The forthcoming article “Alienation, equality, and multifaith establishment” by Andrew Shorten is summarized by the author below.
Can state support for religious practices or identities ever be compatible with secularism? Cautiously positive answers to this question have recently been given by liberal egalitarian political thinkers defending ‘minimal’ or ‘open’ varieties of secularism, including Cécile Laborde, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor. In ‘Alienation, Equality and Multifaith Establishment’, I build on their work by exploring the potential for a concept of social alienation to help assess and guide multifaith forms of religious establishment.
Religious establishment practices and institutional arrangements, in which a state supports or recognises one or more religions, are commonplace. For instance, some broadly secular states subsidise religious schooling and even pay the salaries of clergy, whilst many states lend symbolic support to particular religions, for instance by inviting religious leaders to participate in state ceremonies or by displaying religious symbols in public places. Reflecting on examples like these has prompted multiculturalist political thinkers like Tariq Modood, Simon Thompson and Bhikhu Parekh to reject the goal of disestablishment and to instead recommend moving towards evenhanded regimes of multifaith establishment, in which multiple religions are supported or recognised, perhaps in different ways and to different degrees.
I believe that liberal egalitarians should be open to such proposals, so long as establishment does not involve coercion or fail to respect pluralism and religious freedom. Nevertheless, establishment is often controversial, as in the recent Kreuzpflicht controversy in Bavaria, when public buildings were required to display crosses at their entrances. Cases like these raise the question of determining when specific establishment practices are unacceptable. Other liberal thinkers like Christopher Eisgruber, Lawrence Sager, Martha Nussbaum, Cécile Laborde and Aurelia Bardon have answered this by arguing that establishment is wrongful when it conveys a harmful message. By contrast, I argue that if an establishment practice is wrong, it is for contributing to social alienation. This involves a person being excluded from the justificatory community, undermining their status as an equal normative authority.
Drawing on the critical theory of Rainer Forst as well as Iris Marion Young’s theory of structural injustice, I develop an original account of social alienation and the conditions that produce it. Because social alienation is not merely about subjective feelings but is intersubjectively produced and maintained, I argue that it can only be understood through social scientific analyses of the various mechanisms that contribute to it. These include institutional practices that deprive minorities of equal political status, social arrangements that fail to respect people’s status as equal normative authorities, exclusionary processes of social identity construction, and structures that internally ostracise.
As well as being used as a negative normative criterion for evaluating specific establishment practices, I also show how social alienation can be invoked in support of adjusting establishment regimes to better support and recognise minority religions. This is because it is often unequal establishment practices that alienate, rather than establishment itself. Thus, I conclude the article by showing how multifaith establishment can counter social alienation by promoting a politics of belonging and egalitarian social relations.
About the Author: Andrew Shorten is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Limerick. Their research “Alienation, equality, and multifaith establishment” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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