A few questionable propositions

A few questionable propositions

As Turkey grapples with definitions and re-definitions of secularism, democracy, rule of law, and constitutionalism, friends who are not citizens sometimes think we can see specks or moats in Turkish eyes—while blind to the planks of lumber in our own (to adopt a trope attributed to Jesus in the Gospels). Partly it is Turkish hospitality and openness that encourage us, partly our ingrained presumption.
In a spirit of mutual searching, I offer a comment—or a series of questions—on how the secular and the religious can be peaceably and fruitfully both separated and related. One formula is to say that religion, however various, is all private and personal, whereas government with its schools and law-making, courts and defense system, is public, and non-sectarian, non-religious. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as ‘what a man does with his solitariness’. He had not been to Mecca.
This is the position of the distinguished Dr. Amabassador Faruk Loğoğlu in his admirable exposition (Turkish Daily News, Sept. 12 and 13, 2007) of the received account of Turkey’s Republican system hitherto. It would be convenient if this clear and neat distinction were feasible. But it is untenable both in theory and in practice.
First, we may agree, many of us, that at their truest, religion and the secular realm can profitably leave each other alone, or even support each other, in their respective ways, teaching children at home, for instance, the honor and place of each. But what are those ‘places’?

Religion in the home and the forum

Religion cannot be relegated simply to the hearth and home, like diet, for instance, or sleeping habits. It spills into the public space since human beings are social creatures as well as highly individualized. Nor can the organs of the state be indifferent to religious life, since state officials are themselves human, with the guidance and biases of their beliefs and customs—accepting with Mustafa Akyol (TDN, Sept. 13, 2007, ‘The opium of the Atheists’) that even secularistic atheism has a kind of faith component. And contrariwise, some religions or factions thereof have a propensity to try to dominate all of human life including the governing functions.
Historically, the social and public cults of religion long preceded any time or system in which religion could be considered as a matter of choice or merely personal and private devotion. And these cults were all in league with governing powers. Even where they have become disentangled they still jar and tussle with each other. It cannot be otherwise. People are singular and social, unifying and diversifying, both in organic and in cultural ways.
What hope of a solution?

Religion is the point in human life where we receive concrete breakthroughs of the ultimate in power and meaningfulness of our being—of all being. This is a dimension of finite beings that appears in all our conscious actions: 1) in the infinitely productive life of language and technology, 2) as the inexhaustibility of truth and expressivity in the arts and sciences and philosophy, 3) in the absolute or categorically valid moral law: to do the good, no matter how much variety or disagreement about the concrete contents of that demand; and this includes the imperative to achieve justice in the communal and public forms of life as well as in inter-personal relations.
Religion makes explicit what is implicit in our cultural activities. It both criticizes them and challenges and inspires them to their own appropriate fulfillment. But religion can do nothing without using the cultural forms available to it—thus it, too, becomes subject to judgment and reformation. This dialectic is old as Methusela and new as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So religion is that peculiar dimension of human life that impacts every dimension but ideally should disappear when they all fulfill themselves in harmony—no Temple in the New Jerusalem, where God is all in all. Meanwhile, as we await this blessed consummation, how shall we best allot the roles of religion and the state?

One world or two?

First comes the recognition by both sides that these are not competing actors on the same playing field. They are intersecting dimensions of the unitary human life and being. They are distinct powers of our being, but become entangled in our actual existence. Can they be freed to reach their aims in cooperation not conflict?
Religion and the secular do sustain and revitalize each other as well as reproach and confound each other. Religion spends much energy just keeping its own fires burning; it renews itself by warming and lighting the secular world. Religion thrives as it inspires people to fulfill their secular functions with integrity and purposefulness. Both religion as a self-enclosed system and secular powers that would banish religion make the same mis-reading of it. The end of the ways of the Lord is to be all in all, not separate and apart from all.
The holy exists to sanctify and save from its own self-destructiveness the non-hallowed world, not to be served by it. Without the depths to which religion points, the secular lapses into meaningless materialism and moral opportunism. The secular is great because it is free, autonomous, and independent. Its courage is its own reward. But it is weak in that its sense of self-sufficiency easily becomes emptiness and frustration. Why does it defeat itself?
The secular world at its wisest sees its own depths expressed in the religious symbolism and takes heart that such mystery has not departed from the earth. For clarity and mystery are not opposed to each other: the one is the light and the other is the warmth of the same fire.
The ‘other world’ and ‘this world’ are one and the same world, viewed through different lenses. The Other World is this world envisioned as fulfilled and reunited with its own essence. This World is the actual world heedless of its own depth and self-transcendence.
The religious and the secular are not side-by-side rivals, like say, Fenerbahçe fans and Galatasaray fans. Each contains the whole of human reality from a different point of view and intent. Religion embraces all of life, including its understanding and appreciation of the secular. It is the view, as Spinoza put it, sub specie aeternitatem—from the ultimate or eternal perspective, existentially experienced.
The secular outlook also encompasses the whole human spectrum, with its own consideration of religion as a social and personal phenomenon. Each of us can operate in both spheres at once, and each society interweaves and sorts the two visions and their embodiments in one way or another, for better or for worse….
Perspective is all

Perspective lends depth to the flat, as in a painting. Perspective flattens the three-dimensional, as in a map. Both belong to us. Religion and the secular coalesce in spite of mutual resistance. Can they countenance each other in practice?
Religion both in private and in its inevitable public places of worship, shrines, sacred sites, cemeteries, must restrict itself to spiritual influence—for its own truth and integrity as much as for the commonweal. This may well and rightly affect all of human life, but as a yeast works, not as a jackhammer. This means sensitivity in public symbolism and expression, allowing for other religions and for those disaffected by religion (which is partly due to religion’s failure to be true to itself).
The institutions of the state, for their part, while resisting the encroachment of any religious authority to dictate to them, may admit that they, too, enshrine a kind of civic cult (‘Immortal Atatürk’, Anıtkabir, founding fathers and principles, national holidays, school ceremonies—just as the United States has its ‘civic religion’ of flag, military graveyards and memorials, Abraham Lincoln as martyr, the Constitution as sacrosanct text, Memorial Day, etc.). And the state can show sensitivity in accepting the right of people to affirm their religious or other identity in ways that do not compel or incite others (Nazi uniforms and KKK white sheets—stay home).
As I come from a republic that was wrestling with these issues even before it left the womb, 1776, just as the Turkish path to secular-religious accommodation pre-dated its official birth in 1923, I felicitate the Turkish Cumhuriyet on its course and fervently wish it well toward further equitable, and equable, progression.

--Frank White; fwhitetr@yahoo.com