WORLD VIEW:The role of religion in society is in a fascinating state of flux throughout Europe, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
ARTICLE 17 of the Lisbon Treaty, which respects the status under national law of churches, religious associations and non-confessional groups, attracted little comment during the recent referendum here. But it assumes new significance because of rapid changes in church-state relations throughout the EU. This is now an urgent issue in Ireland following the child abuse scandals and the growing debate on religious control of education.
The article commits the EU to “maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with these churches and organisations”. Already that has happened here when the Government met a whole range of them, although it has yet to issue any conclusions. Many churches have boosted their representation in Brussels and are co-ordinating activity throughout the EU about how to respond to demands for change.
The picture is complicated by the sheer range of experience, as states like France with a strict separation of church and state are now more open to religion while those with (mainly Anglican or Lutheran) established or state religions like Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland or Britain are introducing more separation. Similar changes are happening in the third category, mainly Catholic states like Spain, Portugal or Austria, which have recently renegotiated existing concordats with that church.
Existing and prospective EU enlargement brings yet more diversity, including more Orthodox churches like Serbia’s along with Greece and the possibility that Turkey could become the first member state with a Muslim majority in its population. That would certainly bolster one of the principal religious trends in contemporary Europe: the steady growth and demand for a voice from Islamic minorities who do not assume religion must be confined to the private sphere.
The growing misfit between comfortable assumptions of a strong relationship between secularisation, modernity and democracy, and these changing realities on the ground is another complicating factor. Many analysts speak of a religious revival, despite continuing low church attendance figures – so much so that the term “post-secular” is widely used.
These figures often co-exist with much higher ones for religious affiliation. Such discrepancies are especially marked in Denmark, for example, which has a mere 2 per cent attendance but an 88 per cent expressed affiliation to the Lutheran church; but they are also found in Italy and Spain. Many Europeans still believe but don’t belong to churches – and vice versa.
Such paradoxes are often best explained by perplexed and fearful responses to the growth of Islamic minorities in states used to relatively long-standing religious settlements and taken-for-granted arrangements about the role of religion in education. New immigrants shake these up; but they also become scapegoats for wider social changes which brings religion back to the public sphere. Islam is then cast as a generalised and hostile “other” responsible for upsetting these settlements, symbolising intolerance and renewed religious conflict.
As the sociologist José Casanova puts it, “the immigrant, the religious, the racial, and the socio-economic unprivileged ‘other’ all tend to coincide. Moreover, all those dimensions of ‘otherness’ now become superimposed upon Islam, so that Islam becomes the utterly ‘other’.”
Casanova’s work on religious belief and practice in contemporary Europe contradicts the assumption that most EU member states are on a common and inexorable path towards a secular modernity in which church and state are separated, religion confined to private belief and cultural conflicts thereby avoided.
The actual picture is far less simple. Historically, religion has played a real part of European modernity and democratisation. Its role is best understood in terms of the long-term creation of twin tolerances in which states and churches agreed to coexist.
The churches accept the autonomy of democratically elected governments without veto rights on them. Governments tolerate the autonomy and freedom of religious people to worship, advance their values publicly and sponsor political initiatives, so long as they do not violate democratic rules and accept the rule of law.
That broad framework allows for the rich variety of church-state relations we find around contemporary Europe. According to Silvio Ferrari, an Italian researcher, we are living through a transition from religious to cultural and ethical pluralism reflected in a convergent practice of modifying such church-state relations to take more account of religious fragmentation and greater individualism. Most of this is happening somewhere between the two poles of the French strict separation and Lutheran systems. The French system is changing too. Some 20 per cent of education there is religious and the foreign ministry now has a special section dealing with religious issues. The Lutheran model is changing most rapidly.
Ireland’s hybrid system of church-state relations combines elements of the separatist and concordatarian approaches. Those who want to see the churches put altogether out of education here should be aware that similar radical changes are being sought elsewhere, as in Spain. But the main thrust of change is towards a renewed pluralism.