Religious Literacy, Law and History

Perspectives on European Pluralist Societies

Alberto Melloni, Francesca Cadeddu, Alberto Melloni, Francesca Cadeddu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351398664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

The book profiles some of the macro and micro factors that have impact on European religious literacy. It seeks to understand religious illiteracy and its effects on the social and political milieu through the framing of the historical, institutional, religious, social, juridical and educational conditions within which it arises. Divided into four parts, in the first one, One literacy, more literacies?, the book defines the basic concepts underpinning the question of religious illiteracy in Europe. Part II, Understanding illiteracies, debating disciplines?, highlights the theological, philosophical, historical and political roots of the phenomenon, looking at the main nodes that are both the reasons religious illiteracy is widespread and the starting points for literacy strategies. Part III, Building literacy, shaping alphabets, examines the mix of knowledge and competences acquired about religion and from religion at school as well as through the media, with a critical perspective on what could be done both in the schools and for the improvement of journalists' religious literacy. Part IV, Views and experiences, presents the reader with the opportunity to learn from three different case studies: religious literacy in the media, religious illiteracy and European Islam, and a Jewish approach to religious literacy. Building on existing literature, the volume takes a scientific approach which is enriched by interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives, and deep entrenchment in historical methodology.

Part I
One literacy, more literacies?

1 European religious illiteracy

The historical framework of a removed agenda

Alberto Melloni

Introduction

The definitions of religion accumulated over the years have often been studied in terms of their reach and development.¹ Such a variety allows me to resort to my own formulation and to regard religion as the ‘free assumption of a superior moral obligation by men and women immersed in a culture’. I use this formulation not due to any illusion that it should convince someone or to the presumption that it is immune from critical remark but solely because it is one that I believe allows me to say that everything that is attributed to this sphere – freedom, processes of engagement, translations of moral obligation, conceptions of superiority and, of course, culture – is expressed historically. Moreover, it all unravels in a time of languages² shaped by texts, hermeneutics, practices, gestures, inhibitions, missions, symbols and doctrines that, in turn, produce other doctrines, symbols, missions, inhibitions, gestures, practices, hermeneutics and texts. This series of edifications and deconstructions would appear to some uncontrolled and to others free: a megalopolis of signs and meanings that develop according to

procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.

(de Certeau 1984: 95–6)

Such ‘languages’ can, and sometimes do, convey – both verbally and nonverbally – cultural expressions, ethical attitudes, philosophical convictions and imaginations of the cosmos and the self as well as epistemological postulates or political products. They may take on relationships of synergy, conflict or identity with other languages, whether silent or voiced. They lay boundaries or traverse worlds that are often defined as ‘denominational’, and they can be understood or ignored without the act – understanding, ignoring – determining either historical development or social and political incisiveness.

This lengthy preamble serves to help us comprehend the point of view assumed here in the face of religious illiteracy³ in Europe: that it is not only a sociologically documented fact but also the historical outcome of an abandonment of the understanding of these ‘languages’. Such an outcome is so incredibly vast and profound that it not only involves those who believe themselves to be, or to have become, foreign to these systems of signs and meanings (the expunction of religious dimensions from the House of European History in Brussels does not need to be amended in order to bear testimony to the lowest point in the inculturation of the Union) but also affects those who consider or declare themselves to be believers.

Secularizations

‘It’s secularization, stupid!’. It is Bill Clinton’s famous phrase, but also the motto of the sorrowful monotonies of a religious integralism that looks back nostalgically to the mythical times of a ‘Christian’ Europe – the ‘medieval’ one of Novalis’s⁴ pietism (Menozzi 2005), the wholly Latin one of Gregory VII, if not the imperial one of Constantine (Zamagni 2012, Melloni 2013). It has also been the adage of those who in the last two centuries defined by the term secularization the undefeated enemy to whom we attribute the sociological regression of the religious and the resounding echo of the ‘ego and its desires’.⁵ But the same phrase will be uttered by methodological agnosticism, which, animated by a ‘missionary’ fervor, will see in secularization – secularism, for shorthand – the measure of a civilization that has extended beyond an enchantment of the divine and sees in religious violence the confirmation that without secularism, it would be impossible to encounter Fortschritt.⁶

In some respects, these exact interpretations, with their symmetric simplicity, can be taken as the signs of such profound religious illiteracy that it speaks of ‘secularization’ as if it were a single thing and as if the viability of nonbelief (Taylor 2007, Schoenberg and Majeran 2016) were our destiny, laid out in the monochrome Eden of modernity.⁷

Unitarian secularism?

In point of fact, the research – endowed with the term secularization by jurists working on the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and then redetermined semantically by Émile Durkheim⁸ – has advanced so far as to distinguish phases, traits and aspects that, while not always persuasive, at least disrupt the trivialization of a ‘unitarian’ secularism. Charles Taylor’s tripartition, which is well accepted in the field,⁹ established the following in a long, cinematic sequence: (1) political secularization, (2) secularization involving individual behaviors and (3) the cultural secularization of the postmodern age.

1. ‘Political’ secularization is a thing apart (this does not necessarily imply that it is historically set above other forms). This secularization is referred to as ‘political’ because it moderates, expunges or prohibits discussions, elements and ‘religious’ convictions from institutions and the ‘public’ sphere through a process that others subsequently interpret as an incubator of a ‘liberal’ state (cf. Habermas 2005). It is a process of disestablishment that, in all honesty, does not historically respond to the various positions of science and reason. Rather, it rises as a (believing) attempt to put an end to the carnage of religious wars (Tierney 2014: 215–90). There is little doubt that after the Enlightenment – when conceptions of science and reason held powerful sway – the Revolution and the Napoleonic age ‘secularized’ (are we still using the Westphalia meaning?) decisive features of public life: sovereignty as the origin of nomos, the school as the root of ethos, the registry office as a standardization of the oikos, the hospital as a form of control of science over thanatos and the large-scale army as the place of the civil sacrifice of demos (cf. Baubérot 2013). Following the close coupling between the popular masses and the nationalisms of World War I, political secularization found a variant – interpreted as a degeneration – in European fascism.¹⁰ It reappears, however, without any significant changes in the affluent society of the war’s aftermath, valorizing the possibility of extending the principle of equality to unthinkable contexts within the rigid framework of bourgeois modernity: sexuality, ethnicity, gender, bioethics, family models, etc.
2. The other secularization involving the self-understanding of the self and the world is the one that, in Charles Taylor’s language, upsets, on the one hand, the cosmic imaginary and, on the other, the penetrability of the ego. Taylor sees both as products of the Lutheran Reformation.¹¹ Emmanuel Lévinas (who for obvious reasons could not be content with such a classical explanation so profoundly steeped in ‘Catholic’ suspicions toward Glaubenspaltung) believed that he could trace the re-understanding of the modern world back to the origins of technique,¹² when technique was still too slow and incapable of involving individual bodies. Choices by individuals and religious affiliations conveyed in class segmentations are assumed, therefore, to have resulted in a system of thrust and counterthrust that was to produce cultural secularization, which would then proceed uninterrupted for the decades from Schleiermacher to 1968.¹³
3. According to Taylor, a third secularization joins the fray, which he fully deems a Secular Age. This secularization renders acceptable and dominant both nonbelief (the focus of Taylor’s research) and the multiple recompositions of the religious (which appear to reemerge from an underground calling for blood and deadly identities). Cultural secularization allowed for the transition from a world where each segment of reality was solidly embedded within a superior framework – ‘human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine’ (Taylor 2007: 152) – into a world of disembedding the real segments into a framework of an exclusivist ‘humanism’ (sic!). It is the selfsame ‘clockmaker’ god¹⁴ – constructing mechanisms of such mathematic perfection as to conceal his hand in their making – who allows for ‘science and reason’ to outclass the function carried out by ‘religion and superstition’ (273).¹⁵ Only after this step developed and was then fragmented by the culture of Romanticism in the nineteenth century would the nationalist culture of the twentieth century generate an ‘immanent frame’. In this new setting, religious belonging would disunite (and, if anything, reunite) on the basis of a need for ‘authenticity’ to which ‘established’ communities of faith cannot always respond. Subsequently, this produces aggregations, ‘fervours’ and inspirations in search of new equilibriums.

Illiteracy as a historic fact

I have turned to this excessively schematic synthesis of Taylor’s positions only to say that those who are dissatisfied with simply brandishing the category of secularization as an indeterminate amulet during the crisis of liberal democracies (Böckenförde 2007) would be well served if European religious illiteracy were considered neither the premise nor the product of a secularization of the public space, of behaviors or of what generates Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’ in this day and age. Instead, it is to be understood as a historic fact.

In short, European religious illiteracy is not the result of a shift in the religious landscape. It is, rather, the theologische Unklarheit that encompasses that landscape. Illiteracy is not the pessimistic and blame-casting definition of an indifference to the religious that has lost its serenity and must, in spite of itself, take on the knowledge rendered necessary by the cohabitation of faiths and fundamentalist infiltrations. Rather, it is the darkness that envelops indifference and cohabitations. It is not a dilemma created by the migrations of far-off religious universes, filtered over centuries through the eyes of colonialism. It is what the end of colonialism and the uncontrollability of migratory processes shed light upon.

It is a condition that can, and must, be defined thus: ‘illiteracy’, not for the convenience of a metaphor but rather to deny any assimilation of the ‘fact’ in question with a limit with which to come realistically to terms or a statistically unavoidable error in a society that is far too complex. Like any form of illiteracy, religious illiteracy is a social evil where the victims are the bearers of the damage, and it must be tackled with the same perspective as that by which basic illiteracy was approached. Basic illiteracy excluded the subordinate from reading and writing, and was used as a tool of public policy not to extend political participation and civil development. Can the same be said of European religious illiteracy? I believe so.

1. On a global scale, religious illiteracy cannot be explained by the end of religious influence (whether understood as part of devotion or of superstition) in the public sphere or with its reduced capacity to control personal customs, thus relegating it to the sphere of preference. Religious illiteracy proceeds, on the contrary, from the rupture of an existential metric system that is typical of modernity à l’ancienne: this involved a sequence that saw the individual move toward what we would call ‘self-secularization’ as a haven in one’s journey through life. The link between religious knowledge gained in an educational phase and its use in actual observance ceases at a precise point or stage in life. The rupture of a condition of subjective constraint becomes the emancipation from a universe of the religious and ‘practice’. The multiplication of this journey led to an era (which, in Taylor’s categories, is assumed to be pre-immanent) when people abandoned or rejected adherence to precepts, figures, symbols and practices that were well known to them on both an existential and a doctrinal level. These people were still willing to educate their children for a certain time, often in their original community of faith, beginning from the concepts and teachings that had been rejected, and then to shape them with the same kind of transition toward agnosticism. This agnosticism, however, was in fact filled with meanings and values of religious foundation.
   The end of true socialism has led to a lesser need to assess the ‘religious’ as generally in conflict with state atheism and as an act of opposition toward the totalitarian imposition of ideological atheism. This has resulted in the increasingly rapid accumulation of generations that did not depart from lands of belief in order to come ashore on distant, nonreligious lands but are rather natives of the irreligious. What Taylor calls the immanent ‘era’ in the eyes of the historian seems to be more like a generation than an age: it is the melding together of the first truly agnostic ‘next generation’, endowed from infancy with a religious tabula rasa. Members of this generation are capable of either the most exaggerated eradication of any spiritual instance or of subjecting themselves to the unbridled fascination of unknown religious cocktails, fervent ‘re-bornisms’ and religious obsessions on the edge of salvation/well-being (cf., for example, Spector 2009, Smith 2013).
2. The religious illiteracy that is revealed in the rupture between the self-secularized and ‘native’ agnostics has been reinforced by an equally important rupture within the knowledge and learning pertinent to the religious sphere. Within this field of study, there is an ongoing diatribe concerning the preconditions of s...