I’ll bet Dr Williams is taken aback at the response his comments has generated, and I have to say, I think a lot of people are overreacting. Obviously, I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with him and I’ll argue my point, but heckling the poor man outside his Church? Calling for his resignation? Not even remotely called for, and nothing more than an attempt to limit his right to hold an opinion and express his views.
At this stage it’s probably worth pointing out that there are — at least — two separate groups who’re being critical of his position, and it’s not the secularists and the liberals who’re calling for his resignation. Those voices are raised from within his own Church, and they’re not objecting on general grounds to religious accommodation in the law, they’re objecting very specifically to accommodation of religions that aren’t theirs. Needless to say, I disagree with those people at least strongly as I do Dr Williams.
In fact, on a re-reading his lecture, I realise just how badly misrepresented by the media Dr Williams was. I’m not saying I agree with him; far from it, but I don’t think he was calling for wholesale modification of British law, either. He makes some subtle points, and his words are, at times, ambiguous (one might say disingenuous,) but there is certainly a way to interpret what he said as nothing more controversial than “just because the law gives someone a right, doesn’t mean we should necessarily force them to exercise that right at all times.” That much is obviously true.
So, surely true enough is fair enough? Well, yes, but the assumption that someone might not want to exercise their rights is a dangerous one to establish legally, and an even more dangerous one to nationally consolidate through the establishment of local courts around the country, which (will inevitably) presume the complicity of the entire local population. Williams talks about these supplementary-jurisdictions as being purely voluntary, but offers no suggestions as to how to ensure duress of any kind does not play a role. Matthew Parris puts it excellently, in his piece in The Times:
Faiths capture people. I do not mean this disparagingly. So of course do patriotisms, ideologies, families. But a religion, properly understood, makes profound claims on an individual and community, quite unlike the demands of a golf club. It involves the use of public places and public services, the subordination of the individual’s will; and may demand that he subordinate his spouse’s and children’s wills too. Hence our unease about duress, and the completeness of “consent”.
Dr Williams, in a welter of words, makes no serious attempt to resolve this. Those who read his speech properly will see that his entire argument turns upon the freedom of the group member to “opt out” of the “supplementary jurisdiction” and choose British law instead. But repressive faith groups make it culturally difficult — sometimes well-nigh impossible — for a member to opt out. This gives them the very togetherness and focus that Dr Williams wants to foster.
A religion is more than a collection of rules and habits: it is a complete moral and philosophical system with deep claims upon the inner and outer life of the adherent, from cradle, through schooling, and beyond. The rules it lays down — the private laws — are of a more commanding kind than the rules of Scrabble or the High Peak Hunt because they are morally joined-up: joined with a loyalty beyond the State; joined within an overarching faith and its explanations of the Universe.
How can we expect someone who’d been raised, educated and governed according to certain cultural and religious prescriptions to realise, when it matters, that they are able to “opt-out” of all that? Everyone they know believes and acts a certain way; they have been raised to do the same. They might not even know there is a wider law guaranteeing them greater liberty. Paris, charitably, talks about religions as providing “togetherness” and “focus,” and I dare-say he’s right, but the other side of that coin is obedience, conformity and acquiescence; not traits that I believe will lead to people looking outside the system for redress.
Put simply, religion and governance are a bad mix at any level. Religions are, by their very nature, strongly ideological, and strongly ideological governments, religious or otherwise, fall all too easily — some might say, inevitably — into oppression of dissenting views.
Additionally, and as I’ve said before, there are real risks with introducing even small-scale supplemental jurisdictions in the context of the current British population. By granting legal status to aspects of cultural codes, we run the risk of granting a veneer of legitimacy to the entirety of those codes, including elements that the majority find abhorrent, and by granting already insular communities even greater autonomy, we don’t increase social cohesion on a wide scale, so much as splinter into a series of small, independent communities with little in the way of commonality to bind them into a cohesive whole.
Well this is somewhat heartening; it seems like pretty much everyone agrees with me on the recent statement from Dr Rowan Williams, that the UK should adopt aspects of Sharia Law.
This also neatly demonstrates something I’ve been saying for a while; The UK really is a much more secular nation that the US, state religion notwithstanding. British people tend to know this, but some (by no means all) Americans seem to labour under the impression that the Church here is actually wields some real power. This is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, and yet pretty much everyone in government has come out and publicly criticised him for speaking rubbish. Can you imagine the US president speaking out against a religious leader like this?
I know it sounds insane, but it’s true.
The BBC is reporting on an interview he gave, in which he argued that many Muslims don’t relate to British law and would seek to practice Sharia Law anyway. To avoid this going underground, or being a source of cultural tensions, he thinks we should implement “aspects” of Sharia Law in a controlled way, in order to “maintain social cohesion.” It sounds sort-of reasonable on the face of it, until you ask how exactly it’s going to maintain social cohesion, and remember exactly what particular wedge this could be thin end of. Dr Williams know this, and he says:
nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well
But what he either doesn’t know or doesn’t say is that you can’t draw that distinction in a useful way. This is what Sharia Law is about, it’s not some optional extra that sits on top of a bunch of more acceptable legal constructs. Of course there is more to Sharia Law than oppressing non-Muslims and brutalising women, and it would (arguably) be possible to implement some of the less offensive aspects of it in the UK — but that wouldn’t help. And this is why it would have no positive effect on social-cohesion: No one who can’t relate to the British legal system is having a problem with the way it handles financial matters or what bank holidays we have; that feeling of alienation doesn’t stem from minor administrative details, it comes from a fundamental disconnect with the basis of the law. British law is, by and large, secular, egalitarian and liberal; Sharia Law is none of those things; it’s religiously motivated, patriarchal and authoritarian, and those are exactly the features that the Muslims who can’t abide by UK law want to see introduced. Making a few token gestures won’t appease those people, but it will give them a sense of momentum and a legal precedent for Sharia Law being enacted in the UK. I don’t know about Dr Williams, but that’s not a situation I want to find myself in.
Actually, I think I do know about Dr Williams. I’m sure he doesn’t want Sharia Law to make significant headway in the UK — he’s a civilised man, after all — but, as is so often the case with the religious, he sees any religion as better than no religion, to the point that he thinks any religion is due special privilege:
What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-off, where the law squares up to people’s religious consciences.
Personally, I’d like to rephrase that second paragraph as “What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-off, where people’s religious consciences lead them to claim special privilege to break the law that applies to everyone else.” But then, Dr Williams doesn’t believe in the law as I understand it:
An approach to law which simply said — there’s one law for everybody — I think that’s a bit of a danger
OK — what? What is the law if it doesn’t apply to everybody? It’s nothing more than a tool of oppression, and an educated man like Dr Williams should be ashamed of himself for even suggesting it. The law, one law, must apply to all people equally, otherwise we have no claim to be a liberal, free society, and we might, as Dr Williams suggests, resign ourselves to being on the inexorable path to Sharia Law.
Standard disclaimer: I have nothing against the vast majority of Muslims, and have a lot of respect for many of them. It’s the barbaric misogynists who believe that women are property to be used and abused as men see fit, that it’s perfectly reasonable to behead “the enemies of Islam,” and (most importantly) that the “law of God” is the only one to which they are beholden, that I’m talking about here.
Timothy Sandefur has written an excellent piece on why secular (and specifically scientific) thought should not be considered “just another religion.” It’s in response to an article written by Stephen W. Trask in the Chapman University Law School Law Review, but you don’t need to have read that for Sandefur’s shredding of it to make good, and informative, reading. Go ahead and digest it, it won’t take long.