Dr Geoffrey Brahm Levey

University of New South Wales, Australia

Religious Inclusion, Core Values, and the 'Muslim Question' in Multicultural Democracies

Abstract

Religiosity and ethnic identification have intensified over the course of the last century, contrary to most expectations. Yet the strategies by which Western democracies have sought to respond to these two forms of cultural identity and their attendant claims have often pressed in opposite directions. Whereas the traditional liberal response has been to privatise and separate religion from politics in the name of the secular state, the newer, multicultural approach has been to publicly support, accommodate and celebrate ethnic diversity.

Significant Muslim immigration to the West in recent times and the nature of Islam as a ‘public religion’ have served to sharpen this tension between the ‘religious’ and the ‘ethnic’ strategies of incorporation and inclusion. The result has been a growing consensus that the Muslim presence challenges both the liberal secular state and the liberal multicultural state. The view abroad among Western governments and publics is that the ‘Muslim question’ requires an ever more resolute insistence on ‘core’ liberal values and on the established liberal settlements governing religion and politics, even to the point of discarding policies of multiculturalism for sowing confusion about the appropriate boundaries of the permissible. In contrast, others have argued that we need to revisit the original liberal settlements of the place of religion – especially given that Muslims were not a party to them – and retrieve their pragmatic spirit in fashioning a new settlement for new circumstances.

This paper critically reviews these issues. It argues that so-called ‘core’ liberal values anchor questions rather than answers, in that what they substantively recommend is always subject to variable interpretation and prioritisation. Further, the paper argues that the early liberal settlements have been modified and renegotiated ever since their inception, and that multiculturalism is best understood as just the latest instalment of a ‘principled pragmatism’ in responding to new groups and conditions.

Bio

Geoffrey Brahm Levey teaches political theory at the University of New South Wales.

He was founding director of the Program in Jewish Studies from 1996 to 2005. He is editor of Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism (Berghahn Books 2007), and co-editor of Jews and Australian Politics (with Philip Mendes, Sussex Academic Press 2004), and Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (with Tariq Modood, Cambridge University Press 2008). He is presently completing an Australian Research Council funded project on individual autonomy and the right to culture.