TAMING THE GODS
Religion and Democracy on Three Continents
By Ian Buruma,
Princeton University Press, 132pp.
Reviewed: 17 April, 2010

This book is timely, as Australians face many current political issues in which religious belief, or religious identity, stress test the operation of our democratic processes.

The terms “democracy” and “freedom” are thrown about without definition. Demagogues appropriate them for their own purposes, as if democracy and freedom were unquestionable absolutes. When democratic societies include different communities, each claming divine authority for incompatible religious beliefs, then the secular foundation of democracy may be questioned.

Ian Buruma contributes to a raft of American and British journals, and also is “Henry Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism” at Bard College – a feisty liberal arts college in upstate New York that, while affiliated to the Episcopal Church, has a history of liberal politics and has employed leftish writers such as Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow on its faculty.

Buruma’s “democracy” is not a majoritarian monoculture which demands conformity, but a liberal society which tolerates difference within a framework of shared rights and obligations. The heart of this book is the question: how much difference is tolerable?

It’s significant that Buruma is a European. Though working within commute of Manhattan and writing primarily for an American readership, he barely refers to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and is dismissive of the apocalyptic “Clash of Civilisations” thinking that gained such a populist boost from that event. Extremists launching violent attacks from a great distance are not nearly as interesting, nor as important, as the way that democratic societies respond to changes and differences in belief within their own populations.

Buruma has written previously, in Murder in Amsterdam, about the political assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch conservative who had vocally opposed multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Buruma himself doesn’t like politicized multiculturalism (which he believes is dangerously divisive in democracies) but he argues that modern democracies must accommodate significant differences in the values held by their members – on the basis of tolerance rather than institutional multiculturalism.

The essence of a liberal democracy, he says, is that all members of society must be subject to the same laws without discrimination, but that those laws must be limited to secular rights and obligations. The realm of state law must be clearly separated both from religious institutions and from regulation of behaviour on religious principles unless those principles can be justified by rational argument.

He offers terse critique of different approaches used in several (mainly European) democracies and makes many important observations about the relations between religion and democracy. For one thing, the European Enlightenment that has led to liberal democracy was both a reaction to, and infused by, different Christian religious values as well as classical philosophy. In most Christian countries today, the threat to liberal democracy comes more from extremist Christian fundamentalism (based on ignorance) than from any foreign religion. In non-Western societies, most religious extremism reflects political alienation partly induced by Western cultural and economic dominance, rather than any kind of global ambition.

As to Islam: with the exception of Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia, all significant Muslim countries are functioning secular states, and several of the biggest (including Turkey and Indonesia) are effective democracies coping well with significant internal difference.

The chapter “Oriental Wisdom”, reviewing democratic trends in Japan and China, surveys the relations of Confucianism, Shinto, Buddhism and state cults (such as Maoism and Japan’s Emperor cult) to the development of modern states in these two countries. Buruma does not seem as at home here and the rather piecemeal observations are, to me, less convincing. And do not look here for any consideration of the religious dimension to the politics of dozens of societies across the rest of the Asian continent, from Korea to Afghanistan – almost every country has its own unique complexity.

In the end, Buruma offers much to ponder on the nature and proper scope of tolerance within a democracy. Karl Popper is quoted: “..if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them”. Buruma’s argument is that, to preserve itself, a liberal democracy may tolerate any degree of differences in belief, including beliefs that are themselves illiberal, but can only tolerate differences in behaviour that do not offend the rights of others set out in laws applying to every citizen alike. A democracy that is less tolerant of difference of belief risks following the path of typical “revolutionary” regimes that degenerate into tyrannies.

The realm of politics must still resolve the boundaries of tolerance within each society and, at some level, globally. Whether the issue be the wearing of headscarves, the bio-ethics of stem cell research, attitudes to homosexuality, or establishment of religious schools, it is obvious that not all passionately-held beliefs can be satisfied, be those beliefs religious, rational or irrational in origin.

The test for liberal democracy is to convince those whose beliefs are not implemented that their rights are nevertheless respected.

A book like this can not really produce answers, but can certainly sharpen the questions. This one offers salient examples and quotes in abundance, with commendable brevity and insight, so is recommended as a source and a stimulus.

Richard Thwaites has lived in both tolerant and intolerant societies