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COMMON PRINCIPLES, DIFFERENT HISTORIES: UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

R. LAURENCE MOORE
R. LAURENCE MOORE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Cornell University E-mail: rlm8@cornell.edu
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Extract

In her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008) the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach to egalité has remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 459 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 13–14.

2 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 70.

3 Shiffrin, Steven, The Religious Left and Church–State Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Jefferson's strong metaphor is contained in a letter he wrote to a group of Baptist ministers in the state of Connecticut in 1802.

5 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 36.

6 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 114.

7 A very useful analysis of how English colonials changed the meaning of the terms “dissenter” and “tolerance” is Beneke, Chris, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Kent Greenawalt, “Where Shall the Preaching Stop?” New York Review of Books, 15 May 2008.

9 Her particular target is Howe, Mark, The Garden and the Wilderness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

10 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 70.

11 Gordon, Sarah, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

12 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 68.

13 The best study of the conflict between Catholic teaching and American democratic principles is McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 215.

15 There are many reliable books in English that record church–state relations in France leading up to the 1905 law. These include Larkin, Maurice, Church and State after the Dreyfus Affair: The Separation Issue in France (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973)Google Scholar; Kuru, Ahmet, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Englund, Steven, “Church and State in France since the Revolution,” Journal of Church and State (1992), 325–60Google Scholar.

16 Vicky Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationalists,” Journal of Modern History (June 2009).

17 Associations cultuelles have no exact legal counterparts in the United States, although the so-called trusteeship controversy in early nineteenth-century America resulted in the ownership of Catholic church property by a lay board of trustees. The French word culte can mean religion or any group of religious believers and does not at law carry the negative connotations of the English word “cult.” Its meaning is neutral, akin to the English word “denomination.”

18 Baubérot, Jean, “Current Issues in France,” in Hargreaves, Alec G. et al. , eds., Politics and Religion in France and the United States (Lanham, MD, 2007)Google Scholar.

19 Mayeur, Jean-Marie, La question laïque. XI–XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997)Google Scholar; Baubérot, Jean, Histoire de la laïcité en France (Paris: PUF, 2007)Google Scholar; Baubérot, Jean and Wieviorka, Michel, De la séparation des églises et de l'état à l'avenir de la laïcité (Auxerre, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Lalouette, Jacqueline, La séparation des églises et de l'état (Paris: Seuil, 2005)Google Scholar.

20 Kuru, Secularism and State Policies, 130.

21 Wieviorka, “From Assimilation to Post-republicanism: Jews in France,” in Hargreaves et al., Politics and Religion in France, 116.

22 Finke and Starke, “Religious Economies and Sacred Canopies: Religious Mobilization in American Cities,” American Sociological Review 53 (Feb. 1988), 43.