Roger Trigg is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. He is Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Kellog College Oxford. He is the author of the Theos report, Free to Believe? And he is worried.
His latest book, Equality, Freedom and Religion deals with the same topic as Free to Believe?, albeit on a broader canvas, and is motivated by the fear that religion is being silently downgraded as a right within contemporary public life.
Trigg rightly avoids speculating on why this is the case, side-stepping the insoluble question of whether it is ignorance, disinterest or militancy that has resulted in this trend. But he makes a convincing case that it is happening and that it matters.
He is neither shrill nor apocalyptic. As one would expect from a writer with his background, he has an excellent grasp of the philosophical foundations of the debate, but the book’s strength is that it takes in a range of related fields with equal sureness of touch.
Chapter 1, for example, showcases research that suggests that ‘religion’ (broadly conceived) is hardwired into human nature. Rather than being an economic, psychological or social epiphenomenon, as has been claimed at various times by socialists, Freudians and sociologists, Trigg argues that religion is as central to human nature as any other trait. He is careful to point out that this does not mean that it is necessarily true; simply, that it merits more respect than many in the West are currently minded to grant it.
Cognitive science then moves off the stage, which for the rest of the book is crowded with examples from American and European history, with legal cases from US, Norway, Canada, Russia, and the UK, and with official documents from the Council of Europe, the Government of Quebec, and beyond. Equality, Freedom and Religion may be short but it ranges widely.
Trigg lands a number of effective blows throughout. A moral discourse based predominantly on human rights, he argues, invariably focuses all attention on the relation between the individual and the state, thereby emptying out the space of civil society on which every healthy society depends. A disparate collection of rights-bearing and -claiming individuals does not a community make.
He notes muddled thinking about equality, pointing out that respecting people and treating them equally is not the same as respecting and treating their beliefs equally. Furthermore, he observes, the well-meaning emphasis on equality has the unintended consequence of driving out historical identity and eroding the “particularity of institutions”. “A European court should not be called upon to bankrupt centuries of European tradition,” as European Judge Bonello put it in a case dealing with crucifixes in Italian schools.
He emphasises the point that neutrality in the application of the law is not the same as neutrality in the basis of law. The “secular neutrality” of the law towards different religions, which has existed in Britain for nearly a century, is not the same as a “secular neutrality inspiring the content of law,” a point which some UK judges seem incapable of grasping.
He points out that our much- fêted commitment to honouring the human dignity and rights inherent in every person is founded on Judeo-Christian teaching that humans are made in the image of God (a foundation that is widely recognised), and he goes on to question whether this commitment can be sustained without such foundations. “Grounding worth in [human] capacity”, rather than dignity, as some modern theorists do, begs too many questions.
He is also (lastly) good on why any of this matters. Religious freedom is not simply a primary freedom, the freedom to worship being the first freedom to emerge in Western Europe. It is a groundspring of democratic health. The right to follow one’s conscience has to be at the root of any free and democratic society. “Without the ability to decide, and live by, what we consider to be most important and valuable in human life, we cannot be free,” he writes.
Equality, Freedom and Religion lacks a cohesive structure or sequential argument and this is frustrating, but its overall argument is clear and important. Religion should not simply be downgraded in public life, either by blurring it into an (even more amorphous) “religion or belief” category, or by replacing it altogether with “conscience”, or by baldly stating (as the Council of Europe has) that “states must require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of the precedence of human rights…over any religious principle.” Such a view, Trigg points out, seems to forget that religious freedom is itself a human right.
Such points made, he is equally clear that just as states must not seek to control religion – that way lies totalitarianism – religions should not use faith as if it were some kind of get-out-of-jail free card. Some religious practices are simply pathological and the rest need to be able to operate within a crowded, noisy, plural public square. It is no more reasonable for the believer to say “I am religious, therefore I must have an exemption” than it is for the secularist to say “Your religion merits no exemption whatsoever.” Trigg is not advocating a carte blanche for religion. Rather, his fundamental point, made also in Free to Believe?, is that religion cannot be silently downgraded in some invisible hierarchy of rights.
But that, however, poses one very big question: how, exactly, do we proceed? If the only just way forward is that of “reasonable accommodation”, it is not immediately clear how we are to judge what it reasonable and what should be accommodated. As he puts it, “the problem is what criteria [we] can draw on to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.”
This problem if further compounded by the question of who should adjudicate on these matters. Trigg has real problems with the idea that courts themselves are the right and proper places to judge matters of religious dogma. “Courts should impartially administer the law, not enter into theological judgments about the worth of particular views,” he writes in chapter 10. The spectre of judges proclaiming on the truth or otherwise of varying religious claims is not an edifying one, certainly not if some of the asinine judgements cited by Trigg towards the end of his book are any example. To be fair, plenty of courts feel the same way.
But, the fact is that these cases do come before the courts, with increasingly regularity. Courts are frequently called upon to pass judgement on whether certain practices, beliefs or aspects of material culture are fundamental to a religion: what status for a day of rest? the practice of cremation? a traditional view on marriage? the call to prayer? the entry criteria for a Jewish school? the wearing of a cross or hijab? The need to withhold and pass judgement on such issues seems to be an unsquareable circle.
Trigg advocates “reasonable accommodation” and is honest enough to say that we should treat examples on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, although he doesn’t say it in as many words, it is clear that the balance of his judgement lies with freedom. Reason, accommodation, flexibility, and freedom: that is not a bad place from which to engage in the debate, but you don’t have to be an intractable eeyore to doubt whether it will be enough.
