It is a commonplace today, in the increasingly bad-tempered debates about the role of ‘faith’ in public life, to hear atheists/ secularists/ humanists say something like, ‘Of course, everyone has a right to practice their own religion in the privacy of their own homes.’
Putting aside the slightly alarming fact that anyone should feel the need to deny the desire to abolish ‘faith’ from people’s private lives, this seems to have become the default position in the current debate. You can follow whatever depraved practices you choose – group sex, self-mutilation, prayer – in private but don’t think about bringing them out in public. It would upset the balance and neutrality of the public square.
This position is the central target of Professor Roger Trigg’s latest, well-informed, although less well focused book. Trigg argues forcefully that the equality, freedom and tolerance we so esteem today cannot survive in a philosophical vacuum. Such values need foundations in order to prevent them from sinking into the quick sands of post-modernity and relativism, two ogres against which Trigg has a particular animus. It is no accident, he argues, that such values emerged in and through Christian culture. It will be no accident, he implies, if they erode as that culture fades.
That said, Trigg is not interested in defending religion at any cost; quite the opposite, in fact. He is frustrated by the failure to scrutinise religious beliefs seriously, a failure caused in no small measure by the insistent privatisation of ‘faith’, which leaves the state, especially in
His point is well illustrated by the case of the Church of the New Song, a religion founded in the 1970s by an inmate of an American federal jail, which requires prisoners to be served
The difficulty with Trigg's argument lies in his faith in rational scrutiny. Make faith public, he implies, expose it to rational analysis and, like comparable scientific disciplines, truth will out, errors vanish, and consensus emerge. ‘We are each rational, and able to make judgements about truth, whatever powerful social influences have been working on us,’ he writes at one point. ‘In the end… anyone can break free of any tradition in the search of truth.’
Can they? Trigg's animosity toward post-modernism – evident in asides like ‘the nihilism to which post-modernism inevitably draws us…’ – blinds him to the importance of its insight that our knowledge is shaped by our circumstances and traditions more than we admit or realise. Trigg's religious believers seem to be made in his image: intelligent, nuanced, thoughtful, rational. The fact that so many are not lends much weight to the case of those who would banish religious conviction from the public square, for fear of its divisive and destructive effects. On balance, this argument is outweighed by Trigg's analysis of the harm done, to religion and society, of privatising faith. But it is a close run thing.
Overall, Religion in Public Life is a valuable contribution to the debate. It is wide-ranging: covering issues of liberty, toleration, rights, relativism, pluralism, and much else. It is international: exploring debates in
If it fails to carry the reader all the way, it is not so much because of weak arguments or an overconfidence in human rationality, as a lack of focus, which makes it read more like a series of essays than a structured argument. But that (unlike the hardback price) should not deter potential readers.
Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatized? by Roger Trigg is published by Oxford University Press (2007)
This review first appeared in Third Way.
