Religious membership is generally not fully voluntary
Taken from the comments, slightly modified to make it general rather than a reply.
The literal meaning of the term “indoctrination” indicates the matter at issue quite clearly. Here’s a very standard definition from Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc.” Children are not merely instructed in doctrine, of course, they are also inducted into the ranks of religious organizations in various ways: not just educationally, but socially, ritually, and so on. Moreover, inducting children into the ranks of their chosen religion is the explicit primary purpose of most parents who emphasize their children’s religious education, which is what makes it indoctrination rather than mere education: The word “education,” when unmodified, is generally used to indicate instruction in knowledge and skills, not instruction in doctrine or ideology. Using a term like “religious education” – which I also used – doesn’t change a thing about either the purpose or results of the process.
Which leads me back to my main argument: Children’s membership in religious organizations is by definition not voluntary because children (at least young children) cannot legally, morally, or psychologically be judged capable of informed consent. The assertion that parents have the right to pass their religious beliefs on to their children is entirely irrelevant, because I have granted that exact same right. But acknowledging parents’ right to raise their children in their religious tradition does have the inevitable consequence that membership in religious organizations has a very large, elephant-in-the-room-sized non-voluntary component. I’ll grant that many of the things parents make children do are not voluntary by this standard, including ordinary education – but involuntarily imposing membership in religious organizations on children has different consequences from involuntarily imposing vaccinations or school attendance or violin lessons or whatever. Why? Because religious organizations frequently violate basic principles of justice and equality.
I also granted that religious liberty deserves special protection, and that this protection could even extend to letting religious organizations violate basic principles of justice and equality within their ranks. But for any religious organization’s freedom to discriminate within its ranks to be consistent with a free society’s protection of all rights for all citizens – this is, for it not to unduly privilege religious freedom above other basic rights, nor to unduly privilege some citizens above others simply because they were fortunate that their parents happened to have raised them outside of any discriminatory religious organization – no one can ever be coerced to join a discriminatory religious organization, and every member must be genuinely free to leave those ranks as they will. I will state it even more clearly: Permitting religious organizations to engage in discrimination is morally wrong if membership in religious organizations is not genuinely, fully voluntary. I deliberately chose not to emphasize or dwell on the matter of coercing adults to stay within the ranks of religious organizations because it is genuinely trickier, for many reasons – but how free one really is to leave the ranks doesn’t matter one bit if entering those ranks in the first place is not voluntary, and for the most part it is not.
Religious organizations and institutions do in fact discriminate, and they do in fact involuntarily induct many members into their ranks who cannot conceivably give informed consent – not just many, but the overwhelming majority. These facts create a fundamental conflict between the free exercise of religion and other fundamental rights – including the basic rights of self-determination and equal treatment, which are de facto denied to those unfortunate enough to be born to parents who raise them within the confines of discriminatory religious organizations. Since the basic rights of self-determination and equal treatment are the ultimate rationale for guaranteeing every citizen’s freedom of religion in the first place, this conflict is particularly acute.
I am not denying the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit (within reasonable limits), nor am I denying that religious organizations and institutions have the right to conduct their own religious business as they see fit (within reasonable limits), and that the latter right can reasonably be extended even to practices that discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, behavior, etc. What I am asserting is that these rights in combination generate a genuine logical and moral conflict with basic rights to self-determination: The right of religious organizations to engage in discriminatory practices can only avoid conflict with basic rights to equal treatment and self-determination if and when membership in religious organizations is genuinely voluntary – i.e. you aren’t being discriminated against if you entered the discriminatory group of your own free will and can leave at any time – and parents’ rights to impose religion on their children means that an overwhelming majority of members in religious organizations do not become members voluntarily by any reasonable definition.
Of the fundamental rights at stake, I think equality should trump the special protections offered to religion based on the principle of religious liberty: Religious beliefs include bigoted beliefs; I am loathe to extend special protection to the institutionalized practice and enforcement of bigotry simply because it falls under the heading of religion. The presumption that protecting religous freedom always and automatically does require the state to grant unfettered free reign to religiously-grounded sexism (and heterosexism, and so on) simply because it’s religious is exactly the presumption that Ophelia rightly calls into question in her post.
But how best to deal with this in practice is not at all clear. One thing that might help the situation comes from the other line of argument I made: Free democratic states need to fully disentangle themselves from religions, making them the truly private membership organizations they should be.
A good start would be doing more to keep indoctrination out of public schools, and in its place to ensure that children in public education are exposed to neutral, historical and sociological religious education that paints a realistic, non-judgmental picture of religious diversity. That would greatly reduce the coercive character of parental indoctrination: Even if children are taught “the One True Way” at home and church, they will be in a better position to make their own decisions as adults if they have at least been positively exposed to the idea that there are lots of other ways.
Also, state intervention in religion need not be overt or directly coercive. Perhaps the stance of a well-structured, genuinely free democracy ought to be something like the following: “Of course religious organizations have every right to set codes of conduct for their members, determine who they hire and promote to leadership positions, and so on. But we are only willing to grant tax exempt status to non-profit organizations – religious or otherwise – which are willing to make such decisions within the bounds of secular equal rights legislation that apply equally to all citizens and citizen organizations. If the Catholic Church wishes to be a ‘boys only’ club, then they can pay taxes like any other private club or association.”
The approach outlined above seems very defensible to me. There may be reasons to grant religious organizations some special protections and presumptive legal latitude simply because they are religious, in defense of freedom of religion for all citizens: But insofar as freedom of religion entails freedom from religion for those who abjure such affiliations, there should be a principled assumption *against* extending protection or latitude to such a degree that religious organizations and institutions are afforded positive benefits not available to similarly constituted but non-religious organizations and institutions. If a private membership club is not permitted to discriminate, a religious organization should not be: Or, if the state does allow religious organizations to discriminate (on the basis of sex, race, or some other protected category aside from religion itself) in order to maximize freedom of religion, at the very least the state has a legitimate compelling interest (upholding equal rights for all citizens) in and an objective justification for treating a religious organization that discriminates differently from one that does not discriminate. In the U.S., churches that engage in overtly partisan politics theoretically risk losing their tax-exempt status – although in practice this is true more in the breach than the observance. Why not impose the same sort of limitation on churches that engage in hiring discrimination?
I think your approach to state intervention is perfectly reasonable and ideally what we should do. I have no disagreements at all with your answer to “what should we do about this problem?” I will say again, though, that some of your statements (like “Permitting religious organizations to engage in discrimination is morally wrong if membership in religious organizations is not genuinely, fully voluntary”) suggest the appropriateness of a far greater degree of coercive state intervention than you end up advocating here.
As for your central point: you think unjust religion is particularly problematic because (1) it discriminates, and (2) entry is not voluntary. While I agree that this is bad, I don’t agree that the badness is a case of religion getting treatment a secular group or practice would not get.
You seem to think it’s hand-waving or trivial to point out that parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit. But I don’t think so, because the existence of that right means that religion doesn’t actually pose a special dilemma here. THAT was my point. Yes, religion frequently violates basic justice and equality. So do many secular things that parents legally do, which have long-term effects. Inculcation into non-religious tribal (ethnic, regional) loyalties come immediately to my mind. So I fail to see a special religion-posed dilemma here. I understand the problem posed by the combination of inequity and involuntariness. I just can’t see it as a case of religion getting special treatment, which I think was a major point of OB’s, and which I was trying to address.
Well Jenavir what other secular institution or set of ideas or combination of the two has the kind of hold on people’s minds that religion does? Or the massive rhetorical backup? Outside of North Korea anyway.
There’s an interesting point related to this in the “exceptions” section of the new Irish blasphemy law.
The authors have tried to write it so that Scientology is excluded but several of the “or” sections can equally be applied to mainstream religions (I presume this was unintentional since believers can always see the problems with others faith while ignoring the same problems with their own.)
(4) In this section “religion” does not include an organisation or
cult—
(a) the principal object of which is the making of profit, or
(b) that employs oppressive psychological manipulation—
(i) of its followers, or
(ii) for the purpose of gaining new followers.
Isn’t indoctrination a type of psychological manipulation? – particularly when threats of eternal torture in hell (I would suggest that this puts it in the “oppressive” category)
@Jenavir:
On the other hand, arguing that something is morally wrong does not necessarily mean that you support legislation or other significant state coercion against the immoral practice. One could argue that lying is usually immoral, but be very happy that it is not actually illegal to lie at the same time.
Just to name an example, here in the Netherlands, religious schools and churches are pretty much the only organizations that can fire people because they are gay. They all cite religious freedom protection to do so.
Ideally, I’d prefer a harder line, though I accept that it isn’t politically possible.
Agreed, the state needn’t (and in practice can’t) police all the nonsense and bad advice that parents feed to children. But it should intervene if, for extreme example, parents tell a daughter that if she walks out of the window, angels will support her. Or, to take a real example, that Allah requires her to marry a cousin she hasn’t met.
In principle, ‘you will only be saved if you believe that Jesus died for your sins’ is just as pernicious as the angels. I’ve known many damaged people from the less-than-half-catholic church who intellectually escape, but cannot do so emotionally, even in mature adulthood. The Jesus stuff only gets a free ride because it was historically widely believed in many western democracies, and is still believed by many obviously good and well-meaning people.
Moreover, I think that democracies should confront head-on all discrimination against women, including cases where it is claimed to be necessary because of unprovable assertions about the will of a supernatural entity. There easily could have been self-styled churches which excluded blacks (or whites) from office. Indeed, I think there may be churches which in practice, but probably not overtly, do exclude blacks, or whites, from office. If they claimed, as they might, that they can’t have white priests because Jesus only chose dark-skinned disciples, or can’t have black priests because only pinko-grey can symbolise the perfection of YHWH (and some such), then an enlightened state should fearlessly tell them they are wrong, and are not allowed to discriminate in this way.
Not just no tax breaks for the less-than-half-catholic church: unlimited compensation for women who are denied the opportunity to become priests.
A private club for the preservation of a wilderness can properly refuse membership to someone who insists on shooting ducks in it. Likewise, a church that promotes compassion can drum out a priest who rapes children. I must be allowed to sack a waiter who neglects the rules on food safety. But not one whose eyes I say don’t match the uniform I say my god requires waiters to wear.
Above all, of course, away with ‘faith’ schools in the UK. That’s not achievable short-term, because UK politicians believe it’s a vote loser. What is (almost) achieved, and needs to be reinforced, is an insistence that in all schools, including ‘faith’ schools, children are told that there are many religions. Many, though alas not all, children will then see for themselves that either (a) (say) Islam is correct and (say) Christianity is false, and Allah is weirdly mean to the Christians; or (b) vice versa; or (c) both Islam and Christianity are false.
John Rawls spends a lot of time in his works discussing how the state should approach institutions in a pluralistic society, and his ideal is along these lines. Within the institution there can be hierarchies and the like, with discrimination and so forth, so long as all involved have the right of free association; that is, individuals can join and leave the organization freely, with no coercion or punishment for leaving. This of course doesn’t put a clear-cut line on where coercion starts and so forth, but it at least provides a consistent framework.
I’m drawing heavily from his Justice As Fairness, which is a shorter summary of his work released in the early 2000s. Seriously, read it!
Jenavir wrote:
You seem to think it’s hand-waving or trivial to point out that parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit. But I don’t think so, because the existence of that right means that religion doesn’t actually pose a special dilemma here.
Not sure what country you’re talking about, but it can’t be the US. Here in America we believe so strongly in parents being allowed to raise their children according to their religion, that most states have exempted religion from child abuse statutes, we allow parents to withhold medical treatment from children, even to the point of death, and there are no consequences for the parents. There is no secular organization that provides an equivalent immunity for such acts. Only religious believers are afforded such special treatment.
Jenavir wrote:
Hurm. The hand-waving in your assertion is the part where you declare that there is no special dilemma posed by religion, ignoring the fundamental rights conflict I took such pains to clarify. I don’t know how I could explain this more clearly than I did in the post, but here goes:
Protecting religious freedom is, I have repeatedly granted, important: Many people consider their religious identity absolutely central to their self-identity, and more generally self-determination in ones personal beliefs and conduct (that does not harm others) constitutes a fundamental right that ought to be protected. Also, European history (all of history, really) is ripe to bursting with examples of why the state needs to keep its clumsy, brutish hands off religion – and vice versa. And that is why parents’ rights to raise their children poses a special problem with respect to religion, but not in general. I spelled out the logic of that conflict in what I thought was a fairly clear way in the post (see esp. the fifth paragraph), but maybe example cases would help:
If a given set of parents were to raise their children to be bigots, and even go so far as to induct their children (without their informed consent, which they cannot conceivably give) into an organization whose whole purpose is to further a bigoted social and political agenda – a white supremacist group, for example – the state has no special extra obligations with respect to the white supremacist group. Parents’ rights to raise their children are still protected – even if parents raise their children with no real values but hate for those different from themselves – but the organization itself does not have any special legal status that earns it privileges or any sort of protected status. Rather the opposite: Such an organization would be on every kind of law enforcement watch list, and could easily be subject to legal action under RICO and other laws if they cross any legal line whatsoever. Further, if that organization were to try to engage directly in broader civic life by gaining an official legal status – say, if its members attempted to form a 527 campaign organization to elect a racist candidate for public office, or form a tax exempt 501(c)7 social club – the organization so constituted would be subject to all fair hiring and other anti-discrimination laws with no special exception for their beliefs. While everything about the example is unpleasant with respect to the parents’ conduct and the nature of the group they have raised their children in, it poses no special dilemma with regard to other rights that the state is obligated to protect.
The parallel cases should be clear enough. Suppose instead of a white supremacist group, the parents are Episcopalians and raise their children in that religious tradition and institution. The organization here is obviously religious, and therefore does have a special legal status by which it is not only protected from interference but also receives certain privileges, such as tax exemptions. But since the American Episcopal Church is a fairly liberal organization that currently does not engage in systematic and institutionalized discrimination – women can and have become priests and bishops and what not, for example – again, there is no special dilemma.
Catholic and Islamic parents, however, are inducting their children (which, again, cannot be voluntary on the part of the children) into organizations that DO engage in systematic and institutionalized discrimination, but that are also religious and therefore DO have have a special legal status by which they are protected from interference and beneficiaries of certain legal privileges. This is where the dilemma arises, because this combination creates a conflict with other rights that the state is obligated to protect.
The right of parents to raise their children as they see fit is not problematic in itself. Nor are the protected legal status and even legal privileges enjoyed by religious organizations problematic in themselves: I have granted that they are justified by any and all of the compelling reasons the state ought to grant a fairly high priority to protecting and preserving freedom of religion.
Moreover, I have even granted that extending protection of religious freedom even to the degree that the state grants religious organizations leeway to discriminate in hiring and internal leadership decisions is justified: However, granting such leeway clearly can and does materially conflict with other rights that the state is obligated to protect – such as the right to fair and equal treatment before the law – if membership in the religious organization is in any way involuntary. When membership in a religious organization is genuinely voluntary, any discriminatory practices the organization engages in do not conflict with protecting and preserving equality because those “discriminated against” chose of their own free will to enter the organization and can leave at any time they wish. (I still think it is problematic if the religious organization enjoys social benefits and privileges not available to relevantly similar non-religious organizations, but that’s a separate point, and one no one has expressed any disagreement over here.)
Here, then, is the dilemma – for the right of parents to raise their children and the right to religious freedom in concert create a conflict with the right to equal treatment and equal protection under the law. Without the involuntary induction of children into membership in religious organizations granted as a parental right, the leeway to discriminate that religious organizations are granted to protect freedom of religion would not generate a dilemma with respect to other fundamental rights the state is also obligated to protect.
Some (not so) brief comments:
Much of the description of religious institutions doesn’t match my personal experience. As such am I am bothered by some of the more inflamatory rhetoric that tends to attribute the worst qualities of some institutions to all.
“Religious organizations and institutions do in fact discriminate” More so than other groups? All religious organizations? There is a factual claim here that is lacking in support.
“Religious beliefs include bigoted beliefs” This is so broad as to be largely meaningless. It reminds be of the statement that the 20th century was one long uninterupted period of warfare. True but only through equivocation.
“Because religious organizations frequently violate basic principles of justice and equality.” This is another strong factual claim that would be hard to support. That such organizations exist I have no doubt. I do question the frequency and whether or not it is inherent to religious organizations.
A few years ago, I ran a few “Hebrew Homeschool” sessions for my children and the children of a few other families. I led what we called “Text Study” which involved study and discussion of a variety of texts taking into consideration what our tradition (Jewish) had to say about them. One of the more memorable sessions was based upon a discussion inspired by Jean Kazez’s post about “The Little Red Hen” (http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=118). The indoctrination piece was that I asked specifically about what our tradition has to say about the hen’s behavior. The consensus was that the hen acted in violation of some basic religious precepts such as leaving the corners of your field for the poor. The idea being that our religion teaches that even if you own the land, the seed, and do all of the labor, that there is still an obligation to others. The discussion included much more such as what if the “friends” couldn’t help due to injury, other jobs, etc. What if the hen had several chicks to feed, etc. Other questions were asked and discussed such as why is this story taught in America?
Was this indoctrination? You bet. Perhaps it can be forgiven in that the goal of these sessions was to encourage critical thinking and an awareness of our tradition. If you suspect that the two don’t go together, I’d be willing to explain how they can.
Was this voluntary for the children? Of course not. Part of raising children includes making decisions about their upbringing. I don’t give my children a choice about vaccinations, attending school, bedtime, or a host of other activities. You can’t be a responsible parent by only allowing for fully voluntary choices.
The tax code is fairly clear about what constitutes partisan politics. The key limitation is that a tax-exempt organization (all such organizations, not just religious) may not support a specific candidate in an election. Because it is fairly easy to meet this requirement and still support a candidate by loudly supporting the issues with which that candidate is aligned, it is rare for an organization to violate the specific restriction.
There are non-religious organizations that discriminate for which we permit tax-exempt status. Wellesley College comes to mind. Linking discrimination to tax-exempt status may have unintended consequences.
Despite my obvious biases and despite being an active member of a synagogue, I do agree that tax-exempt status for religious organizations is suspect. It seems that you can reach that conclusion independently of the questions of discrimination, indoctrination, and the non-voluntary nature of some of them.
I find myself having mixed feelings about this article. There are many valid concerns expressed but they seemed to be somewhat muddled. The suggestions for action strike me as benign or possibly weaker than current law and practice in the United States. The problems described don’t seem to be specific to religious organizations nor are they inherent to religious organizations. On the other hand when I strip away some of the rhetoric I do find some questions that I would like to see explored further (usually by stripping out the word religious):
1. Permitting organizations to engage in discrimination is morally wrong if membership in said organizations is not genuinely, fully voluntary. I’m having difficulty with the qualifier. The question of permitting discrimination does seem to me to be a separate question from coercion. Since parents have a great deal of control over the activities of their younger children the conclusion would be that it would be morally wrong to permit any organization that has children as members to engage in discrimination. If that is the case then I suspect that having children as members is likely to be irrelevant, the real question is what kind of discrimination is morally wrong.
2. No one can ever be coerced to join a discriminatory organization, and every member must be genuinely free to leave those ranks as they will. Does this mean that if the organization isn’t discriminatory that coercion is acceptable? Genuinely free is also a problematical concept. I know of some communities where people are “free” to leave but have been denied the education needed to make it a realistic choice.
3. What limits should the state impose with respect to child-rearing? I wouldn’t trust the state to have complete control neither would I allow parents to do as they see fit. What sort of indoctrination is acceptable and what is beyond the pale?
I don’t check these comments very frequently, feel free to email me for clarification or rebuttal.
Jeff Alexander
Jeff,
“Religious organizations and institutions do in fact discriminate” More so than other groups?
Not necessarily, but religious orgs and insts get special exemption from some laws which other groups don’t get – the combination is the issue.
“Genuinely free” is a very problematic concept indeed!
I can see how that can be misleading in isolation – but it isn’t in isolation. It’s half of a dilemma – or perhaps I should say, one third of a trilemma. It is the combination of this moral claim with other moral claims that creates the problem, but perhaps it would have helped if I’d framed all of the moral claims as clearly. I hate to put the ‘anal’ in analytic philosophy, but sometimes the clarity is worth the effort.
Claim 1: Parents have a right (which ought to be guaranteed and protected by a just state) to raise their children as they see fit, albeit within certain reasonable limits. Those reasonable limits are primarily characterized by the rights of children, who ought to be treated as having all human rights not intimately and immediately bound up with self-determination, such as the right to life and the right to security in their persons. (Fetuses aren’t children, so don’t even go there.)
Claim 2: People have a right (which ought to be guaranteed and protected by a just state) to religious freedom. Moreover, a just state is obligated to allow citizens the free exercise of the religion of their choice to the greatest degree consistent with other fundamental rights. (Something similar about greatest latitude consistent with other rights could be said of all fundamental rights, and would seem to be what makes them fundamental – such as the right to self-determination more broadly, freedom of speech and association, etc. – but the matter of latitude bears special mention given the history of religious unfreedom.)
Claim 3: All citizens of a just state are due equal treatment under and equal protection of the law.
Subclaim 1 (intersection of C1 & C2): Educating and inducting their children into a religious tradition and organization of their choice lies well within the reasonable limits on parental rights. [This not only falls out of the discussion of ‘reasonable limits’ described under C1, but deserves special mention and protection under C2.]
Subclaim 2 (intersection of C2 & C3): Allowing believers to structure their religious organizations and practices in a discriminatory fashion need not run afoul of citizens’ right to equal protection under the law (fair employment laws, for example), but only if citizens enter and leave religious organizations on a genuinely voluntary basis. [Generally speaking, under the concept of natural or inalienable rights, one cannot give up a right such as the right to equal protection under the law. What matters here is the definition of discrimination, not equal protection. Discrimination is quite reasonably defined under U.S. Constitutional law precedent as granting or denying particular privileges to a class arbitrarily designated from a sizable number of persons, where no reasonable distinction exists between the favored and disfavored classes. Here, voluntary choice constitutes a non-arbitrary, very reasonable basis for designating a class of persons to be denied certain privileges. Thus, if you freely and voluntarily join a church that engages in discriminatory hiring of ministers based on sex, for example, you have no basis to sue the church for discrimination under the banner of your right to equal protection of the law: You are in fact being treated equally to every other citizen, insofar as you have the freedom not to affiliate with the discriminatory religious organization, and can freely choose a different, non-discriminatory church to attempt to become a minister in.]
Subclaim 3 (both an implication of C1 and a simple matter of fact): Although it is well within the rights of parents to raise their children in a religious tradition and induct their children into the religious organization of their choice, it is in no way reasonable to describe this as the child’s choice. Insofar as children are factually not capable of given fully informed consent and are legally not self-determining [see C1], and insofar as most adults are inducted into religious organizations as children, most membership in and affiliation with religious organizations is NOT genuinely voluntary.
Subclaim 3, partially derived from and in concert with Claim 1, is clearly in conflict with Subclaim 2 (which derives from Claim 2 & Claim 3). Either (1) religious organizations should not be allowed to discriminate – which generates a conflict with protection of religious freedom, Claim 2; or (2) parents should not be allowed to induct their children into religious organizations which discriminate – which generates a conflict with parental rights, Claim 1; or (3) we can give up Claim 3 entirely and grant that some citizens – women, gays – really are just second-class citizens who neither deserve nor receive genuine equal protection of the law.
I’m not genuinely ready to give up any of the three pivotal moral claims, and I recognize that there are real practical and political problems to be navigated in this mess. But if I had to prioritize, I would definitely put equal protection of the law before religious freedom or parental rights.
tomh: yes, I’m aware that in America religious parents are sometimes allowed to do things no non-religious parents get away with. I wasn’t speaking of extreme cases like denial of medical care, but rather more common cases like (for instance) sexism or induction into sexist institutions.
G. (I’m going to try block-quoting and see if it works):
They don’t have tax exemptions, which you correctly identify as a special religious privilege. But they do have the right to discriminate, if I recall correctly. I might be wrong about this. Maybe there have been lawsuits against the KKK for unfair hiring practices (probably no minority would want to join, but the KKK is sexist as well, so maybe a white woman wanted to be Grand Wizard or whatever?). The right to discriminate is really what I was focusing on, in saying that parents are free to make their children members of groups that discriminate whether they are religious or not.
Thank you for the longer explanation at 15:12:29. I always find more detail helpful, even if it is a little anal! I’ll have to read it and think about it later.
A well thought out article.
I find myself in complete agreement.
A few points:
Are there in fact any religious organizations and institutions that do not discriminate ? By their very nature, religious organizations are sectarian. If they did not discriminate they would not be religious.
The suggestions with respect to tax exempt status seem overly complex. Let’s keep it simple, no religion gets tax exempt status, ever, period, full stop. No need to agonize over definitions of voluntary, no army of bureaucrats needed to enforce regulations. Let’s put religions on the same footing as the chess club, botanical society, Italian club (yet another discriminatory organization !) etc. You want to belong the religious club X ? Fine, pay your dues and pay your taxes.
Quakers? I’m guessing, but I think they don’t discriminate. Unitarians?
Yes, there’s a great deal that can be done short of taking action that effectively renders a religion illegal (which could be the effect in some cases, given that issues about who can be a priest may be core doctrines in some religions). Remember, we were initially talking about a newspaper artcle that was mainly worried about whether it should henceforth be illegal for the Catholic Church to restrict the priesthood to men. I was arguing that that should not be illegal, and I still think so – it’s tantamount to banning the whole religion, which is not something we should want to do and is not practical. On this, I take the same approach as Lori Hamilton – it’s a legitimate area for legislative exemption, but not for a declaration of unconstitionality by the courts where there is a constitutional provision similar to that in the US.
I think some people took my approach to this narrow situation as meaning I’d take a broader approach to letting religions discriminate. But not really. You can do a lot to knock them around the ears without effectively banning the religion.
Personally, my approach might well be a variant of Ophelia’s, but working out how it would actually operate is pretty hard, especially since I actually take a tougher line than Ophelia seems to on tax breaks. Ideally, I’d say: don’t give any of them tax breaks, at least for their merely religious activities (as opposed to genuinely charitable ones). That’s not coercive, it’s withdrawing an unwarranted privilege that they shouldn’t have had in the first place. It then becomes a matter of whether we can find any meaningful carrots for them if they are good.
Still, it’s also not going to be politically acceptable. I don’t think it breaches any political principle that we have good reason to defend, but I do realise it would be too unpopular to to be practical. So maybe something like Ophelia’s proposal is a better policy recommendation for the real world.
My ideas on this are still vague and undeveloped, for which I apologise. But it’s no use waiting until I have a watertight policy proposal; this is something that needs to be discussed, despite all its difficulties.
A quick (and superficial) perusal of wikipedia tells us this:
In 1827 a division occurred within Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when its members could not agree on who was to be clerk. The issue involved the visits and preaching of Elias Hicks in violation of the will of numerous meetings; they claimed his views were universalist and contradicted the historical tradition of Friends. The same year, a number of Friends in sympathy with him separated to form a parallel system of yearly meetings in America, referred to as Hicksite and those who did not were called Orthodox; ultimately five yearly meetings divided.
Quakers have their apostates and schisms just like any other religion. In this case they discriminated over an argument
about the meaning of revealed truths, and as a result, what used to be one organization suddenly became 2 using some bizarre set of criteria based on differing interpretations of dogma to distinguish one group from the other.
On Unitarians we see:
Unitarianism can very loosely be divided into two categories. Both maintain that God is one being and one “person”—the one Jesus called “Our Father”. Jesus is the (or a) Son of God, but generally not God himself.
I don’t see how any ideology based on claiming knowledge about how the universe works without any evidence to back it up (and often in the face of evidence to the contrary) could be any thing else but discriminatory, there has to be an “us” (the saved, the chosen, the elect, ad nauseam) and a “them” (the damned, apostates, infidels, etc).
We see this taken to the absurd (but internally logical) extreme, when from my vantage point as a Canadian, I look at 2 people from Ireland, who are indistinguishable to me in speech, dress, mannerisms etc., until one of them kills the other and I discover that one is catholic and the other is protestant.
Ditto for sunni and shia muslims from Iran. Could you look a a picture of a dead muslim from Iran as the result of sectarian violence and identify whether it was sunni or shia. The killer sure could.
Perhaps we are seeing an operative definition of religion; creation of an in group and an out group based on non physical characteristics.
Oh, I’m all in favor of not giving churches tax exemptions, Russell.
Steve, but modern Quakers are pretty liberal, no? As these things go.
Re Russell’s comment on tax exemptions:
I wholeheartedly agree that giving religious groups tax exemptions simply because they are religious groups is problematic: That’s why I mentioned the problem of granting privileges to religious groups that aren’t available to similarly constituted non-religious groups.
I think it helps to have a broader awareness of what sort of groups DO get tax exemptions: Purely social groups can qualify for non-profit tax exempt status under U.S. law if they meet certain qualifications, such as a certain proportion of their income being dependent on membership dues/member donations, not operating at any significant profit, etc. One of those criteria is that they DO have membership criteria (being a graduate of a certain school to qualify for membership in an alumni association), but don’t exclude otherwise qualified persons on based on an arbitrary unrelated status (so an alumnae organization of a women’s college could not exclude men because they are men, but they could because they are not alums – and of course, that would change if the women’s college became co-ed, as some historically have). In other words, you can have membership criteria like adherence to a certain set of religious beliefs, but that would still not grant you any right to discriminate on the basis of some other criterion like gender and still qualify for tax-exempt status. That’s why I specifically referred to 501(c)7 social groups, as opposed to a 501(c)3 charitable organization (which a church need not be) – but both are tax-exempt non-profit organizations. I just thought links to the IRS website would be tedious (and now I don’t have time to look them up and put them in here – but they’re the first hits on Google if you search for the cited tax codes).
I’m still a bit worried about your position, Russell. Perhaps you could help me. You seem to be saying that if something is a core part of a religion, then it should not be subject to legal sanctions. However, the relegation of women to lower status is clearly a central aspect of Islam. It is expressed plainly in the Qu’ran and the Hadith, it is exemplified in Sharia law, and it is hallowed by tradition. Should this let Islam off the hook in the same way that you think the Roman Catholic Church should be off the hook regarding women in the priesthood?
OB – but modern Quakers are pretty liberal, no? As these things go.
Perhaps, in the same sense that modern misogynists are less likely to use sexist language than those in days past.
Their change in behaviour has more to do with external forces than any quality inherent to their ideology. Consciousness raising and public censure are examples of the external forces driving this sort of change. It was certainly nothing in their holy books that caused the change, as the books did not change, just their interpretation. That is, decades and centuries of study of the holy books did not suddenly reveal new information that had previously been missed.
Modern Quakers may be more “liberal” to the same extent that they are less religious.
Yeh. That’s pretty much what I meant, Steve. Quakers are (I gather, without really knowing much about it) more open to being changed by those external forces than more conventional religions are. In short they tend to be liberal.
Oops. Duh. I echoed your ‘liberal’ point without noticing it. Anyway yeah. Their liberalism pulls (nowadays) against their religiosity.
At the end of the day, I think religious liberty, including the liberty to indoctrinate your children, is important not because it itself is a good thing, but because I cannot imagine a world in which this liberty did not exist without that world also being an utter disaster.
In practice, Russell, your argument is compelling. And in practice, no government is going to take on the Roman not-at-all-catholic church about women priests – and therefore eventually cardinals, and therefore a prospect of some new and truly compassionate thinking in the church’s management. But I’d still like to resist part of your argument.
“Anti-discrimination employment law exists to ensure that women (and other groups) are not excluded from the mainstream (primarily secular) labour market.” Maybe. But I would argue that it fundamentally exists to contest an assumption, held for millennia in many societies and at the heart of most of the big religions, that women are inherently inferior to men.
If the Roman not-catholic church advanced any intelligible reason for excluding women from its workforce, akin to saying that only men can take part in a clinical trial of a treatment for prostate cancer, then plainly the R not-c c should be allowed to discriminate. But they don’t. Instead, they do handwaving essentially about the inherent maleness of their supposed god. And that’s code for the old bad idea that women are inferior. Ideally, governments would tell them they’re wrong.
A great article with some very thoughtful comments.
On discriminatory practices in religious groups (e.g. preventing women or gay people access to specific roles/jobs or even participation in the group), modern societies will not continue to tolerate these practices indefinitely. I believe that as these practices become more and more anachronistic over time, exemptions to our increasingly decent and comprehensive human rights bills, charters and laws will no longer be acceptable within the community. I only hope this happens soon. No religious groups should be exempt from these laws.
I can’t see why any group should be given a tax exemption, unless the entirety of their profits are given for actual charity (e.g. to feed people, give clothing, counselling, cricket equipment, etc.).
On parental indoctrination, I can’t see how this can be prevented. However, I’ve got a couple of suggestions:
– No person can be considered an official member of a religious group until they are legally an adult (16, 18, 21; take your pick). Of course, this won’t stop children attending, but at least they’ll be asked to officially ‘sign up’ at a later date.
– The state has an overwhelming educational responsibility. It must develop students who can think critically about things we have discovered (scientific facts), things we’re pretty sure about (scientific theories) and things which we’ve pondered for thousands of years (philosophy, especially metaphysics) without finding much in the way of universal truths. This includes studying and finding out about ways of answering metaphysical questions. All students should find out about christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, hinduis, etc (their practices and history) and understand that there are lots of people who live moral lives without adhering to any of the above. If parents don’t want to send their children to a school (state or private) that follows this curriculum, parents should not expect their school to be given any governmental funding.