Religion & Law

Stanley Fish's recent column, "Serving Two Masters:  Shariah Law and the Secular State", will be of interest to MOJ readers, I think.  He considers, among other things, this question:

 ?How far can liberal democracy go, both in accommodating minority groups in public policy, and, more profoundly, in granting official legal recognition to their beliefs, customs, practices and worldviews, especially when minority religious conduct and values are not congenial to the majority,? that is, to liberal democracy itself?

The question is, of course, an important one.  To be sure, Christians will want to ask themselves a related, but different, question, namely, "how far can Christians go, in submitting to, or embracing, the demands made by contemporary understandings of liberal democracy?" 

Fish also notes John Milbank's suggestion (which is consonant, I think, with the proposition that animates Dignitatis humanae) that

"only a distinctly Christian polity ? not a secular postmodern one ? can actually accord Islam the respect it seeks as a religion.? The italicized phrase is key: the respect liberalism can accord Islam (or any other strong religion) is the respect one extends to curiosities, eccentrics, the backward, the unenlightened and the unfortunately deluded. Liberal respect stops short ? and this is not a failing of liberalism, but its very essence ? of taking religious claims seriously, of considering them as possible alternative ways of ordering not only private but public life.

Christianity, says Milbank, will be more capable of deeply respecting Islam because the two faiths share a commitment to the sacred and to a teleological view of history notably lacking in liberalism (again, this is not a criticism but a definition of liberalism): A ?Christian polity can go further in acknowledging the integral worth of a religious group as a group than a secular polity can.? Christianity can acknowledge the worth of Islam not merely in an act of tolerance but in an act of solidarity in the same way that Christian sects can acknowledge each other. . . .

Fish's column, no surprise, prompted lots of comments; here is Fish's response to those comments.