Andrew Copson; Panel 3; Magna Carta 800th Lancaster House
The question that we’re invited to consider falls under the general heading of the first question, which
is: “Are the secular settlements of Europe secure?” I’d like my contribution to that question to get us
into this discussion to be to consider, just very briefly, what these secular settlements actually are in
practice; where they’ve come from; what some of the social changes that might be making some of
them less secure actually are; and some of the flash points that have been indicative of conflict within
that secular framework in recent years.
Shami gave a good description of the ideal types of ways that one could treat religion in the state. I want
to try and give three actual type of secular settlement that we’ve found ourselves within Europe today.
The type of secular settlement that the state has taken on across the continent depends on a number of
factors. It depends on the stage in that nation’s history in which secularism was instituted, or organically
grew up; it depends on the nature of the religion and the religious culture in which the secularism grew
up or was instituted. (Protestant secularism, roughly speaking, looks quite a bit different from Catholic
secularism, just as Sunni Muslim secularism looks in Turkey different from the rest of Europe.)
Generally, then, there are three types that can be discerned. One is secularism as separation – it likes
often to think of itself as a strict separation but is not always in practice – a separation of religious
institutions and state institutions. It is associated with modernity; it’s often instituted as a way of
clearing out what is seen as the mediaeval rubble of clericalism and goes together with a republican and
civic nationalistic attitude. You can all think of secularisms across the world, but certainly in Europe that
are of that first type. The second type of secularism sees itself as much more liberal and is based on the
idea of toleration – specifically the toleration of a diversity of religious denominations. It bases itself on
the idea of neutrality and fair treatment, often to secure a sort of civil peace within the boundaries of a
particular nation. This second type of secularism can seem to advocates of the first type as being not
very secular at all because it can often, as in the case of Belgium or the Netherlands, involve quite
considerable state funding of different religious institutions and organisations. However, the funding is
provided, as it were, on a per capita basis: fairly and in what they would describe as a secular manner, in
attempts to be impartial and objective. The third type is where a country is quasi-secular, rather by
accident. That, to some extent, is what we have within the UK: a state which is not actually secular in its
constitution, and whose present head of government has stated in recent years that it is certainly not a
secular country. But in practice, to a great extent, a division has been created and constructively and
dynamically maintained between religious institutions or at least one particular religious institution on
the one hand, and various public services and state institutions. (On the other hand, in many other
services and institutions there is a deep embedded-ness of one particular denomination, so labelling this
third type of secularism as such at all is contestable.)
What social changes across Europe (and there are some consistent pan-European social changes at a
high level that we can discern) are putting those secular settlements under strain? Some of them are
quite surprising. I will go into three, and the first one is quite counterintuitive. The first social change
which is putting settlements under strain is the decreasing religiosity of the population of Europe as a
whole. A collapse in practice in terms of Christianity across the continent has taken place over the last
few decades. A significant reduction, although not as great a reduction, in religious belief, and again a
highly significant reduction in religious identity across Europe – all this across a generation of people
whose Grandparents would have identified as Christian. That’s a massive social change. 51% of people in
the UK in the last British Social Attitudes survey said they were not religious and didn’t associate
themselves with any religion. That’s one big social change.
Second is the increasingly vocal nature of the Christian residue; remaining Christians are increasing their
political activity, increasing advocacy of what are seen as the ‘rights’ of Christians but which are very
often the defence of privileges for Christians. The third is the arrival within Europe of significant (still
very, very small but significant) range and number of minorities and people of non-Christian religions to
a greater extent than ever before.
These three social changes are the ones that are the most to be highlighted for putting the secular
settlements under strain.
Taking them in order:
The increasing number of people who are not religious: that does seem like, as I said at the beginning, a
slightly counterintuitive social change to highlight as putting the secular settlement under strain. In fact,
our settlements are so embedded within historic religious assumptions that it does put a secular
settlement under strain. All sorts of assumptions about, for example, what we should do in our school
curriculum, what we should do in our public life are brought into question when a culture moves from
being a non-religious but culturally Christian culture to being not even culturally Christian. Think about
cases that went to Strasbourg from Norway: the Folgerø case. A group of non-religious people who said
they no longer wanted their children in their school to be learning morality and to have a moral
education only from a Christian point of view. Their parents and grandparents, who might also have
been not practising and not believing Christians, were perfectly happy, probably, to have morality
taught through a Christian lens. However, a more secular generation, two generations later, wants their
positive non-religious beliefs to be upheld. So those things which have been, as part of a secular
settlement, secularised religion (moral education at schools for example) are no longer acceptable to a
self-defining non-religious population. We’ve had this with Humanist marriage law in the UK, for
example. Our politicians sometimes really can’t catch up with that, and find it very difficult.
There’s an increasingly vocal Christian section of society in Europe. That obviously puts secular society
under strain because when people feel on the defensive, as Christian lobby groups often do within the
Council of Europe or within the OSCE, they tend to push back against what they might have, in other
contexts, accepted as perfectly secular elements of the law.
And then there’s the arrival and growth of non-Christian religious minorities in Europe. It is obvious and
we have heard already how this puts new strains on the settlements.
I agree with Shami that the human rights framework that we have post-Universal Declaration, postEuropean Convention, is the only plausible way, but more than that a positively constructive way of
reconciling the sort of differences of opinion and flashpoints that this social change has caused in our
secular settlements and is the only plausible way to unpick some of the nasty tangles that have been
created. All current secular settlements in Europe fail, I think, to reach those human rights standards
today. Every sort of secularism is deficient in meeting those standards in one way or another.