Secular Europe Research Articles

Christian identity of secular Europe

Among other things, intensification of process of European integrations has imposed the need for realization and strengthening of common European cultural identity, that is for creating a new set of values, which would be common to all European citizens and which would be the basis for their permanent feeling of community and an experience of belonging to Europe as a common area. What are the chances of such a project since, on one hand, Islam is appearing in Europe as a religion that does not know secularity and, on the other hand, an important part of European inhabitants is showing the rise of anti-immigrant and , especially, anti-Islamic feelings, opposition to the presence of foreigners, fear of majorization and the loss of one's own identity and the values of European culture? The existing conflict with Islam is, most often, described as a conflict between secularized West where religion is a matter of private choice and religious (primarily Islamic) world where religion is regulating every aspect of life. However, innumerable examples all around us (starting with the fact that the time is counted according to the Christian calendar, Christian holidays and iconography, Biblical myths, moral codes, architecture, toponims-to mention only few) constantly reminds how much Christianity (primarily as a cultural tradition) is strongly present in the lives of the secular Europeans, how much is that secular context in fact permeated with Christian story. Vestiges of that past, which are all around us, are not in fact perceived as a Christian story - in meeting with European secularism such recognition comes only to others to whom that story is not familiar. On what premises then can such a common forum be created on which all would really feel equally at home? In this work I will try to consider possible directions in which, considering the existing circumstances, Europe could move in search of the new common denominator. Since nations, according to the nature and the sense of the idea itself of Europe without borders, can not figure as elements of cohesion (multiethnicity, turning towards market laws, obligatory decrease of sovereignty of national states towards, etc.), there are two logical possibilities: 1) Strengthening of Christian identity, that is returning to the previous paradigm, which is for Europe Christian paradigm - hence Christianity as new/old collective identity, 2) An attempt to de-fine a new type of plural secularism, that is, to establish secular society of non-Christian type that would be inclusive also for members of other, non-Christian cultures.

Power and Authority within European Secularity: From the Enlightenment Critique of Religion to the Contemporary Presence of Islam

Power and Authority within European Secularity: From the Enlightenment Critique of Religion to the Contemporary Presence of Islam

Religious Diversity Across the North American Urban System

This study addresses the spatiality of religious diversity in both the United States and Canada. First, it summarizes the pertinent theoretical issues regarding the conceptualization of religious diversity, particularly its connections to religiosity, a topic that has been extensively debated in sociology. Second, it summarizes the major dimensions of religious diversity in North America, the causes and implications, situating Canada, which is relatively moderate in terms of its religiosity, between the conceptual poles of a relatively secular Europe and a relatively more religious United States. Third, it lays out the data and methods, which involve three different quantitative measures of diversity at the county or census division level in both countries. Fourth, it presents the results, using both cartographic displays as well as a statistical analysis of religious diversity across the urban hierarchy. It affirms that religious diversity increases steadily with city size. The conclusions point to the implications of this line of thought for future work in human and urban geography.

Secularism and the Public-Private Divide: Europe can Learn from Latin America

This paper explores the difficulties faced by European secularism in dealing with a Muslim diaspora of unprecedented size in the continent's history. It shows how this presence has highlighted contradictions in European conceptions of the religious and of the public-private divide. The paper does this by comparing Europe to Latin America where a quite different process of secularization seems to have taken place.

Political Roof and Sacred Canopy?

Debate over the place of Christianity in European politics and society has made an important come-back. The Convention on the Future of Europe’s deliberations over the EU Constitution has thrown into relief the role of religion in defining ‘Europeanness’. In the context of a secularized Europe, Christianity is fighting for its institutional recognition and space in the public sphere. Religion may offer a cultural identity and work both to resist and to accommodate change. However, the Christian mobilization has been challenged by those who defend the secular order. The debate over whether Christianity should be seen as constitutive of European identity has been framed by wider concerns about collective identities and memories in Europe.

Christian identity of secular Europe

The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy began after twelve editorial cartoons, most of which depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad, were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005. The newspaper explained that this publication was a contribution to debate regarding criticism of Islam and self-censorship. In response, Danish Muslim organizations held public protests and spread knowledge of Jyllands-Postens publication. As the controversy grew, some or all of the cartoons were reprinted in newspapers in more than fifty other countries, which led to violent protests, particularly in the Muslim world. Critics of the cartoons describe them as islamophobic and argue that they are blasphemous, intended to humiliate a marginalized Danish minority, and a manifestation of ignorance about the history of western imperialism, from colonialism to the current conflicts in the Middle East. Supporters of the cartoons claim they illustrate an important issue in an age of Islamic extremist terrorism and that their publication is a legitimate exercise of the right of free speech. They also note that similar cartoons about other religions are frequently printed, arguing that the followers of Islam were not targeted in a discriminatory way. The dispute has again pointed out to the relevance of religion and religious differences in the contemporary world. Again, several questions presented themselves as significant: citizen freedom, values and the rights to exercise them, secularism, tolerance, multiculturalism majority-minority relationships and so on. The resolution to these issues appears as of the outmost importance, considering the existing tendencies of united Europe to even more firmly establish cultural, economic, and political associations, in order to launch a one, joined European identity with vanishing national, ethnic and religious differences. Therefore, the question becomes: what could serve as a foundation for such a united identity? The reactions to the idea of "united Europe" that provoked rising nationalism xenophobia, and resistance towards immigrants in general show that a construction of the identity of this kind represents a very complicated undertaking, with still blurred ending. This paper, thus, discusses basics misunderstandings between "Euro-enthusiastic" and the ones who worry about their own national identity, and points out to the existence of some intrashared values that could serve as a foundation for a future, united European identity.

IN SEARCH OF NON-SECULARIST DEMOCRACY

Abstract In his Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a “purely civil profession of faith” and tolerance of other religions. In the faith-based side of nation building, early Americans dismissed Rousseau's generic religion and embraced a Protestant Christianity with “liberty of conscience to all men.” After World War II, the US moved beyond pan-Protestantism to a more inclusive vision of the American civil religion, accepting Catholic and Jewish Americans into the fold. More recently, some have talked of including Muslims as well. Iraq's notions of Pan-Islam may be far from European societies' secularism, but may actually have some similarities to America's history of civil religion.

Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel by David Adams Rebecca L. Walkowitz Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. By David Adams. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Colonial Odysseys seeks to historicize two characteristics of modernist writing: its use of classical models and its articulation or critique of imperialism. David Adams attributes both of these characteristics to “the tortured working through of… the failure of the modern subject to replace God as a subject of history” (222). He argues that modernist writers (his principal examples are Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf; his secondary examples are E. M. Forster and James Joyce) set their narratives in colonial territories because these spaces allowed them to stage, sometimes reproduce, and sometimes reject a feeling of nostalgia for omnipotence and lost self-certainty. Adams’s title, therefore, refers to the metaphysical “odysseys” for which physical journeys serve as occasion and consequence: occasion, because physical journeys allow fictional characters to experiment with new ideas of authority apart from the godless center; and consequence, because the desire to regain a sense of authority often leads European characters to impose their will on other peoples. The journey or odyssey is not only a metaphor in Adams’s study, since he attributes the historical project of colonization to the historical problem of epistemological homelessness. (It is difficult to speak unmetaphorically of Adams’s argument since, as he shows, home may have a literal geography, but the meanings of geography are ideological and metaphorical.) Adams suggests that secularization led to colonization because Europeans needed to replace one idea of totality with another: if “home is a place where… the totality of the world is fully accessible to the subject,” then secular subjects can retain the metaphorical experience of knowing only by making their hold on the world more literal (47). Adams’s book offers an articulate response to the accusation, leveled by Georg Lukács and later by Fredric Jameson, that modernist narratives are indifferent to or hopelessly ignorant of “the geopolitical phenomena that they seem to represent” in novels such as A Passage to India and A Voyage Out (2), which Adams examines in his study, and from the geopolitical phenomena that they do not seem to represent in novels such as Howards End and Mrs Dalloway. The first group of modernist narratives are said to be “distracted,” Adams explains, because they are too much concerned with the Odyssey of Homer, as it were, and not enough with the odysseys of present-day Europeans. Adams’s response to this accusation is interesting because it is not a refutation: he argues that modernists were indeed more interested in the self than in the world, but he argues also that problems of the self mobilized not only fantasies of travel but also the economic and social realities of colonialism. Adams thus suggests that modernists who projected interior voyage onto world voyage were not disengaged from history. Rather, they were representing the consequence of European secularization and modernity: filling or struggling not to fill “a god-shaped hole” (11 and passim). Adams borrows the theory of “reoccupation” that is central to his account of the modernist novel from the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. As Adams presents it, “reoccupation” refers to the process of answering “theological questions with secular ideas” (4). Adams uses Blumenberg’s theory to argue that modern thinkers used an idea of geographical totality to replace an idea of totality based on a Christian view of God’s omniscience. For the most part, the book offers a historically specific account of “reoccupation,” focusing on the intellectual and social developments of early-twentieth-century Britain. Colonial Odysseys is shaped not only by Blumenberg’s work but also by the tradition of Marxist literary criticism, especially the work of Lukács and Jameson. This is evident in Adams’s assumption that representing the world must involve offering an account of its “totality.” Moreover, Adams suggests that wholeness is a necessary aspect of social life as well of representation. He contends, for example, that Edward Said’s desire for a community based on affiliation rather than filiation “underestimates the human need for integration...

Making Public Space: Opportunities and Limits of Collective Action Among Muslims in Europe

Recent research suggests that the settling of Muslims in secular Europe is leading to the individualisation of their religious identity and to the fragmentation of their social life. Such research purports to show the production of a specific ‘European’ Islam that eludes the traditional authority in which Islam is allegedly still mired in most Muslim majority societies. This paper considers the predicament of Muslims in Europe from a different perspective, through a consideration of the ambivalence of secular norms of the public sphere and of their limits in dealing with religious expressions. While much of the current literature concentrates on the diasporic and transnational aspects of the Muslim presence in Europe, the focus here is on specifically European and post‐colonial dimensions. The institutional sedimentation of historic traumas, rather than universal values, specific to the formation of European societies and public spheres are considered in both their internal‐metropolitan and external‐colonial articulations. Set against these original characteristics of European public spheres, an analysis is offered of some of the most vocal activism, particularly that of Muslim women and youth, as instances of a struggle to transform and enrich, and even to decentre, European public spheres.

Religion and politics in comparative perspective: the one, the few, and the many

1. Introduction: the one and the many - religion and politics in comparative perspective Ted G. Jelen and Clyde Wilcox 2. The challenge of pluralism: the Catholic church in democratic Poland Timothy A. Byrnes 3. Catholicism, politics, and culture in the Republic of Ireland Michele Dillon 4. Religion and politics in Iberia: clericalism, anticlericalism and democratization in Portugal and Spain Paul Christopher Manuel 5. The religious dimension of Israeli political life Kenneth D. Wald 6. Between heaven and earth: the dilemma of the Islamic Republic of Iran Sussan Siavoshi 7. Islamism in contemporary Arab politics: lessons in authoritarianism and democratization Mehran Tamadonfar 8. Religion and politics in a secular Europe: cutting against the grain J. Christopher Soper and Joel Fetzer 9. Religion and democracy in South America: challenges and opportunities Anthony Gill 10. Looking for hope in Central America: the Pentecostal movement Anne Motley Hallum 11. Religion and politics in India: the emergence of Hindu Nationalism and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Sunil K. Sahu 12. Religion and politics in Japan Maria Toyoda and Aiji Tanaka 13. Religion and politics in an open market: religious mobilization in the United States Clyde Wilcox and Ted G. Jelen 14. Conclusion: the political roles of religion Ted G. Jelen and Clyde Wilcox.

Fluid identities: Muslims and Western Europe's nation states

This article traces the evolution of the concepts of identity and religion within the Muslim minorities in the countries of western Europe. It introduces the challenges faced by first generation immigrants and the changes that took place in the socio‐economic structures of the host countries. It goes on to present the reactions of these Muslim communities to the tensions of modernisation and life in urban, industrialised, secular Europe and the search for re‐acculturation that characterised the second generation of Muslims. The article details the reactions and shortcomings of British, French and German responses in particular to the demands of these gradually developing ethnic minorities, and focuses on policies adopted in the sensitive areas of education and citizenship. The article concludes by exploring the changing nature of the Muslim identity and its potential to become fully integrated within an over‐arching European identity.

Consensus, neutrality and compromise

The ideal of a culturally and religiously neutral state is thought by some to underpin democratic multiculturalism, but actually may work to prevent its emergence. This perception lies behind ‘the politics of recognition’ and the recent reinterpretation of equality. Possible political responses to multicultural social circumstances can be usefully discussed in terms of some ideal types of state and the conceptions of individual and community that informs them. This leads to the question of in what sense must the multicultural state be a secular state, which is discussed here with particular reference to Islam, western European secularism and the church-state connection in Britain. The claim that secularism is neutral between religions is flawed and there is an incompatibility between multiculturalism and radical secularism; the presence of new religious minorities means the existing constitutional compromises between religion and secularism need to be reformed in the spirit of inclusiveness rather than neutrality.

Vanishing diaspora: the Jews in Europe since 1945

In 1939 there were ten million Jews in Europe. After Hitler there were four million. Today in 1996 there are under two million. On current projections the Jews will become virtually extinct as a significant element in European society over the course of the twenty-first century. Bernard Wasserstein sheds light on the reasons for this dire demographic projection. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, many hitherto unpublished, Wasserstein begins with the painful years of liberation after World War II when Jews tried to recover from the destruction of their people and communities, then traces the Jewish experience in Eastern and Western Europe in different national and ideological contexts. His inquiry covers the impact on Jews of postwar reconstruction, Soviet occupation, the Cold War, and the collapse of communism. These, combined with the memory of Nazi genocide, the persistence of antisemitism, the development of Israel, and the Middle East conflicts, shaped the history of European Jewry in the second half of the twentieth century. Vanishing Diaspora argues that survival for European Jews ultimately will depend on choices they themselves make to reverse trends. They have an alarmingly imbalanced death-to-birth ratio, and many have jettisoned religious observance in the spirit of a secular Europe, losing their cultural distinctiveness as well as their numbers.

Traditie en Aanpassing in de Jaren ’80

Tradition and Adaptation in the 1980s The Syrian Orthodox Church hetween Asia and Europe This article falls clearly into two parts which correspond to the words ,Tradition' and ,Adaptation' in the title. In Part One we survey customs surrounding marriage and virginity and the fertility of human beings and of their animals and fields. We see how the agricultural life of the villages is intertwined with their Christian theology and rituals. And we take a look at the traditional education practised in the churches and monasteries of Tur 'Abdin. There are of course many other traditions and many other customs, not least those embodied in the Syrian Orthodox liturgy. But enough has been said to show that the transition to a non-agricultural life-style in secular Europe is one that tradition alone is not equipped to cope with. Nor can a traditional Syriac education be considered sufficient to meet the demands made on the leaders of the emigrant community. To some ex tent the Syrian Orthodox have been forced to adapt already. It is this process and the direction in which it is likely to be continued that we shall be studying in Part Two of this article.

Muslims in Europe: the lost tribe of Islam?

The Muslim presence in Europe has caused the Christian churches to focus their attention on a number of issues arising out of this presence and the following article is a review of three papers put out by church organizations. Starting chronologically from the earliest paper to the most recent, I have first summarized the contents of each paper before analysing and commenting on them collectively. The three Church Research Papers on Muslims in Europe are Witness to God in a Secular Europe, Conference of European Churches, Geneva 1985, The Image of Islam in German School Textbooks by Udo Tworuschka, Muslims in Europe. No. 32, 1986, and Islamic Law and its Significance for the Situation of Muslim Minorities in Europe, Report of a study project, Muslims in Europe, No. 35,1987.