weaknesses. They should not be changing places; they should be making an elaborate flourish to integrate each other’s historical lessons, and to build a new sense of association of place and history amongst its newest inhabitants.