What ‘toleration’ requires
The Telegraph speaks up for inequality.
Toleration is one of the most fundamental values of a liberal society. It is also appears to be the one that some Labour ministers find hardest to understand. It requires accepting that other people are entitled to arrange their lives and institutions around their religious beliefs – even when those beliefs appear, to those who do not adhere to the religion in question, to be wrong-headed, or even discriminatory.
Really? Does it? ‘Toleration’ requires accepting that other people are entitled to arrange their institutions around their religious beliefs, no matter how oppressive and powerful and influential those institutions are? Really? So toleration requires accepting that a few other people are entitled to arrange institutions that control and oppress millions or billions of other people who are carefully and explicitly and permanently excluded from any power within those institutions? Really? No exceptions? So if a gang of clerics ‘arranges’ an institution that divides people into slave and free, toleration requires everyone to accept that?
Oh no no no – that’s not what we meant at all, The Telegraph would perhaps reply. No no, of course not. We meant the institutions that already exist, and have always excluded women from any power and any role in shaping the very rules that exclude them. That’s all. That’s quite a different thing, obviously; not like slavery at all. Obviously slavery is horrendous and no people can be allowed to ‘arrange their institutions’ in such a way as to allow slavery. God no. But it’s fine to exclude women – obviously – because women are…you know…well they’re not quite complete people, that’s all; they’re represented by the men they’re related to; so nothing is lost if they are excluded. Surely that’s obvious enough?
No, it’s not, actually, but it is obvious enough that that’s what unthinking smug comfortable people think on the subject. It’s also obvious that they’re careful to word things in such a way that that doesn’t jump off the page. It’s very sly to talk of ‘other people’ arranging ‘their lives and institutions around their religious beliefs’ as if it were a matter of all the people in question agreeing on how to arrange the institution when the exclusion of half those people from any possibility of participating in that process is precisely the issue. It’s not that ‘people’ arrange the institutions in such a way that women have no say, it’s that clerical men do. It can’t be called ‘toleration’ to accept the arrangement of institutions that officially permanently disenfranchise half their members at the outset. Yet The Telegraph feels entitled to do just that. Three cheers for the status quo.
For once, I’m tempted to play devil’s advocate. Not that I’m usually much in sympathy with the Telegraph on such matters, but I don’t see why private institutions shouldn’t be entitled to discriminate in whatever way they like with respect to membership.
If the Catholic church*, for reasons that make no sense to me, want to exclude women from the priesthood, I don’t see that its the role of Government to prevent them. Likewise, if some group of racist nutjobs want to exclude blacks, or caucasians, or any other group, as long as they remain an entirely private members organisation, I don’t see that as any business of the state.
The quid pro quo that I’d want such institutions to accept, though, is that if they want to run themselves along such lines, the state should not go getting them involved in the running of schools, adoption agencies, and any number of other quasi-state-run institutions that the Catholic church are involved in
*As someone living in a simmering bed of sectarian idiocy, I should point out I’m picking on the catholic church only because it’s the biggest and most entwined with the state, at least in the UK, of those religious organisations excluding women.
I don’t think the slavery analogy quite works. In the western world at least, people are perfectly entitled to leave any religious group whose principles they disagree with. Slaves, by definition, could not simply walk away from their position and go live somewhere which didn’t allow slavery.
The main point I would make is that the Catholic church is really not a private institution. It’s different from the state (though often highly entangled with it), but in many ways it acts like the state. It has massive power over people, usually from birth. It’s not like a mere club or voluntary organization – it has vastly more power and influence than that. It doesn’t really match the description ‘an entirely private members organisation.’
People are entitled to leave any religious group whose principles they disagree with, but that’s very far from saying they’re entirely free to. Most people are born into their particular church, and leaving is correspondingly difficult.
Now why was this predictable?
A law passed in 2007 forced the closure of two Catholic adoption agencies for their refusal to place children with gay couples.
How does that differ from,
… two Catholic adoption agencies chose to close rather than abide by the law.?
patrick,
You make a good point, but this is a statement of general principle. People can arrange their lives around anything the want as long as they stay within the law, but some institutions (whatever is meant by that) carry a lot of weight and not everyone under the aegis of such institutions is free to leave, or finds it a simple matter to do so.
To grant institutions the right to exemption from laws which apply to everyone else, on the grounds of appeal to faith is a bad idea.
I agree that it is not the business of secular courts to tell the church who can wear what hat or be addressed by which vacuous honorific. But on matters of employment rights, access to services, that sort of thing? They should follow the same rules. I appreciate your quid pro quo idea – which I would see as, ‘If you want to discriminate, get thee to a nunnery’.
Tolerance is a strange and interesting subject. Liberal states seem to have a vested interest in making sure that some of its communities are organized in a democratic way (i.e., unions), while at the same time they do not especially care about the organizational fairness of other institutions (i.e., religious communities). If we really cared about the idea of the autonomy of communities, then you would think we would have to take a tolerant attitude towards all the different kinds of community within a society.
The puzzle could be resolved if religions were by their nature supposed to provide people with asylum from the state. In that way, the broad attitude of toleration we’re supposed to have towards religions would have a hope of being legitimate. But I don’t think that the legal regimes of today have got that idea in mind.
You know how some banks are ‘too big to fail’? Well some religions are too big to be independent of equality laws.
It can’t be called ‘toleration’ to accept the arrangement of institutions that officially permanently disenfranchise half their members at the outset.
On the contrary, I think it can be called ‘toleration’, according to the dictionary definition. I think your point should rather be that toleration is not always good. If we allowed murderers to go free, that would be toleration too, but it’s a form of toleration that we should not – um – tolerate.
Hmmyes…but it can’t be ‘toleration’ in the sense the Telegraph means, which includes an implicit ‘good.’ I avoid the words (tolerance and toleration) myself for just that reason – I think they stupidly imply that tolerance is always good when of course, as you say, that’s nonsense. The scare quotes in the post were intended to indicate that distance – the scare quotes meant ‘toleration in the sense meant by the Telegraph, which is a stupid sense.’
I’m afraid I disagree with you on this one, Ophelia. I don’t care how these religious organisations structure themselves internally, and I don’t think it’s any of the state’s business. Sure, we can worry if they’re abusing children, and there are always grey areas. But if it’s their doctrine that you have to be a two-headed rodent to be a priest, that’s no concern of mine. If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Bicephalic Rat. Create a schism in the time-honoured way. The role of the state is to make sure that continuing membership is not coerced, not to require that the doctrine be changed (which would be a clear attack on freedom of religion).
It’s when these religious organisations try to impose their doctrines on the rest of us, through the political process, that I get worried. But I also get worried about the need to defend freedom of religion.
Freedom of religion cuts both ways: (1) they get to organise themselves internally in accordance with their doctrines, and we put up with it (i.e. tolerate it); (2) we get to live our lives in violation of their doctrines, and they have to put up with it. We can’t rely on (2) while refusing to accept (1).
So Russell you think religious organizations should be exempt from secular equality laws? Unlike other organizations and other employers? They should have special rights to ignore the laws because they are religious? I don’t.
And do you really not care how these religious organisations structure themselves internally? Even though it means that one gender is entitled to make rules for the other that many people consider far more binding than secular laws, while the other gender is not entitled to make rules for the other gender or its own? In a world where people are inducted into those religions at birth?
I can see thinking freedom of religion has to trump all that, but I have a hard time seeing ‘I don’t care.’
Well, Russell, I disagree. Large institutions, like the Roman Catholic Church, or like the Church of England, or like Muslims in Great Britain (almost overpowering culturally amongst Muslims who would be (and are often) endangered should they choose not to live according to Islamic tradition and doctrine), should not have a right to structure themselves in such a way as to disadvantage half (or greater than half) of their constituency. They should not have the right to oppress them, or others like them, in the surrounding community, by their beliefs and practices, especially when those beliefs are systematically used to influence public decisions and discourse, and more particularly when demands for respect, and freedom from offence are consistently made. Indeed, very few of these institutions observe your condition (2) without restriction or complaint. And in societies where these institutions may control, and be encouraged to control, the means of public education, the freedom of children and young people in their control to live in violation of their doctrines is seriously compromised and limited.
I have expressed myself vaguely, since the Roman Catholic Church and Islam not only disadvantage women, but also speak disparagingly of gay and lesbian people. So do many in the Church of England. Why should this be tolerated in a free society? These institutions have enormous power over people. They have direct and nearly unlimited influence upon children, upon their beliefs, and ways of understanding themselves and their society, including other members of it.
Regarding both Islam and the Roman Catholic Church, there is another serious concern. The Roman Catholic Church is controlled by a foreign power, and the same concerns that were valid in Elizabethan times are still valid today. The Vatican actually interferes in the workings of democracies and in public policy decisions by threatening catholic politician with excommunication. The same, though in a less structured way, is true of many Muslim associations and religious centres. Why should a reactionary state like Saudi Arabia be empowered to spread its oppresive influence to citizens of Britain in the name of toleration (or ‘toleration’)?
Well maybe I don’t have such a hard time seeing ‘I don’t care’ – that was close to my view before I wrote (co-wrote) Does God Hate Women? It was protracted exposure to the Vatican’s instructions to women that changed my mind about that – the spectacle of centuries upon centuries of men telling women what’s what while taking very good care never to allow them to participate. I think I did think of it as just their business – just internal – priests mumbling over the mass, that kind of thing. I overlooked how much of it is law-giving. I think law-giving has to be representative, period.
Also, Russell, the laws are not specific to religions – they’re simply laws, that apply across the board. It’s not obvious why religions should be entitled to exemptions from general laws. In the US the free exercise clause of the First Amendment is a major reason they are, but that’s a very contentious area of law and it goes back and forth a lot. Martha Nussbaum is a fan of the ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ – I think she’s batty!
The Vatican, Irish, American and other world-wide hierarchical prominent figureheads — who ride rough-shod over their flock; are also the same powerful religious with philosophy degrees under their belts and the very same so-called innocent holy beings who pretend not to understand child paedophilia. Mind-boggling! Philosophy how are you!
Oh Russell, I expected much better from you!
“I don’t care how these religious organisations structure themselves internally, and I don’t think it’s any of the state’s business.”
Yes it damn well is, whilst they claiming tax exemption, discrimation law exemptions to name but two areas of direct state business.
“Sure, we can worry if they’re abusing children, and there are always grey areas.”
No, they are NOT grey areas. This single egregious comment makes me feel more than a bit ill.
“If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Bicephalic Rat.”
You MUST be aware that many folks are incapable of leaving, held there by threats of alientation, violence, and mental torture. Females, especially.
Honestly, is this reallyu the actuall Russell Blackford?
“The role of the state is to make sure that continuing membership is not coerced”
Whence on earth did you get that barmy notion?
It is refuted by all of recorded history!
“It’s when these religious organisations try to impose their doctrines on the rest of us, through the political process, that I get worried.”
Well, shame on you, sir.
Shame that you do not care about the millions of physically, mentally oppressed and enslaved around the globe until it affects you directly.
I used to respect your opinions, but can do so no longer, sir.
Your only excuse for your message is that it is a forgery.
I started a comment on this post some hours ago that became a 2500-word (and counting) analysis of the whys, wherefores, and proper limitations of freedom of religion. I may complete and publish it some day, but the heart of it follows:
If religions and churches and so on were purely private and genuinely voluntary membership organizations, I would argue that the state could and should legitimately let them run themselves as they wish – even to the extent of allowing them exemption to equality protections, and thus permission to discriminate on the basis of religion or gender or behavior in hiring and internal leadership decisions – in order to maximize adherents’ freedom of religion. How can such discrimination be compatible with equality? The freedom to discriminate can only be consistent with a free and equal society if the discrimination is limited within the bounds of an organization or association that citizens are genuinely free to enter and/or leave as they choose: In other words, no one is genuinely being discriminated against if anyone subject to discrimination is free to join or leave the discriminatory organization without coercion or penalty [which I take to be the essence to be Russell’s position], and so long as the organization in question does not enjoy any special legal privileges that cannot be accessed equally well outside the bounds of the organization.
Clearly, however, these conditions are not even remotely met by actual religious organizations. Actual religious organizations are not fully and genuinely private, because they are so frequently privileged by and entangled with the state in various ways in even the most technically and constitutionally secular nations, such as the U.S. Still less are actual religious organizations genuinely voluntary – for many, many reasons, but by far the most evident is the brute fact of childhood indoctrination: The most consistent predictor of every person’s religious affiliation – even for those whose religious affiliation is “None!” – is the religious affiliation of the person’s parents. Nothing could be more clearly coercive and less voluntary than the religious indoctrination of children.
Obviously, interfering with citizens’ child-rearing to such an extent conflicts with freedoms that citizens ought reasonably be granted in a free democratic society. While there are and ought to be limits to the control parents have over their children – such that parents are not free to treat their children in abusive or neglectful fashion – I will grant for the sake of argument that religious upbringing properly lies well within those limits, rather than beyond them. Nevertheless, children are not capable of giving full informed consent, so their indoctrination into a religious organization can only be considered involuntary and coercive, even if we grant that it is a type of coercion that appropriately lies within the scope of parental rights. If membership in religious organizations is not genuinely voluntary – as it certainly is not for children – then the conflict between the freedom of religion and the freedom to raise one’s children as one sees fit (within limits) is real, and no amount of hand-waving or hand-wringing by the religious can make it go away: If religious parents have the right to indoctrinate their children into membership in religious organizations, then it is not only legitimate but obligatory for the state to interfere in the management of religious organizations and institutions to ensure that their structure and activities are consistent with the values of a free democratic society – such as absolute equality of all citizens regardless of race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference, ability or disability, etc.
In other words, religious organizations cannot have it both ways in a free society: If religious organizations wish leeway discriminate – that is, to skirt the fundamental principle of equality upon which a free society rests – then membership in religious organizations must be fully voluntary and they cannot be granted any latitude whatsoever to encroach on the freedom of citizens (or future citizens, i.e. children) through any sort of coercion or indoctrination. On the other hand, if religious organizations and religious parents wish the latitude to indoctrinate children and otherwise retain or expand their organization membership through coercive (rather than persuasive) means, then religious organizations cannot be granted any latitude to undermine or violate the principles of equality that legitimate a free society. If citizens are indoctrinated into a religious organization or association without their free and informed consent (which children cannot give), or if they are subject to coercive pressures that keep them in such an organization, then that organization must abide by all the legal protections which guarantee the freedom and equality of all citizens for the organization to be tolerated within the bounds of a free and equal society.
Hmm. I seem to have left out a key transition when cutting and pasting that, judging by the dangling “to such an extent” in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph. Oh well. I think my reasoning is obvious enough without it, so I won’t bother filling it in.
“Sure, we can worry if they’re abusing children, and there are always grey areas.”
No, they are NOT grey areas. This single egregious comment makes me feel more than a bit ill.
Michael, while I can understand why you get upset with Russell, here I think you read too much into what he said. He did not say that abusing children is a grey area, as you seem to think he said. Reading carefully gets harder when you’re angry, but is all the more important then.
@Harald:
You are perhaps correct that I over-reacted on my specific interpretation of this particular point, and I thank you for guiding me to a calmer analysis.
Russell is a professional philosopher, and seems to pride himself in his targetted precision of language, often very rightly correcting others at length for a minor infringement of meaning.
That he shoud be so open to misinterpretation with this particular phrase frankly astounds me, but you may well be correct.
What is your opinion on Russell’s tacit dismissal of theocratic slaves in his summary advice that if they don’t like their religion, it is encumbent on them to start one that suits them?
“But if it’s their doctrine that you have to be a two-headed rodent to be a priest, that’s no concern of mine. If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Bicephalic Rat.”
Or to paraphrase with a minor and relevant substitution:
“But if it’s their doctrine that you have to be a male to be a priest, that’s no concern of mine. If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Mysoginstic Male.”
To my mind, Russell is effectively blaming the unwilling victims of a literal hierarchy for their plight and, as a side-dish, excusing religions of all of their truly evil deeds, providing that they do not impinge upon him directly.
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick here too?
If so, I’d love to know just how.
I am not above admitting error when it warrants.
‘Tolerance’ means: someone is annoying me but I don’t give them any shit about it, because they’re not doing any real harm. The position the Telegraph, Russell Blackford et al. are taking is not tolerance. The actions of religion cause real harm, so the idea of ‘tolerance’ DOES NOT APPLY. A better word for the position they are advocating is “laissez-faire”. (They spin it as a moral decision, but it is not aimed at the greater good, so it’s not moral but practical.)
‘What is your opinion on Russell’s tacit dismissal of theocratic slaves in his summary advice that if they don’t like their religion, it is encumbent on them to start one that suits them?
“But if it’s their doctrine that you have to be a two-headed rodent to be a priest, that’s no concern of mine. If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Bicephalic Rat.”
Or to paraphrase with a minor and relevant substitution:
“But if it’s their doctrine that you have to be a male to be a priest, that’s no concern of mine. If you don’t accept the doctrine, leave the Church of the Great Mysoginstic Male.”‘
I find it odd that he felt the need to construct such an absurd hypothetical to support his response. Instead of talking about men and two-headed rats, why didn’t he place his argument in the context of men and women, as Ophelia did? I assume it’s only because that would have made his argument completely untenable.
@Chayanov:
Precisely my point.
You have summarised my feelings to a “T”.
Horrid, legalistic hair-splitting point.
The RC church IS a state, or is at the very least, based in a legally independant state, which is given diplomatic recognition.
The Vatican.
Thus, all RC priests, are, by definition, paid agents of a foreign power.
Now this may, or may not be relevant today, but it was one of the concerns, and reasons for the long-held and (at the time thoroughly justified) fear and suspicion of the RC church.
In England, at any rate.
For instance:
Anyone reading one of the few bits of the English constitution which is written down – the Book of Common Prayer – will find, amongst the pronciples defined therein, the statement:
“The Bishop of Rome hath no dominion in this realm of England”
@Greg Tingey:
Not a ‘hair-splitting’ point at all, but a cogent sighting of the enormous elephant in the room.
The Vatican, who used to be, until recently, be the most viciously brutal ruler of the Western world for more than a millenium (sp. intentional), continue their *state sponsored and supported* crimes against humanity to this day.
If that is ‘hair-splitting’, then it must be a two thousand year-old, thousand mile-wide hair.
I was speaking legalistically, not practically or morally.
Arheist though I am, my protestant upbringing, and Huguenot ancestry reminds me of how horrible the RC church was and is.
And its mirror-image, the communist Party, and its child, islam, but that is another story.
P.S. If you are in a public discussion, or even a pub, and some RC is sounding off, then give the BoCP quote I mentioned. It is garuanteed to get them to lose their rag completely.
Hey G, how about you complete it now and let me publish it as an article huh huh?
Russell I’ll publish your opposing view too if you want to write it up.
I agree with G. to the extent that state support (in the form of tax privileges and such) makes religion not completely private, and as such subject to some state regulation. I don’t agree that “indoctrination” of children into religious beliefs does, unless by “indoctrination” he means isolating the child from all non-religious or differently-religious influences. But atheists have a tendency to describe teaching children religion as “indoctrination,” so I’m guessing that’s what G meant. People have the legal right to teach their kids whatever beliefs they want, whether those are religious or not. They don’t have the right to physically abuse or to isolate or to deny education, which allows children to question or escape their parents’ beliefs. But they do have the right to “indoctrinate.” So religious people need not pay any price of state regulation for doing what any parent is allowed to do (whether that parent is an atheist, a Satanist, a JFK-shooting conspiracy theorist, a free-market libertarian, an astrologer, or a Christian).
Also, I don’t think psychological pressure to remain in a group ought usually to be considered “coercion,” for the purposes of deciding whether state intervention is called for. That sets a pretty dangerous precedent and expands the state’s rights considerably. “Coercion” ought to involve, at the very least, extreme economic dependency and preferably some type of physical violence. The idea that states should regulate religious treatment of women because the women are psychologically pressured and therefore “coerced” is highly problematic. We should CARE about the treatment of these women, yes, because psychological pressure is real. But I think we need to draw a line between that and “coercion,” because otherwise we run the risk of tyranny. People psychologically pressure each other in all kinds of ways all the time, many of which are good and many of which are bad, and a free society ought to allow this. Freedom includes the freedom to give way to a psychological bully, or to make bad choices because of how your parents raised you. We want to make it easier for people to avoid doing these things, but state intervention really isn’t the way to go. It’s frankly demeaning to the adulthood of the women involved and threatening to everyone’s autonomy.
What I would suggest, rather than pleading with the state to intervene and save Catholic women from themselves, is direct action: supporting Catholic women who want to leave the Church, and encouraging more women to think along those lines. Publicizing their efforts. Drawing attention to the contradiction between Church teachings and the lives of most modern women on subjects like birth control. Publicizing incidents like the pregnant 9-year-old rape victim whose mother was excommunicated for getting her an abortion. Encouraging them to set up their own independent churches if they feel they must have a church of some kind.
To my mind, that would be a less patronizing and dangerous way of dealing with the situation. It would promote those women’s freedom rather than restricting it. I think it’s both more desirable and more realistic (anyone REALLY think Western governments are going to force the Church to allow female priests? Really?) to see this kind of thing end through the concerted voluntary agency of the victims, rather than in a top-down way.
But the issue is not “pleading with the state to intervene and save Catholic women from themselves,” it’s whether religions should have special exemption from laws that apply to everyone else.
And just saying that people have a right to raise their children in their religion is not enough; the point is that that right has some very worrying consequences.
I think Americans tend to have a habit of taking very simplistic all or nothing lines on these issues precisely because we don’t have to deal with the most alarming kinds of outcomes. We don’t have to deal with them so we forget that they exist anywhere, and what the results are.
An interesting thread – I commented on this at the beginning because of the tag on the site “your chance to disagree with us!” but having read all the responses, I feel deeply ambivalent about the whole thing – not sure I’m wrong, but not sure I’m right.
To clarify, I would not support exempting religious organisations from laws which apply to everyone else (a la the Catholic Church’s lobbying to exclude its adoption agencies from the law requiring them to give equal consideration to gay applicants as potential adopters here in the UK) but question whether private organisations should be required by law not to discriminate by race, gender, age, shoe size, et cetera in their internal workings. As a number of people on this thread have pointed out, though, whether religions, especially Catholicism, which has its own state, are truly private organisations, is an open question. And if they are not, then the question of whether they should be required to abide by the equality laws which apply to providers of services in this country is an interesting one.
And on further consideration, I accept it might be more effective to require such organisations to abide by equality laws than to try to chip away at their ‘public’ function – e.g. by closing down the schools they run – which at least where I live, would be an enormously unpopular move, regardless of what I might think of the idea of churches being funded by the state to educate children.
But Benjamin, and OB, I’m not talking about our “sense of justice.” Yes, it’s violated by sexual harassment outside the workplace, and rightly. I was specifically referring to what we consider “coercion” for the purposes of state intervention. That is, coercion that spurs the state to intervene and regulate. That’s a much narrower area than any domination that would make us morally outraged.
Also, OB, the idea of religion having “special privileges” I think relies on one of two things: (1) state privileges with regard to taxes (no argument from me on that score), OR (2) comparison between membership in a religion and citizenship in a country, or an employer-employee relationship. It’s the second that I think is problematic, precisely because people are coerced by employers and states in a way that they’re not by religion (unless it’s a theocracy).
OTOH, now I’m considering the economic aspect of the priesthood. It’s a salaried job, no? So maybe that’s a valid comparison to an ordinary job. It would be different if the priests were unpaid volunteers. Hmm.
Jenavir, okay, I haven’t been talking about coercion at all, so I guess you’re talking to G and I’ll just erm not go off on a tangent.
Jenavir, your objections seem to miss the logic of my argument. Firstly, my arguments about the extent to which religious organizations are private vs. public is largely separate from whether or not membership in them is voluntary or coercive, and they only intersect tangentially in the bit where I lay out logical/moral limits on the right of religious organizations to discriminate. Your segué from one to the next seems to confuse largely separate arguments (although I will come back to how they might usefully intersect later).
Secondly, where did I say anything that was remotely interpretable as justifying state interference with adult citizens’ participation in religion – let alone anything so paternalistic as ” pleading with the state to intervene and save Catholic women from themselves”? I call bullshit on any claim that I even hinted at the possibility of such nonsense, although perhaps you were alluding to someone else’s post.
Thirdly, saying that “atheists have a tendency to describe teaching children religion as ‘indoctrination,’ so I’m guessing that’s what G meant” is an unnecessarily cheap rhetorical maneuver on your part, not on mine as you seem to imply. I challenge you to look up any dictionary definition of “indoctrination” and try to tell me how Sunday school and catechism do not meet the definition. Does the word have negative connotations? Sure. But its literal meaning is still perfectly consistent with my use, and I was not using it rhetorically; the literal meaning of the term 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 that your objections fail to address: 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. Your assertion that parents have the right to pass their religious beliefs on to their children is entirely irrelevant, because I 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 of the reasons you cite – 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. I do not see how any of your objections in any way avoid or transcend or ameliorate this fundamental conflict: In fact, your objections seem to contain little more more than the sort of hand-waving and hand-wringing I alluded to as being predictable responses to this conflict.
I think you are confusing the question of how best to practically address this problem with my purely logical and moral argument that it is a real problem. The fundamental rights conflict I highlighted is clear and it is real – however, I will readily grant that the best way to resolve this conflict in actual day-to-day, real world political life is far from clear. Nevertheless, a problem of conflicting legitimate rights can never be resolved if we refuse even to acknowledge that here is a genuine conflict.
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 understand Russell’s and Jenavir’s Millsian reservations about state intrusion into the internal affairs of religious associations – freedom of association and all that – but I still have very serious concerns on the other side. I quote from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s recent op-ed piece in the Independent:
That is a real concern. There are women who have been silenced by Islam and the Roman Catholic Church, to go no further (though if you read some evangelical stuff it’s quite clear that women’s voices are being turned off). This kind of thing is instilled in children at a very young age, something that Nicholas Humphrey addressed in his Amnesty Lecture.
While I don’t want to see the state intervene in the internal affairs of ‘free’ associations, I also don’t want to see people silenced and marginalised by religion, something over which many people have a very small degree of reasonable control. Sure, you can leave, but leaving has a very high cost – depending on circumstances, of course. But there seems no reason that societies should not establish basic limits to the kinds of marginalisation and silencing that religions can indulge in without legal redress. Individuals should have the right to call religions to account for the harm that they do. If religions are permitted to be exempt from these standards, then significantly large numbers of people can be harmed without remedy, at the same time that they do general harm to the society of which those damaged people are a part. You can see this taking place in countries like Nigeria and Uganda. Similar things happen behind closed doors in Britain, Canada and the US. Does freedom of association extend this far?
G’s and I crosposted. My comments are not a response to or a development of G’s thoughts, which will take a bit of time to digest!
Or I’ll try to spell out briefly what I’m saying – which is not, here, exactly that religions are coercive (though they are) but that they are not in any simple sense voluntary.
Religions are not fully voluntary; they are formally voluntary but in other ways they are not; they are not so much coercive (for the purposes of this discussion) as sticky or clingy, and they are that in a way that no other institution or set of ideas is, as far as I know.
Religions are sticky, and religions lay down laws for people, also in a way that no other institution or set of ideas does. This fact combined with the fact that the law-giving is confined entirely to one gender is seriously bad. That’s not to say that cops should be planted in every church; it is to say that (at a minimum) religions should not be exempt from laws mandating equality before the law.
Ophelia, you said: “… it’s whether religions should have special exemption from laws that apply to everyone else.”
Spot on – but this is exactly the problem we are having with those other religious loonies pushing for Sharia “law” – special exemptions for special groups.
NO.
One law for all the people.
it took us long enough to get to this point, and now some idiots want to throw it away?
I believe there is a pressure group – start by trying the NSS website for directions – who are attemtpting to keep “one law for all”.
That is one of the essentials of this discussion, and it is really important.
As if you didn’t know already.
Sorry if I have repeated the apparently obvious, btw.
I crossed with both G and Eric! Ah well. Anyway, I wasn’t responding to their posts.
“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.”
Exactly. And this really needs to be acknowledged and included in discussions of the subject, not hidden or minimized. People are inducted into traditions that are explicitly formally and profoundly inegalitarian – this is not a small thing! And it can’t be addressed with standard-issue stuff about religious freedom, because that just evades all the real difficulties.
“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”
That’s a killer point. I hadn’t thought of it before, either.
That comment has to be a post. No way around it.
I will suggest one revision of G’s long thought:
“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.”
should read:
“Religious organizations and institutions do in fact discriminate, and they do in fact induct many members into their ranks who cannot conceivably give informed consent – not just many, but the overwhelming majority.”
I don’t think religions do this involuntarily.
I think, in response to Ophelia’s suggestion, that if individuals had a right to call religions to the bar to face questions of offences against their rights as persons, this should be a sufficient inducement to religions to ensure that the freedom and the rights of members are being carefully observed. Clearly, it will take some time for a common law tradition to develop around offences to equality provisions as they apply to religion, but eventually these things should get sorted out. But the state does have a right to intrude where religions do actual physical harm to people, as in the case of FGM, or MGM, if it comes to that, exorcism, etc.
I might add that I have always felt bound by religion, and that I was abused as a child in the way that the school that I attended inducted me into religious belief and practice. It took the brutal reality of significant abuse for me to break the chain forged as a child. I think individuals should have redress for this kind of harm. Certainly, parents have a right to pass on their traditions to their children, but they also have a responsibility to make clear to them that many people disagree, and they, when they come of age, may disagree too. No one has a right to indoctrinate children in their own beliefs to the exclusion of all others, and no one, I suggest has a right to indoctrinate female children with the belief that females are inferior to males. Years ago I had begun a dissertation on the rights of children – and had to stop because of serious illness. (Illness actually drove me back to religion, but that is another story.) My basic position was then, and is now, that children have a right to be educated in such a way that the choices that they make as adults are genuinely free, based upon some understanding of the use of critical reason. This was, I recall, basically what Nicholas Humphrey said in his Amnesty Lecture, for which he was widely criticised. I think he was right, and that this abuse of children is one of the most serious harms that children still almost universally suffer.
In his TV series “The Root of All Evil?” Dawkins interviews a psychologist who was brought up in a fundamentalist religion. She still felt, as I still do, a tremor of fear when she heard the word ‘hell’. Part of her practice as a psychologist was spent in helping religiously indoctrinated children break free of the bonds of religion. We should all be concerned about this kind of abuse. I do not know how Millsian liberals can fit this into the scheme of liberties, but there must be some way. It is, in many ways, as serious an abridgement of freedom as slavery, and almost as harmful. It may, in fact, because the effect is so widespread, be more harmful, if we did but know it.
Whoa, I’ve been away from my computer a fair bit in the last 24 hours and there’s too much here to read quickly. I expected some considerable disagreement, and I understand Ophelia’s point of course.
I do get a bit snarky, though, when people say “I expected better of you.” No, what you mean is you expected me to agree with your view on a complex issue on which much ink has been spilled by legal and constitutional theorists.
Ophelia is correct that this is a law of general application. I agree that such laws should not generally be unconstitutional in the American context (which this isn’t, but it’s worth thinking of how this issue would be handled under First Amendment law).
Even the most forthright critic of the rather accommodationist line taken by many people in the US (including, recently, Nussbaum in Liberty of Conscience), namely Marci Hamilton, thinks that accommodation by the legislature (not the state) is appropriate in a case such as this, where we’re talking about who can be a priest. That’s because religious doctrines about who can have a priestly vocation are so much at the core of religions. See page 189 of the paperback edition of God vs the Gavel (a wonderful book that I recommend to everyone):
The impetus for the [legal] doctrine [of ministerial exception to anti-discrimination laws re employment] lies at the heart of any religious identity, regardless of the required characteristics. There is a good question to ask, under the free-exercise doctrine, whether it was appropriate for the courts rather than legislatures to created such an exemption.”
That’s not a full defence of my position, which will probably have to wait until my own book on freedom of religion is finished. But I think the view developed by Hamilton is both the principled one, if we accept freedom of religion as an important political principle, and the pragmatic one for critics of religion to adopt.
Pragmatically, don’t forget that there’s more of them – the religious – than us. Once we start saying it’s open slather for legislatures to ignore freedom of religion (and I realise that Ophelia isn’t going that far) you say goodbye to keeping creationism out of schools … and to appropriate political results on many other issues where the religious are in the majority and only doctrines such as separation of church and state are holding back unpleasant legislation with populist backing.
Is open slather Oz for open season?
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish argot from typo!
Yes the pragmatic reasoning could be quite different from the principled. On the other hand…I think facially neutral equality laws should be defensible.
“That’s because religious doctrines about who can have a priestly vocation are so much at the core of religions.”
Well yes – and so is the maleness of God and the betterness of maleness. But…the result is what it is: women bound by laws that they have zero power to make or reform. I think this could at least be argued more – so that the problem would be less hidden.
Thanks for title, Russell, sounds great – I’ve been wanting something good on this subject.
Quite right, Eric! One “involuntarily” too many in that sentence made for ambiguity whether that adverb refers to the manner in which inductees are inducted or the manner in which inductors induct inductees. The danger of editing one’s sentence on the fly…
;-)
And thanks for the compliment of making my comment a post, OB! I feel like my afternoon was less ill-spent.
Also, Russell’s quotation from Marci Hamilton is very telling:
The logical implication of this is that if the required characteristics for ministers in a given religion are deeply misogynistic – such as the insistence that those who minister must not only be exclusively male, but exclusively males unpolluted by regular sexual contact with lowly females, as celibate Catholic priests are (in theory) supposed to be – then the very heart of that religion’s identity is also deeply misogynistic. That, at least, I can agree with 100%.
G., I will make a longer reply to your actual post, but I would like to clarify here that I did not originally read you as merely making a logical/moral point that religion poses a problem (because of the combination of inequity and childhood inculcation). Rather, I thought you were addressing the issue of government intervention, because that’s what many of the previous comments were about–and so I responded accordingly.
Jenavir. I agree, the comparison to the evils of slavery was, in one sense, “over the top.” Psychological imprisonment is, as you say, not the same as physical imprisonment. However, I tried to qualify it, by speaking of the effects of the psychological and intellectual abuse of children. Surprisingly, perhaps, the effects of slavery were moderate on society as a whole, in the same way that we, in the West, can go about our business from day to day without reflection on the extreme hardship that is experienced by people elsewhere in the world. The effects of religious indoctrination are systemic and widespread. What difference it would make if this were stopped is hard to say, but I happen to think it would be considerable. Nor do I mean to suggest that, in such a case, religion would cease to exist, but membership would be largely voluntary and, to the degree that this is possible regarding religious belief, reflective (if not actually critical).
At the same time as I say this, Russell’s very thorough and deeply knowledgeable response to the issues that are being discussed needs to be met. I certainly feel outclassed here, though I wonder if it is not rooted in an intellectual tradition that is severely threatened by the political realities of religion in the contemporary world, which no longer occupies the same place that it did in Mill’s day, when it was trying to find a part to play in an increasingly scientific world view. Much has happened in the 137 years since Mill died, and we are now faced with a religious tradition which, to a disturbing degree, knows virtually nothing of science, and does not want to know. And Christianity, sadly, has not been reluctant to catch onto the coat-tails of this tradition, and to begin making demands to recognition and respect which had been largely in abeyance for many years.
I suspect, Jenavir, that ‘complementarianism’ has much the same result as considering women inferior. It is a way of saying the same thing without saying it.
I shall certainly put God vs the Gavel on my reading list. In fact, I have just stopped writing long enough to order it.
Thanks for the clarification, Eric, and I think that does make sense.
Re: complementarianism, I’ve seen a couple of different examples where women have used it as a tool to gain greater rights. But I’m pretty sure those are minority cases and that what you are saying is generally correct. A lot of people seem to think that the sting of being treated inferior is taken away when you stop saying “inferior.” But actions speak louder than words and denial of power is a way of saying “you are inferior.”
There’s a chapter largely about this in Does God Hate Women?.