Religious Diversity in Europe

Mediating the Past to the Young

Riho Altnurme, Elena Arigita, Patrick Pasture, Riho Altnurme, Elena Arigita, Patrick Pasture

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350198623
• eBook ISBN: 9781350198609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on research funded by the European Commission, this book explores how religious diversity has been, and continues to be, represented in cultural contexts in Western Europe, particularly to teenagers: in textbooks, museums and exhibitions, popular youth culture including TV and online, as well as in political speech. Topics include the findings from focus group interviews with teenagers in schools across Europe, the representation of minority religions in museums, migration and youth subculture.

1 Religious diversity in Europe: The challenges of past and present

Patrick Pasture and Christophe Schellekens¹

This book assesses historical and contemporary representations of religious diversity in Europe and how the past is mediated to the present and future generations. Indeed, present-day representations of this issue often invoke and refer to the past. Europe has a troubled history with religion, as manifested, for example, in the Wars of Religion. Nevertheless, Europeans have also learned to live together, and perhaps this was more often the case than we assume. In order to properly understand and grasp the full significance of contemporary representations of religion, we must also therefore have a reasonable understanding of the past. This chapter briefly outlines some of the salient features of Europe’s long and complex history of religious coexistence and toleration, less as a yardstick to measure the accuracy of historical representations – though this objective, even if never fully attainable, is not entirely absent – and more as a means of comprehending and historically contextualizing these contemporary representations. It not only looks at Europe as the original centre of (or heir to) Christendom, but also explores the experiences of al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. Throughout this chapter, we will be focusing not only on practices and attitudes but also on the norms, beliefs and values held by a diverse set of actors and institutions.

A history of (in)tolerance, war and peace-making

‘We have learned that tolerance is the soul of Europe,’ the German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared at a ceremony to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation on 31 October 2017, in Wittenberg (Merkel 2017). The place and timing of the statement suggest that she was mainly referring to religious toleration, without excluding tolerance in other walks of life.²

The underlying idea is that tolerance is Europe’s answer to its remarkable diversity, an idea that is also expressed in the European Union’s (EU’s) motto, ‘Unity in Diversity’, which it adopted in 2005. It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to look at these two assumptions. Is Europe really so diverse? Compared to South and Southeast Asia with their multitude of languages, ethnicities and religions, one may wonder. In fact, rather than being particularly diverse, one could argue that Europe, if anything, is obsessed with a drive towards unity and has an innate fear of diversity (Pasture 2015). From that perspective, perhaps the opposite is true: that intolerance lies at the heart of Europe’s soul. The origins of this intolerance lie in the particular history of Christendom, in which an intense alliance was forged between church and state and their interests became closely aligned. It also explains why Europe never completely endorsed freedom of religion in the way the United States did – after all, tolerance is not the opposite of intolerance (although calling it its counterfeit, as Thomas Paine did, may be overstating it as well) (Paine 1791: 78).

The learning process invoked basically refers to the tolerance that allegedly emerged after the Wars of Religion. According to the standard narrative, these wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ushered in a new, stable European order based on sovereign states with fixed territorial boundaries, the ‘Westphalian model’ that is still referred to in most textbooks and analyses of the international system. It was also responsible, so the story goes, for the rise of religious toleration, for which the Enlightenment is mainly credited. Both narratives are highly problematic historically. The alleged Westphalian order, for example, is a nineteenth-century myth that describes an idealized political model that has no basis in the actual peace treaties or in political practice. Neither did it bring an end to religious violence, certainly not if one takes a pan-European perspective (e.g. Nexon 2009: 265–88). And as for its contribution to the rise of toleration, arguments in favour of religious freedom and tolerance had been formulated by various thinkers long before the Enlightenment, including Christian ones.³

The narrative furthermore ignores Europe’s non-Christian and particularly Islamic pasts, and thus implicitly equates Europe with the history of Christendom, excluding other religions (Asad 2003). In this chapter, we will be focusing on how both Christendom and Europe’s Islamic empires dealt with religious diversity, offering examples of their ‘tolerance’ and intolerance, and discussing their different ways of living together. While Classical Antiquity is usually associated with a tolerant attitude towards religious diversity (notwithstanding the persecution of Christians) (Marcos 2018), Christendom is notorious for its intolerance which goes back to the recognition of Christianity as a state religion in the late Roman Empire (Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD). This also applies to the Christian kingdoms that were constituted in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages, although at that stage religion appears to have been more of a social commitment than a belief system, and society seems to have been far more open to foreigners and religious diversity than in later times (Classen 2018; see also Brown 2013). It was not until the eleventh or twelfth centuries that Europe turned into a ‘persecuting society’ (Moore 2006). With few exceptions, European states demanded adherence to Catholicism as a sign of obedience (even though the different interpretations of religion allowed for considerable variation in practice).

The fear of diversity applied, among others, to ‘heretics’ as well as pagans and ‘infidels’, which explains why non-Christian advisors or experts (doctors, astronomers, mathematicians, etc.) were rarely to be found at European courts. Likewise, non-Christian merchants in Medieval and Early Modern Europe hardly travelled inland. This even extended to the Arabs, great travellers and merchants who in Asia and Africa ventured far beyond Islamic territories. Jews, however, could be found throughout Christendom since Roman times. Though often harassed and persecuted, they were respected as people of the ‘Old Covenant’ and enjoyed the protection of canon law even if they were also condemned for their rejection of the New Covenant (Sicut iudaei, c. 1120) (Levy 2016). Sometimes they enjoyed royal protection in exchange for loyalty and for their services as moneylenders and scholars. Especially when Europe became more urbanized and moved towards more organized feudal states, however, Jews became systematically and massively persecuted. In 1290 they were expelled from England, and later also from France and Spain after the Reconquista (Moore 2000; [1987] 2006; see also Kaplan 2007: 294–330; Nirenberg 1996, 2014). Romani, although mostly Christians, faced similar difficulties. Itinerant descendants of military clans from northern India, they arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century, as wandering vagrants, tolerated sometimes with fascination, but more often despised, persecuted and expelled (Taylor 2014).

There were nevertheless times and places in Christendom, such as medieval Sicily, Hungary (between c. 1200 and c. 1300) and Christian Spain (until c. 1500), in which Muslims and Christians lived together in (relative) peace, and Catholic monarchs recognized Muslims as legitimate citizens, granting them a similar status to that afforded to Christians in Muslim countries (Catlos 2014). Resisting calls from the hierarchy to impose religious uniformity, the Catholic kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Union in 1368 granted religious freedom to all: Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, Shamanistic and Islamic Tatars (who settled in Lithuania in the fourteenth century), and increasingly Christian dissidents or heretics, such as Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists. It would be wrong though to consider the Polish kings as ‘enlightened’ advocates of religious freedom, as their power was tight...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Religious diversity in Europe: Meditating the past to the young
• 1 Religious diversity in Europe: The challenges of past and present
• 2 Views of the young: Reflections on the basis of European pilot studies
• 3 Representing European religious diversity in textbooks for history education
• 4 Society exhibited: Museums, religions and representation
• 5 Religious diversity and generation Z: TV series and YouTube as instruments to promote religious toleration and peace
• 6 Refugees and the politics of memory: Political discourses of religious toleration and peace
• 7 Commemorating the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the Ohrid Framework Agreement (2001)
• 8 Religious pluralism in the Islamic tradition in late al-Andalus and in contemporary Islamic transnationalism: A conceptual approach
• 9 From dialogue to peace: Organizations for interreligious and interconvictional dialogue in Europe
• 10 Religious toleration in the new spirituality subculture: The Estonian case
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page