Secular privilege, religious disadvantage

Judith Butler's paper ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’ (Butler 2008) makes an excellent point about the ways in which individual sexual freedoms can be used to negate the rights of vulnerable groups. She makes her case in relation to the Dutch citizenship test and the forms of torture devised for Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. As she points out, it is the rankest hypocrisy when freedoms are invoked for the purpose of oppression by those who do not respect the rights of women and sexual minorities in the first place. The vital question which Butler's paper raises but does not answer is whether the connection between championship of individual sexual freedoms and oppression of minority groups is necessary or contingent. By simply pointing out the dark uses to which enlightened liberal support for individual rights may be put, Butler leaves it open for readers to conclude that she is drawing attention to the abuse of an otherwise innocent set of commitments. Here I want to develop her hints and whispers that there may be a more integral and disturbing connection between championship of a maximal programme of individual rights and the disturbing uses to which it is being put. Although this issue opens out onto a much broader debate about the relation between individual and associational rights, I will confine my remarks to a consideration of gender and sexual rights ‘versus’ the rights of religious groups, particularly religious minorities. Does championship of the one necessarily involve denigration of the other? And if so, are feminists and other defenders of individual freedoms always going to be in danger of sanctioning violence against vulnerable minorities? Feminist voices have been amongst the most important in the growing chorus of criticism directed at multiculturalism (e.g. Okin 1999). Their worry is that if cultures are viewed as goods deserving of protection, then the rights of individuals may be compromised. The examples which are given very often concern religious cultures, and the way in which they may sanction such practices as forced marriage, marital rape, polygamy and cliterodectomy. Such violations are used to support the case that states must uphold individual rights and support equality and non-discrimination as an overriding duty. Support for religious rights and associational rights in general is never more important than support for the rights of individuals, and the latter must always trump the former. Feminism's suspicion of religion has a long history. From the start of the western feminist movement, criticism of religion was central to its project of emancipation. In the 1890s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her team of helpers took their scissors to the Bible, and excised those parts of it which they found incompatible with feminism. By the 1970s radical feminists like Mary Daly were attacking all forms of religion as inimical to the feminist project, and invoking such wide-ranging examples as sati, rape and witch-burning (Daly 1979). Though such sweeping critique has been heavily criticized for its ethnocentrism, lack of empirical engagement, and sweeping generalizations about world religions (e.g. Lorde 1984), hostility to religion remains entrenched. If anything it has been reinforced by the growth of lesbian and gay studies and their influence on gender studies. The hostility is bound up with the way in which defence of women's rights and, even more so, sexual rights, tends to go hand in hand with support for a maximal programme of state-backed individual rights to individual equality, freedom and self-expression. Many recent feminist approaches have been tempered by greater respect for ‘difference’, including an ethnic difference which tends to be rather forcibly and artificially jointed from religion. But, as Butler reminds us, there is a continuing tendency to link support for women's rights and sexual freedoms to a narrative of western progress and a submerged assumption that more religious cultures must be encouraged to catch up with the enlightened secularism of the west. Such ideas are echoed on a daily basis in the press, political debate, and in everyday talk. I write during a week when Cherie Blair, wife of the ex-Prime Minister, has given a Chatham House lecture in which she pleads that religion and culture should not be used as excuses for denying people, particularly women, their right to equality. Referencing the speech, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin argues that she doesn't feel the ‘slightest obligation’ to respect religions which abuse human rights ‘or to allow them to bring their practices into this country’ (4-11-07: 16). She presents multiculturalism as incompatible with respect for individual rights, and adds as a clinching argument: ‘There is not a great deal of freedom in Islam which, after all, means submission’. An alternative to attacking religion directly is to argue that it must be excluded from the public sphere by a ‘neutral’ state. The effect is equally destructive, because the privatization of religion means the end of religion (one could as well speak of making politics a purely private matter). Religion is a name we give to a complex set of social practices which structure individual agency, and are in turn recursively structured by it. At the heart of these practices there is a collective articulation and celebration of the sacred, which is experienced as transcending the everyday world. Religions seek to embody the sacred-transcendent not only by way of sacred objects, buildings and spaces, but in their collective lives. Thus a church, for example, is not just a place where individuals go to have private experiences of transcendence, but a group which tries to instantiate an ideal of selfless love by becoming ‘the body of Christ’ in every sphere of social existence. In so far as members of the group support one another (and others), often in extremely practical and material ways, the sacred is realized in the mundane. Religious belonging may therefore make life not only intellectually meaningful and morally satisfying for its members, but emotionally resonant and practically live-able. Right across the world, religion continues to provide a range of services and support to those who would not otherwise have access to them – including education, financial welfare, childcare support, and support in dealing with domestic abuse. As a number of empirical studies show, this is true not only in the southern hemisphere, where both charismatic Christianity and Islam continue to grow rapidly, but even in the USA – where evangelical churches in particular offer a range of services for women run by women (e.g. Brasher 1998). Liberal elites do not require these services not because they have reached a plateau of enlightened maturity, or because they stand at the vanguard of civilizational progress, but because they have access to a range of resources which are denied the majority of the world's population. Even within affluent western countries, they are often unavailable to immigrant communities, for whom religion is correspondingly important. If religion is particularly significant for the disprivileged, it is often the disprivileged within the disprivileged groups, or the ‘minorities within minorities’ (Bader 2007: 30) for whom it is most essential. This is the opposite observation to the feminist and enlightened liberal observation that it is minorities within minorities who are most in need of the protection of state-backed human rights legislation. In my view both observations are true, and it is only by holding them both together that we can be responsive to the complexity of the situation of vulnerable individuals in societies in which material and cultural resources are not equally distributed (i.e. all real world societies). Let me give a concrete example, relayed in conversation by the Danish sociologist Ole Riis. A woman is imported into a modern Western society as a glorified house-slave of an ethnic Nordic husband. She is isolated and refused an education by the husband. Her choice is to remain with him or get divorced and evicted. She has some help from a Danish woman friend in applying for training, and enters a course as a health worker. Her husband then threatens her aggressively. Her Danish friend convinces her that she does not have to accept such treatment, and brings her to an organization of free lawyers. After a hard beating, she flees to a women's asylum with their two children and eventually gets her own flat. Her friend helps with finding cheap furniture and kitchenware and making contacts with social workers. As a result, the future begins to look a little brighter, but it remains isolated and insecure. Without the help of her (white, middle-class, Christian-background) friend, she would not even have been able to take these steps. This example draws attention to a number of salient points. First, religion does not have a monopoly on sexism, chauvinism or domestic abuse. I am not aware of any evidence that levels of abuse have any significant correlation with religious or secular adherence. Second, although religion can and does legitimate and normalize infringements of rights, it also forms the cords of a network of mutual support for vulnerable people. Without it, and without some mentors, many women would just confront dominant husbands and an impersonal, incomprehensible bureaucracy. To break out of the network involves the risk of landing up in the dregs of society, whose existence privileged secularists often ignore. Third, although religions in general have a conservative bias, there is great variation within the religious field, and it is important to distinguish at the very least between those religious groups which support human freedoms and equality, those which give them only limited support, and those which actively oppose them. When debating the application of individual rights-based legislation it is also important to distinguish between the very different cases of religious groups per se, independent faith based organizations (like private schools), and state-funded faith based organizations and services (like adoption agencies and care homes). Finally, it is worth noting that even the most conservative religions are capable of changing and adapting to liberal democracy, though the process takes time. Christianity is a good example: as late as 1864 the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX condemned ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilization’; by 1964 Vatican II was presenting the church as the champion of human rights. It is surely naïve to imagine that the enactment and enforcement of equality and non-discrimination legislation will on its own achieve genuine social equality. Rather, by infringing the associational rights – and hence the very existence – of the moderately conservative forms of religion practised by many minority ethnic-religious groups, it is likely to inhibit rather than advance the cause of many of the most disadvantaged in society, including minorities within minorities. In the real world, minorities like Muslim women are far more likely to achieve equality by working within their own religious culture than by turning their backs on it (which is partly what increased prevalence of veiling is intended to signal). In doing so, they are much more likely to bring about a gradual internal transformation of these communities than is any heavy-handed secularist intervention. As Haleh Afshar (2007: 419) observes, ‘Islam provides a framework that enables its adherents to open pathways towards feminism’. What the stand-off between various forms of secular liberalism and religion is likely to achieve, then, is something very different from what well-meaning secularists desire. Moreover, as Butler reminds us, the antinomy plays into the hands of those who intend actual harm to minority groups (whether minorities on the national or international stage). This is especially the case when western liberalism presents itself as a ‘neutral’ stance, which is somehow detached from ‘culture’, and which has no sacred commitments of its own. Then ‘religion’ becomes a marker of the subjugated other, whilst the privileged become the possessors of pure truth, transparent rationality, and the engines of progress. My suggestion is that we can resist this stand-off by rejecting the idea that there is a simple choice to be made between individual and associational rights. As soon as one looks at real world situations, the opposition begins to blur. In practice, for example, human rights law often involves rather sophisticated line-drawing exercises between group and individual rights, as the Shabina Begum case in Britain illustrated rather well (McGoldrick 2005, 2006). Moreover, states are given – and claim – considerable room for manoeuvre in interpreting international human rights treaties and adapting them to local cultural situations. The example of India and, to some extent, Canada, suggests there is no reason why constitutional (not secular) liberal democratic states in the west could not provide maximum toleration and accommodation for religious practices without surrendering support for minimal morality and basic human rights. Such rights could include not only negative liberties but essential positive rights, including exit rights and meaningful exit options. They may include minimal, but not necessarily equal, respect and concern (Bader 2007). As Butler's paper hints, the alternative option of using state power to promote maximal programmes of individual human rights premised around the universal good of leading an autonomous and self-chosen life is not only likely to be counter-productive, but to continue to generate the noxious spectacle of freedom being turned into a tool and a justification of coercion. To return to my opening questions, I do not believe that feminists and other defenders of individual freedoms are necessarily in danger of sanctioning violence against vulnerable minorities. Nor, conversely, do I believe that religions in liberal democratic societies must set their own standards and claim total exemption from all human rights and equalities legislation. Rather, I think what is needed is greater mutual understanding, a more generous and tentative sense of who we are, greater realism about imbalances of power in modern western societies, and some serious self-criticism and compromise on both sides. To date, it has to be said, religions and religious minorities in the west have shown themselves to be more willing to make this compromise than have enlightened secularists.

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