Tom Storrie was deceased at the time of publication.
End AbstractMost academic and specialist books deal with either citizenship or religion alone. Recently, some authors have tried to bring the two aspects together (e.g. Nyhagen and Halsaa 2016). Citizenship and religion may combine in different ways. They may cooperate, each one strengthening the other; positively, when the members of a church find in their religion good reasons for taking care of their fellow citizens; negatively, when they make an alliance against a third party, for instance the alliance between the church and the army in the colonisation process. They also may fight each other and citizens may have good reasons to believe churches are taking an excessive part in the affairs of the city. Should we consider secularism as being often at risk to act religiously (Baubérot 2012) their quarrel is in a way an extension of religion wars.
The authors of this book have met regularly for a couple of years, confronting how the issues related to citizenship and religion are taken into account in their respective countries. A first step was a publication in French (Storrie and Blanc 2018). Now this book examines the relationship between these two key social issues, as what Tom Storrie calls a single âdouble problematicâ (meaning the unification of two previously autonomous problematics). This problematic is ever more burning in todayâs world. It has become profoundly important for the wellbeing as well as the security of all peoples across the world. Far from witnessing the predicted âdeathâ of religion in a post-modern world, the authors observe the âreturnâ of religion to centre stage in recent decades.
In the first stage, each of the six co-authors wrote a chapter included in Part I. Intended as a personal account, these chapters present how every author understands the relationship between citizenship and religion in the light of his/her personal experience over time with his/her own particular historical and cultural background. Part I is intended to establish a basis of mutual understanding among the co-authors, from which each may then undertake to write a second chapter (in Part II), allowing everyone to take issue with this or that point of view put forward by another or others.
In the second stage, the co-authors had to rethink their chapters in the light of all previous contributions and to produce either a chapter on a new issue (such as the training of future Islam teachers in German state schools, âSupermuslimâ women in Algeria etc.) or an updated and more developed version of their initial thoughts. The contributors hope the readers will join them in this conversation and enlarge it.
The analytical distinction between âreligionâ and âreligiosityâ is very useful here. A religion is an institution with its rules of entrance and exclusion; linguists suggest two Latin origins: religare, meaning to bind together, and relegere, meaning to read again and/or to re-interpret. Religiosity is the subjective feeling of a personal dialogue with a supra human being. What is more, many adherents of different religions across the world appear to have an increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant outlook, which has strongly contributed to outbreaks of deadly violence, which may now explode at any time or place in our global village.
Tzvetan Todorov describes the trap in which we all are ensnared: The West and the predominantly Islamic countries are often seen as standing cruelly opposed to each other. Western fears are pitted against the resentments and anger of the Other:
Fear of the barbarian is what risks turning us into barbarians. The evil that we do can far outdo that which we feared at the start. History teaches that the remedy can be worse than the evil itself. [âŠ] The United States incarnates in exemplary fashion this reaction following the attacks of 11th September 2001 either by intervention directly or by encouraging intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. (Todorov 2010)
Overcoming this reciprocal fear is a major challenge. In the Oxford Research Group, Abbott et al. (2007) rightly argue: â(i) Terrorism is not the greatest threat in the world. (ii) The âwar on terrorâ is failing and actually increasing the likelihood of more terrorist attacks. (iii) Climate change is a major security concern; fortunately, we have the means to address it, but it is an urgent issue.â These three issues do not concern national states only but also the citizenry as a whole.
Citizenship takes two forms, which are complementary to some extent: either a
statutory citizenship, formally granted by the state, or an
active citizenship, inviting
citizens to play their part and to take care collectively of their
common good. In this sense,
citizens become the main actors committed to sustainable development preparing a better future for both the planet and humanity. An enlarged
democracy is a necessary pre-condition (Ben Rhomdane
2007). However, when they use the rhetoric of â
active citizenshipâ, governments tend to cover their own weaknesses:
[UK Prime Minister] Thatcherâs âactive citizenâ is based on the idea that an individual has obligations rather than rights and that the vessel for the exercise of these obligations is civil society rather than the state or welfare state. [âŠ] Margaret Thatcher simply proposed to reduce the role of the state. (Espiet-Kilty 2016)
For her, an âactive citizenâ is an individual alone and not a member of a citizenry. He/she practices charity with the poor, that is, a form of solidarity between unequal partners and without reciprocity (Simmel [1908] 1999). Similarly in France, during the 2020 confinement period, President Macron invoked active citizenship for solving problems created by irrelevant state policies against coronavirus.
1 Our Struggles with Citizenship, Religion and Secularism
The aim is to picture the common ground among the group, taking into account the irreducible disagreements at the same time. It appears all of the co-authors were educated in religion, either Catholic, Protestant or Muslim. However, they all are now against religious sectarianism and open to a tolerant secularism. The initial instruction received different interpretations: some co-authors put the emphasis on their family education, others on the role of peer groups when they were teenagers and/or young adults and others on the historical context in their respective countries.
Tom Storrie was an educationist. He presents two events that played an important part in his conceptualisation of the relationship between citizenship and religion: one is positive, the end of the murderous religious war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; the other is negative, the Salman Rushdie Affair. In Northern Ireland, the 2007 Peace Treaty was the opportunity to create a government including the ex-enemies and was able to develop a fruitful cooperation. By the end of the 1980s, the Salman Rushdie Affair presents a good example of âa single double problematicâ: how was an Iranian Ayatollah (both a religious and a political leader) able to condemn to death a British writer without any fair judgement, simply for being ironic and critical about Islam? Here, the religious fully absorbs the political, raising the issue of the links and the borders between citizenship and religion.
In France, both Maurice Blanc and Bruno Michon received a Catholic education. They are sociologists and became unbelievers (or atheists, the distinction is very unclear) when they were young adults. For the first one, the youth rebellion in May 1968 was a catalyst. For the second, it was the election for the first time of a Socialist President in France, François Mitterrand, in 1981. France claims to treat every religion on an equal footing. However, as in George Orwellâs Animal farm, âsome religions are more equal than othersâ! Secularism takes many forms and is ambiguous: a first form is against any religion, the truth coming from science and not from religion; an opposite form is tolerant towards every religion: it is a private matter and the best the state can do is to keep hands off and not to interfere. A new form of secularism recently emerged: tolerance with old established Christian religions but not with Islam, presumed culturally too different for being acceptable (BaubĂ©rot 2012). Such a âsecularismâ also appeared in the United Kingdom and in Germany.
Cherifa Bouatta is a clinical psychologist in Algeria, a country whichâafter its Independence War which ended in 1962âis formally a Democratic and Peopleâs Republic. But the alliance between Government and Islamic Conservatives is catastrophic for women. The Family Code contradicts the democratic principles mentioned in the Constitution and women remain âsecond class citizensâ. Algerian feminists used to be, and still are, victims of many discriminations. The word feminist is controversial and often rejected, as coming from Western countries. The womenâs movement includes both feminist (secular) and feminine (Islamic) groups; they may sometimes work together, but often against each other. However, women are very active in the current...
