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There are two ways a society can be “liberal”. Britain needs to choose which one it wants.
A recent poll conducted by ICM, What British Muslims Really Think, found, among other things, that 52% of Muslims in Britain think homosexuality should be illegal, 39% agreed that “wives should always obey their husbands”, and 31% said it was acceptable for a man to have more than one wife. Reactions to these findings have been many and various, but one common line is that this is a shocking revelation of a ‘nation within a nation’; a large minority culture sitting within wider British society (which we are required to assume is homogenous) and totally distinct from the rest of social Britain and what it stands for.
Non-Muslim Britons should be cautious in reacting to the news that many British Muslims hold different (perhaps opposite) views to large sections of the rest of society. In particular, efforts should be made to avoid oversimplification when it comes to the idea of a ‘nation within a nation’. Many have been right to point out that the poll also found that more Muslim Britons than non-Muslim Britons feel a strong connection with Britain, and other similar statistics about belonging.
But more than calling for an appreciation of the nuance of the poll’s findings, we need to answer another question; about what kind of Britain we want to live in. In reacting to the poll Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, spoke at different points of “Muslim liberals”, “the liberal media”, “Britain’s liberal white elite”, and “secular liberals”. In each of these instances, what Phillips is referring to is a particular kind of viewpoint –for example, being liberal about sexuality as opposed to conservative about sexuality (for ‘sexuality’, substitute other major issues as relevant). Being “liberal” in ones viewpoints is about having a personal conviction of the moral acceptability of a range of positions on a given issue, in contrast to having the personal conviction of the presence of divisions between morally right and wrong when it comes to a particular way of living. We might call this ‘personal’ liberalism.
To state that many British Muslims are not personally liberal is true, but it might not be important. This is because there is another kind of liberalism to which modern Britons are usually committed, and that is political liberalism. To be politically liberal, unlike personally liberal, is to believe that each person has the right to make decisions about how to lead their lives – including their right to form their opinions – so long as they are not stopping others have the same open, free chances.
The British government, national and local, is politically liberal (what we might loosely call a ‘free and open democracy’); it allows, and accommodates, the different life choices of its citizens so far as they don’t block other citizens’ similar freedom to live as they choose. What we must notice, as we reflect on the finding that many British Muslims are personally conservative, is that in a politically liberal Britain, neither the government nor indeed any British citizen has the right to demand that they be anything else. Political liberalism for everyone means we cannot demand personal liberalism from anyone. Personally liberal individuals are free to propound their beliefs respectfully, even rigorously, in the hope that others will adopt them, but they cannot take the personal liberalism of many Britons (even the majority) to be justification for undermining the political liberalism on which contemporary Britain is built.
The distinction between personal and political liberalism is key to avoiding unwarranted responses to the ICM (and other, future) findings about the spread of viewpoints in Britain. In particular, personally liberal individuals, such as Trevor Phillips, must not conflate the nation’s political liberalism with their own personal liberalism. The fact that the majority of Britons are personally liberal does not offer any grounds for expecting personally conservative Britons (which, incidentally, is a much larger group than the British Muslims identified in the ICM poll) to change their views. From a national standpoint, Britain’s political liberalism is fundamental and prescriptive: accepting and accommodating others’ right to make their own life choices to it is a condition of British citizenship. In contrast, Britain’s personal liberalism (that is, the majority’s personal position) is not.
The implication of Phillips’ calls for “muscular integration” is not just that the personally liberal are correct in their views, but that they have a right to expect the personally conservative (or worse, try and make them) to change their minds. The whole point of living in a politically liberal society is the tolerance of (non-harmful) viewpoints of others. If we start assuming that personal liberalism for all is anything more than an acceptable personal preference (for example, that it might be a justified political goal), we will forsake political liberalism, and that would be more than a great shame.
Joseph Ewing is a Research Assistant at Theos | @josephwewing
Image by Unsplash from pixabay.com available in the public domain.
