November 9, 2005
Street Wars Can Be Linked to France's Religious Oppression
By Maggie
Gallagher
In this unexpected
French war in the streets, press reports offer a strange new kind
of body count: "Nationwide, vandals burned 1,173 cars, compared
to 1,408 vehicles Sunday-Monday, police said. A total of 330 people
were arrested, down from 395 the night before," according
to the Associated Press.
But until this week,
when a 61-year-old French man attempting to put out a burning
garbage can was beaten to death, no one had been killed. Twelve
nights of rage and no bodies? Some strange combination of civilization
and its opposite are at work behind the alien cement walls in
French suburbs constructed to contain immigrants and their families.
This is not an underclass, not as we in America understand it.
Not yet.
These mostly Muslim
boys and young men, French sons of immigrant fathers, are still
bound by a code. For how much longer? The French riots raise two
pressing questions: Why there? And why not here?
Kevin Seamus Hasson,
the author of a new book, "The Right To Be Wrong," has
a new idea. The subtitle of his book is "Ending the Culture
War Over Religion in America." What I want to know from one
of America's foremost religious liberty experts right now is:
What can we learn from American experience about how to keep the
French religious war in France?
"Unlike
England and France, we don't have homegrown Islamic extremists
bombing our subways or rioting in the U.S.," notes Hasson.
Why not? After all, we have as many Muslims as the French do (about
5 million). But for 9/11, the jihadist had to import terrorists
from abroad. Meanwhile, in Europe, it is largely second-generation
Muslim Frenchmen who are burning up their own country.
Hasson traces the
comparative U.S. advantage to the First Amendment's vigorous promise
of free exercise of religion for all Americans. "As flawed
as it is, U.S. religious freedom is palpably good to the people
who live here. Religious liberty for Muslims works in practice,"
points out Hasson, "even though Muslim theologians have not
yet figured out how it works on paper." The great hope he
sees for the next generation of Islam is that Muslims may learn
from their experience here why religious liberty is a human right
that is good for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Meanwhile, he says
what France should have learned from its repression of religious
minorities, but hasn't yet, is "it always backfires."
Hasson is the founder
of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which defends religious
expression as a basic human right here and around the world. The
Becket Fund recently sponsored an exhibit at the U.S. Capitol,
"Bodies of Belief," that included the French ban on
religious symbols in public schools as one of many examples of
worldwide religious repression. "It would be simplistic to
say they banned headscarves in public schools, and now there are
riots," notes Hasson. "But the underlying reason the
French found it necessary to ban headscarves is what's responsible:
a hard secularism that says religion is like second-hand smoke,
something you can indulge in in private, but it's the government's
job to protect you from it in public."
France, he argues,
has "oppressed believers of all stripes for centuries and
is once again reaping the whirlwind." Separation of church
and state is the problem; religious liberty is the solution.
Cement walls built
to contain religion turn out to be Maginot lines. The temptation
raised by this latest round of riots will be to move toward an
even harder-edged secularism that defines religion itself as the
problem. This is the French way: government repression of religion
in the name of democracy. It leads, inevitably, to government
oppression that inflames culture wars into real ones.
Copyright
2005 Maggie Gallagher
