Difference: the true test of Democracy

Taming the Gods:

Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

By Ian Buruma,

Princeton University Press, 132pp.

Reviewed: 17 April, 2010

We 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'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 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 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.

In most Christian countries, the threat to liberal democracy comes more from extremist Christian fundamentalism  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, he notes that 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.

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.

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.

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Richard Thwaites has lived in both tolerant and intolerant societies