Abstract
Western discourses about religion typically assume a concept of it as primarily a system of belief, grounded on faith in the authority of certain texts designated as scripture. But many conflicts around the world ostensibly organized around religious identities have little to do with belief. While scholars sometimes describe such cases in terms of politicization of religion, the underlying phenomenon is a conversion of the content of religion (beliefs, symbols, narratives, rituals) into markers of group identity. Philosophies of religious pluralism, such as that of the late John Hick, ignore this in arguing for the (qualified) relativity of religious belief and doctrine. Whether or not their arguments are convincing, analyses of this sort have little relevance to cases of religious communalism, where elements of “religion” serve predominantly as expressions or signs of inherited group identity. In these cases, the operative claims of religion within social life cannot be effectively regulated by the philosophies of religious pluralism focused on the content of faith. It is important to recognize this if the moral and political aim is to discover strategies for countering inter-group violence.
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Notes
- 1.
This is also true of Eisenberg’s analysis in Reasons of Identity; see Chapter 5, “Religious Identity and the Problem of Authenticity” (Eisenberg 2009, 91–118).
- 2.
This last observation does not quite fit Canadian multiculturalism, whose formulation has been at least equally oriented towards national minorities, to use Will Kymlicka’s term, which in Canada mainly comprises francophone Quebecers and indigenous communities (though these groups have not necessarily welcomed inclusion within the multicultural paradigm, which, some argue, tends to dilute rather than respect stronger claims for the right of social and political self-determination (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis 1992; Nootens 2014; Coulthard 2014). With respect to immigrant minorities, however, most of the cases that have reached the courts or been prominent in public discussions about “reasonable accommodation” have indeed been religious ones. These include demands for institutional accommodation of prayer times and spaces, and for the dietary requirements of different religious groups, along with the especially acute focus on the wearing and display of religious garments, such as turbans, headscarves and veils.
- 3.
Cf. Anna Galeotti: “With regard to ‘our’ practices, no matter how objectionable from the point of view of substantive autonomy, rarely, if ever, does one hear calls for public bans of the practice. In contrast, cries for a public ban were central to the protracted public controversy over the Islamic headscarf in France, leading to draconian regulations and to the prohibition on wearing it in school” (Galeotti 2015, 60). Phillips likewise draws attention to the “hierarchical differentiation between the agentic individuals from majority or Western ethnocultural groups and those ‘others’ deemed more passive and constrained” (Phillips 2015, 94).
- 4.
“Religion is not a race”, says one Quebec politician, in answer to the charge that the Canadian province’s ban on veils is racist.
- 5.
The racist anti-Sikh posters discovered on the University of Alberta campus in Canada in September of 2016 provide an especially odious example of such attitudes. See Alam (2016).
- 6.
It is also sometimes claimed that some forms of veiling, such as the burqa, are uncomfortable and may be harmful to women’s health. As Martha Nussbaum points out, however, the same could be said of many common Western items of women’s attire, such as high-heeled shoes, which no one is arguing for banning (Nussbaum 2012, 115). See also note 4 on the double standard used for judgements of autonomy in such cases. It is telling that recent feminist analyses emphasize respecting women’s agency in relation to cases of “choice” that earlier feminists had problematized, such as sex work and pornography, and yet choices such as wearing the hijab readily evoke suspicions of false consciousness (Al-Saji 2010, 881).
- 7.
This is not to ignore the many difficulties multicultural models have to confront in balancing individual and group rights, dealing with intra-group oppressions of gender and class, minorities within minorities, concerns about representation and so on, which it is not my purpose to discuss here.
- 8.
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Sikka, S. (2021). Pluralism About What? Religion as Belief and Identity. In: Puri, B., Kumar, A. (eds) Re-thinking Religious Pluralism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9540-0_1
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