06/21/2023 – Religion & Government Part 2: Models of Pluralism

What should the relationship be between the government and religion? Should they be completely separate? Should they find ways of working together for common goals in society? Or, should there be a state-endorsed religion? This is the second of a great three-episode series. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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We’re in the middle of a three-part series on the issue of church and state, or more broadly, religion and government, by looking at a book titled, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies. This is the third and most recent edition of this book which came out in 2017. The relationship between religion and government in these six countries are grouped into three pairs which are the three episodes in this series. If you haven’t watched the first episode yet, go check it out. It introduced the topic, and covered the first pair of the United States and France under the category of models of separation. In this episode we’ll cover the Netherlands and Australia under the category of models of pluralism. The third episode will cover England and Germany under the category of models of establishment followed by a conclusion to the entire three-episode series. Let’s get started.

The book covers six western liberal democracies have which sought to deal with the relationship between church and state yet approached the question in different ways. The challenge of pluralism is how best to live together when driven apart by issues defined by religious faith, yet still honor the idea that diversity is important to the common good. There are three driving questions here posed by the authors. First, how far can a democratic government go in permitting religiously motivated behavior that is contrary to society’s welfare or norms? For example, does the religious freedom of one group harm others in public health or safety or normal functioning of society? Not just things like human sacrifice or polygamy but also the role of women in society. Second, should the state encourage and promote consensual religious beliefs and traditions in an attempt to support the common values and virtues that bind a society together and make possible limited, democratic government? And third, when religious groups and the state are both active in the same fields of endeavor, how can one ensure that the state does not advantage or disadvantage any one religious group, or either religious or secular belief systems over others? Advantaging could mean funding of some religious groups but not others or creating laws benefiting one religion over another. The goal here should be for a government to be evenhanded toward people of all faiths and of none. All six countries selected for inclusion in the study are stable democracies, religiously pluralistic, and each with distinctly different approaches to church-state issues. Let’s get into the second model.

Today we’re going to be talking about the pluralist or structural pluralist model, which is the second model in the book. Under this model society is understood as made up of competing or perhaps complementary spheres. Religion is not a separate sphere with only limited relevance to the other spheres like the strict separationist model, but rather as having a bearing on all of life. Models of pluralism include the examples of the Netherlands and Australia. First, the Netherlands.

The Netherlands currently has a population of more than 17 million people, the smallest of the six countries in the book. It’s a constitutional monarchy with a largely Catholic south and Protestant north. The Netherlands is described as corporatist and consociational. Corporatist means it has institutionalized representatives of key societal groups which make public policy through a process of negotiation and compromise among themselves and government officials. This is largely accomplished through a range of advisory councils. Consociational refers to the tendency for elites in a divided society to replace the incompatible demands of their constituent groups with pragmatic compromises that maintain the unity of society. Rarely are there adversarial confrontations with clear winners and losers, but rather high levels of negotiation, discussion, and compromise. The ideal society is one which has more popular participation in the political system without societal divisions and greed which destroys social stability. [*cough* capitalism] Education ought to be universal and carefully regulated by the government to make sure that particular religions (such as Christian doctrines) were eliminated in favor of more broad moral themes that would produce national unity and responsible citizens. Religious beliefs were to be relegated to the private sphere.

There’s a history behind this. In the late 1800’s, a powerful alliance formed between Christian Reformed groups and Roman Catholics motivated by political pragmatism. Both were minority groups that were unlikely to impose their beliefs on the nation as a whole. They form the heart of principled pluralism which is the subtitle of the chapter. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian and prime minister from 1901-1905, spoke for a political order that recognized and accommodated the religious pluralism of society. Kuyper often spoke in support of “parallelism” – the right and freedom of differing religious and philosophical perspectives and movements to develop freely on separate, parallel tracks, neither hindered nor helped by the government. This later became known as pillarization. These pluralistic principles triumphed in the early 20th century and was written into the Constitution in 1917 by the guarantee of full funding for schools of all faiths on par with the public schools. The principles of pluralism came to dominate public thinking and pillarization arose in most areas of group activity. For example, there would be a Catholic political party, a Catholic labor union, Catholic schools from primary to university, a Catholic radio network, Catholic newspapers, various Catholic recreation clubs, and more. These organizations would constitute the Catholic pillar. Pillarization has been challenged in recent decades by secularization and an influx of immigrants from other areas of the world who have no wish to integrate into this type of society. Today, pillarization has largely deteriorated and the Dutch no longer live most of their lives within a single pillar, but pick and choose. Though this sort of society is now long gone, the institutions have not necessarily disappeared. It is still not assumed that a neutral, secular organization representing a segment of the population can speak for all. So, in some respects, the old pillarization system is still alive. The Dutch model of pillarization as it still exists today reflects a choice between two approaches: integration into a shared “Dutch” identity, or the accommodation of multiple cultural identities within the same state. Though the term “pillarization” is no longer widely used, it is still a part of the Dutch way of governing society. Societal-political organizations segmented by religious-philosophical orientations still exist along with a society and a government that accept the legitimacy of such organizations and seek to accommodate them in a wide variety of fields.

The basic right to the free exercise of one’s religion is laid down in Articles 1 and 6 of the Dutch Constitution as revised in 1983. Article 1 states: “All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.” And Article 6 also reads: “Everyone shall have to right to profess freely his religion or belief, either individually or in community with others, without prejudice to his responsibility under the law.” Because the Dutch are more committed to negotiation than legal confrontation, judicial interpretations have not been a dominant influence as they have been in the United States, but constitutional provisions still are a reflection of Dutch thinking. The 1983 revision to the Constitution includes protections of both “belief” and “religion” in order to make clear that secular beliefs have the same legal protection as religious views. The Dutch word for belief, which I can’t possibly pronounce correctly (levensovertuiging), could be literally translated as “life conviction.” For example, if the government supports old castles and other old buildings, it should also protect ancient church monuments. A variety of religious and secular beliefs and their organizations and programs are to be treated equally by the government.

The Dutch concept of pluralism, when applied to education, leads to a deep and lasting commitment of freedom of choice. The result is enrollment at nonpublic schools at rates that are unique among western democracies. About two-thirds of primary and secondary school students attend nonpublic schools, by far the highest level of the six countries considered in this study. In comparison, France was about 20 percent, and the U.S. only 10 percent. Whenever there are sufficient numbers of parents who want a new school that incorporates a certain distinctive religious or secular philosophy (or in Netherlands terminology “direction,”) the government is committed to fund it as fully as it does the public schools. The Netherlands has no established state-endorsed church and the state does not directly finance religious groups, yet still funds all schools, religious or not, on the basis of equal treatment. But schools are not free to teach whatever they want. Much of the curriculum is set at the national level along with certification standards and comprehensive exams. Schools do have much freedom though in choosing texts and teachers.

The Netherlands situation can be described as principled pluralism. Leaders seek to attain government neutrality on matters of religion, not by a strict church-state separation that sees all aid to religion as a violation of the norm of neutrality, but by a pluralism that that welcomes and supports all religious and secular structures of belief on an equal, evenhanded basis. This system is rooted in two basic assumptions. One, a pluralistic view of society that sees a variety of religious and philosophical movements as normal and no threat to the unity and prosperity of society. And two, nonreligious organizations and movements are not truly neutral, but are yet another “direction,” equally legitimate but no more legitimate than a host of other religious and nonreligious philosophies or directions. They hold the view that the government should not discriminate for or against religion. If religion is to be fully free, government must take certain positive steps to accommodate it so that religion, along with other secular beliefs, can in practice be freely exercised. Countries without the same long tradition of working together may have a harder time maintaining a sense and national unity and purpose than has the Netherlands.

And now the second example in models of pluralism, Australia, which has a population of around 26 million people. Much of the land in Australia is virtually uninhabitable and 90 percent of the population live in urban areas. It has a higher percentage of foreign-born population than any of the six countries with over 25 percent born overseas versus around 13 percent in America. The most important principles in Australia regarding church-state relations are pragmatism and tolerance. But because the “practical” solution has changed over time, Australia has vacillated among four different church-state models in its 200-year history: establishment, plural establishment, liberal separationism, and now pragmatic pluralism. There has been very little support in Australia for an American-style separationist model. Also, voting is compulsory in federal elections, and turnout rates in those elections are consistently over 90 percent. House elections use a preferential voting system where voters rank candidates in order of the voter’s preference. The candidate with the lowest vote total has his or her vote reallocated to the remaining candidates until a single candidate has a majority of the vote. Pretty cool, huh?

Historically, the original purpose of the British settlement in New South Wales was to imprison criminals from English cities since the American Revolution stopped them from being shipped to the former colony, now state, of Georgia. This slowly turned into a mix of different types of Christianities along with other religious nonconformists. The New South Wales Church Act of 1836 revised the established church model by allocating funds on a more equal basis to the largest denominations in the colony without discrimination. Why not fund all of the churches and thereby depoliticize religious disputes? The intent was to make life easier for colonial authorities. Pragmatism became the norm in that religious issues were viewed as a problem to be solved in the most expedient manner possible. In the late 1800’s this started to change as spurred on in the debates surrounding education. The education acts passed by the various states allowed independent religious schools to operate, but they rescinded public finance of them.

Six colonies united to form the commonwealth in 1901 and modeled Section 116 of their Constitution on the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: “The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Constitution.” The state did not see a positive obligation to defend any established church, but at the same time the Constitution was not an attempt to keep religion out of politics. Some issues which make the situation murkier include the idea that Australia has no comprehensive bill of rights and there is no due process clause in the Constitution, so Section 116 cannot be applied to the states. This means states could, in theory, establish their own official state church or religion.

Australia has made progress in religious rights because social values contribute to an atmosphere that supports these rights, including allowing new religious groups to negotiate their way into Australian society. Political and pragmatic concerns have been far more important in Australian church-state issues than theoretical considerations. This is in stark contrast to France with its deep ideological commitment to laïcité, or even the United States with its less aggressive form of church-state separation. The state recognizes that religious life is not limited to the private sphere, but has an important public component. The problem is that there is no federal law that specifically bars religious discrimination and thus no established guidelines as to how far groups can go to exercise their religious liberty.

Both the Netherlands and Australia seek to accommodate and support a wide diversity of religious and secular systems of belief. That is why the authors categorize them as models of pluralism. Under this model society is understood as made up of competing or perhaps complementary spheres. Religion is not a separate sphere with only limited relevance to the other spheres as a strict separationist model does, but rather religion has bearing on all of life. So, what do you think about the models of pluralism category? Do you think the Netherlands or Australia has the best implementation of this model? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. In the third and final episode in this series we’re going to look at two countries used as examples of models of establishment, England and Germany, followed by a conclusion to the entire series. Under this model the state and the church form a partnership in advancing the cause of religion and the state because they are viewed as two pillars on which a stable, prosperous society rests. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

J. Christopher Soper, Keven R. den Dulk and Stephen V. Monsma, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies. Third Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowland & Littlefield, 2017.