BETTING ON THE WRONG HORSE

Don't Separate Mosque and State: U.S. should stop trying to export its secular system to Iraq (Amitai Etzioni, June 16, 2003, LA Times)

The United States should cease promoting a secular civil society as the only alternative to a Taliban-like theocracy in Iraq. We cannot quell the religious yearnings of millions of Iraqis merely by fostering democracy and capitalism.

The most effective way to counter a theocracy is to promote moderate, liberal religious institutions.

The 1st Amendment's separation of church and state is not a foreign policy tool; it's a peculiar American conception. Just because the American government is banned from promoting religion within the U.S. does not mean that it cannot promote it as part of a civil society in Iraq or Afghanistan. [...]

Favoring liberal Islam as an antidote to fundamentalist Islam is not to be confused with a related but different issue, whether Islam is compatible with democracy. I take it for granted that Iraq can and should have a democratic form of government. However, it should not treat religion as a threat but, potentially, as one mainstay. The current U.S. position ignores that potential.

The 13 points released by U.S. Central Command--that the rule of law be paramount, for instance, or that the role of women be respected--are fine, but they all speak only to secular issues. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, they reflect the concept of the "end of history"--that all ideologies are on their last legs as the world embraces the American version of democracy, human rights and the free market.

This idea, in turn, is an extension of the Enlightenment conceit that modernity is based on rational thinking. Irrational religion, then, belongs to history, and secularism--reason and science--will govern the future.

However, as we are learning all over the world, people have spiritual needs that cannot be addressed, let alone satisfied, by Enlightenment ideas. We see the explosive growth of Christianity in East Asia and Africa, a resurgence of religion in Russia and other former communist nations in Eastern Europe and a rise in Islam even in countries that had extensive secular, modern periods--most tellingly, in Turkey. People ask: Why are we cast into this world? Why are we born to die? What do we owe our children, our elderly parents and our friends and community?

Neither democracy nor capitalism speaks to these issues. Hence for the many millions of people there is religion, hard-line or moderate. Which one we should favor is clear, as long as we can get off our Enlightenment horse.

This is one of the better essays that Mr. Etzioni (whose fine memoir we've just reviewed) has written, though it's strangely right as regards Iraq but wrong as regards America.

Of course the First Amendment requires nothing like the "separation of church and state", only that there be no establishment of a state religion, which is presumably what Mr. Etzioni would want for the Islamic world too. Meanwhile, the Left having imposed the erroneous standard to which he refers has indeed tragically cut off the modern West from the ability to fill its spiritual needs, leaving it debased and materialistic in the extreme. It is precisely by moving more cautiously in secularizing--by applying the Constitutional standard but not the current Leftist standard--that the Islamic states may find they have a far brighter future than many (most?) (all?) Western states which are riding their Enlightenment horse right into oblivion. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2003 1:19 PM