Update, 26/3/23: Talk now available online here, courtesy of Central London Humanists.

Is Pastafarianism a parody or a religion? What is a ‘religion’ anyway? Can an internet movement originally intended as a joke be used to challenge the status quo of religious privilege in law and society around the world? And what happens when followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster start taking their ‘faith’ seriously?

We have returned to these questions several times in the pages of the Freethinker. Editor Emma Park has also written on similar themes for the New Humanist and podcasted about them for the National Secular society.

On 16 March, Emma will be giving a talk organised by the Central London Humanists to explore these issues further.

Meeting details

Registration: Register on Meetup here.

Date: Thursday 16 March 2023

Time: 6.30pm – 8.30pm, followed by drinks at a nearby bar

Venue: Old Diorama Arts Centre, Regent’s Place, 201 Drummond St, London, NW1 3FE

Cost: £3.00

All profits to the National Literacy Trust.

More about the talk

Emma will look at the origins of the Pastafarian movement, the evolution and distinguishing characteristics of its ‘churches’ around the world, and some of the legal cases to reach the European Court of Human Rights and courts in the US, Australia and Canada.

She will also consider the ways in which the symbols of the movement – colander, pasta crown, pirate hat – have been used in protest in a variety of contexts and in countries from Russia to Austria, from Canada to Australia.

Bibliography of Pastafarianism

What is ‘religion’? Strasbourg and the Pastafarians again, by Frank Cranmer

Religious Privilege 2 : 0 Pastafarians, by Niko Alm

Flying spaghetti monsters, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

The secular religion of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Mienke de Wilde and Paul Cliteur

Judging the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Derk Venema and Niko Alm

Pastafarianism and the meaning of religion, National Secular Society podcast with Derk Venema, Tony Meacham, and Tanya Watkins, Captain of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Australia

Pastafarian Month at the Freethinker

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Below, we present a brief update by Niko Alm on two cases brought by followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster against Austria in the European Court of Human Rights, which handed down its decision on both yesterday. Almost inevitably, the Pastafarians lost. What is interesting is why they lost, and what this says about the state of religious privilege in Europe today. –Ed.

On 15 December 2022 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) published its decisions on two applications brought by Pastafarians in Austria.

Case 1. Sager v Austria (2022)

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Austria (CFSMA) wanted to acquire the legal personality of a ‘confessional community’. This was denied by the Austrian authorities and courts, despite the fulfilment of all substantial and formal requirements – respectively, the existence of cult and rite, and a minimum of 300 members.

Austria’s Federal Administrative Court had to be very creative in its reasoning in order to comply with the informal request made of it by the Department of Religious Affairs (Kultusamt) to deny the CFSMA recognition. The core argument was that although the applicant fulfilled all the legal requirements, its members were not sufficiently religiously active to form a community. This requirement is not stipulated in the law but was simply made up by the judge.

The proceedings lasted almost four years and went through all judicial levels up to the Austrian Constitutional Court, which marked the end of the appeal process in 2019.

Case 2. Alm v Austria (2022)

This was my own case. I applied for a new passport and identity card, each with a photo showing me with a pasta crown, which with its wire-like appendages symbolised my ordeal through all the official channels. The authorities refused my application with this photo despite my meeting all the (other) requirements. Headgear may be worn on photos for religious reasons. I claimed religious reasons, but the arbitrariness of magistrates and judges was stronger than truth and justice.

The decisions of the ECtHR

In its rejection of the two applications, the ECHR mainly relied on the ruling in De Wilde v The Netherlands, which was pursued by Dutch Pastafarians. Mienke de Wilde applied for a driving licence using a photo in which she wore a colander on her head. She went through all judicial levels up to the ECtHR, which rejected her application, holding that Pastafarianism is not ‘serious’ enough to be a religion.

Arguably, the Court was wrong in this case: religion is primarily constituted by the self-declaration of its adherents and should not have to be measured against the criteria of a court. In any event, de Wilde’s case ought not to have contributed anything to the matter of the Austrian applications, because the evaluation of the Dutch interpretation of Pastafarianism should have been irrelevant to the Austrian one. The Court should have taken into account the specific characteristics of Pastafarianism and its adherents in Austria.

Moreover, although the Court referred to the arguments of the Austrian courts and the Austrian Department of Religious Affairs, it quite obviously did not consider any of the applicants’ arguments.

In a statement published on its website (in German), the CFSMA, of which I am a member and Master of Celery, expressed itself ‘disappointed’ with the Court’s decision. ‘It saddens me that the ECtHR does not take Pastafarianism seriously and questions our faith,’ said Supreme Maccherone Philip Sager.

Reportedly, the Almost Supreme Maccherona, Nadja Entner, was also shocked. ‘In my opinion,’ she said, ‘the judgement of the ECtHR is unjust, almost discriminatory. Our religious community and the concerns of our Church members are not taken seriously. Young, innovative world religions like Pastafarianism have no chance at all of being recognised, even though all the state-defined criteria are met. Despite everything, we will continue to fight for religious freedom and for equal treatment and equal rights for religious communities.’

The CFSMA is not planning to give up, but to ‘start the legal process again’. ‘In the past eight years, during which we have fought for our fundamental rights, we have been able to learn and improve a lot. I am hopeful that we will soon reach a positive result with the Department of Religious Affairs,’ said Sager.

I also wrote a statement for the website, as follows:

For me, the renewed rejection of the Pastafarians in court does not come as a surprise. In all procedural steps, both in the (attempted) recognition of the CFSMA as a ‘confessional community’ and now also with regard to ID documents with pasta crowns, the authorities and courts have shown themselves to be uncomprehending and uncooperative.

I cannot understand, tolerate or accept this rejection from a democratic point of view. Obviously, the wearing of headgear for religious reasons, i.e. in the broadest sense ideological or conscientious reasons, is allowed in Austria in passport photos. If Pastafarians – or non-Pastafarians – simply make use of this freedom for whatever reason, then no harm is done to anyone, neither to individuals, nor to organisations, society, taxpayers or the state. There is no cost to exercising this freedom. 

Why so much energy has been sunk in incomprehensible, absurd and illogical arguments,
up to and including outright lies, from the Department of Religious Affairs to magistrates, administrative and supreme courts and now the ECtHR, is beyond me. The simpler, cheaper and more elegant decision would have been to simply accept what is worthy and right: to allow the pasta crown in the identity card. The only person who would have made a fool of himself would have been me. Now the Constitutional Court and the ECtHR have ridiculed themselves. But why?

Ultimately, these procedures are an expression of the undemocratic entrenchment of organised religion in our laws, which wants to secure its privileges, right down to its headgear, with the help of secular jurisdiction.

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A key element of secularism is opposing the age-old symbiosis between rulers (or governments) and state religion, each dependent on mutual legitimisation. King James I was under no illusion: ‘No bishop, no king.’ And as the American lawyer, writer, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll noted in 1881, ‘the throne and altar were twins – two vultures from the same egg.’

One of the most treacherous examples in the last century of this symbiosis was the way in which France’s Roman Catholic hierarchy propped up the Nazi puppet Maréchal Pétain during World War II.

I remind readers just how relatively recent this all is. For me it is not dusty academic history; as I will demonstrate, it is on the cusp of living memory. It is a case history of the fragility of liberty, something too many of our politicians – even those who claim to be historians – seem to be very careless about.

On 22 June 1940, Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, conceding defeat. As a result, while the Nazis battled to overwhelm the northern half of the country, the southern half, euphemistically entitled ‘Free France’, was nominally under Pétain’s control, relieving Hitler of any need to deploy forces there. The Pétain regime was based in the spa town of Vichy, chosen for its many lavish hotels and transport links.

Pétain’s grip on power was tenuous and he needed all the support he could summon. Who better to fulfil this role than the Catholic Church, preaching to the nation from its pulpits each week? The purges against the Jews had already started, even in France, but that proved to be no impediment to the Church’s unconditionally supporting Pétain. And not just the French Church. In August 1941 Marshal Pétain enquired about the Vatican’s view of his collaborationist government’s anti-Jewish legislation. According to the report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, top Vatican officials found ‘no objection to these restrictions so long as they were administered with justice and charity and did not restrict the prerogatives of the Church.’

The Church’s leaflet, addressed in 1942 to every French person, made just one point: that it was a religious obligation to support Pétain, almost as if he were a saint. He was already a national hero for his military role in World War I. The leaflet comprised sycophantic pro-Pétain statements from practically every senior cleric in the country. It is not hard to imagine devout matriarchs and other pious family members castigating detractors – for example, those in the resistance or protecting Jews – simply because anything short of unquestioning allegiance was portrayed as a sin against the diktat of the Church. In 1942, Bishop Lusaunier went as far as to direct that ‘the French should obey Pétain, not De Gaulle’ – who was leading the resistance from London.

It is not surprising that there is little or no evidence of a public backlash to the leaflet at that point. The Vichy regime was a police state, whose rules affected every single life. Even children had to sing a daily hymn to Pétain: Maréchal, nous voilà! (‘Marshal, here we come’).

The history of the Catholic Church is replete with its support for the oppressors over the oppressed, going back at least to the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores of South America in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the case of the Church’s collaboration with Pétain, its price for this Faustian pact was the reversal of laïcité, the secularist reforms of the opening years of the 20th century, from which the Church was still reeling. For example, France’s Third Republic had proscribed religious instruction or observance in publicly funded schools. On 9 July 1940, the Government of the Republic was transferred to Pétain’s control. Defeat was blamed on the Jews, Communists, atheists and Freemasons, and portrayed as divine retribution for the secularist reforms.

Religion was let back into publicly funded schools. Public funds were permitted to be used to finance religious schools. Pétain closed the teacher training establishments set up after the Revolution. From 1943, communes were required to pay for church maintenance. The Church was given back assets, particularly property, that had been sequestered by the Third Republic.

The Church will also have been delighted that the revolution’s battle cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was abandoned. Pétain replaced it with travail, famille, patrie (‘work, family, fatherland’). This ushered in a new moralism, an attempt to woo ardent Catholics, for example by discouraging divorce and demanding that women dressed modestly and bore children within wedlock. Jacques Duquesne, the author of a book on French Catholics during the occupation, believed that ‘one reason for the church’s mute acquiescence was its enthusiasm for Vichy’s moralizing, family-based, traditionalist agenda.’

Nothing in this regime actually operated as it was presented to the people. Although the cornerstone of the new regime was ostensibly Catholic, there were secularists among its ranks. And life in Vichy was as libertarian as it gets. Pétain’s private life was similar: he was not a practising Catholic, married a divorcée, and had affairs but no children.

A few months after the leaflet’s release, the Church’s position unravelled a little. In July 1942, Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, despite having supported Pétain, protested together with some other clerics, but no other prelates, about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and the reportedly enthusiastic arrest of over 13,000 Jews by the French police without any coercion by the Nazi authorities. By mid-1943, however, control of the notorious Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris, from which 67,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, came under Nazi control, demonstrating conclusively that the Vichy regime was subservient to the Third Reich.

Tellingly, Saliège’s protests did not shame the Church into rethinking its collaborations. As late as February 1944 the bishops condemned the resistance army, despite the fact that the extent of Nazi atrocities was widely known by then, as was their all but certain prospect of defeat in Europe. This was just six months before the allies liberated Paris, and, soon after, France.

After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, the Nazis deported Pétain against his will to Germany to head a ‘government’ in exile, but Pétain refused the role. In October, however, he was brought back to France for trial.

He played the wronged victim. ‘Power was legitimately given to me and this was recognised from the Vatican to the USSR.’ He was, if nothing else, a murderous anti-Semite. However the ‘Lion of Verdun’, as he had been known for his valour during World War I, saw himself as the country’s grieving father. On 17 June 1940, he had proclaimed, ‘France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms.’ Five days later, as told by Martin Goldsmith in Alex’s Wake, he signed the Armistice with Hitler, at the latter’s request, ‘in the very same railroad car and on the very spot where, twenty-two years earlier, the Germans had surrendered at the end of World War I.’

Pétain may well have been motivated by an attempt to avoid France’s total destruction, and it is possible that he himself was the puppet of Prime Minister Laval. One of his main accusers was Paul Reynaud, briefly prime minister before Pétain took over, who had done his utmost to oppose the Nazis. Reynaud told the court, ‘never has one man done so much damage to a nation as Maréchal Pétain has done to the French.’

De Gaulle commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was exiled to prison on l’Isle d’Yeu, where he died in 1951. Laval was executed.

Astonishingly, there was no wave of anticlericalism at liberation. The Church emerged unscathed from its collaboration with Vichy because the Gaullists, socialists, communists and the Christian Democrats were all united in a government that needed the support of the Church.

It was not until 1997, on the site of Drancy transit camp, that French bishops asked forgiveness ‘for the collective silence [sic] of the bishops of France during these terrible years.’

As the Guardian reported in 2002: ‘Successive French leaders have had their own reasons for perpetuating the illusion that the Vichy regime was a victim of the Nazis and not an active participant in a Germano-Franco fascism.  It was not until 1995, the year he became president, that Jacques Chirac broke the taboo of silence, admitting that “the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers”.’

Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of the secularist Federation Nationale de la Libre Pensée, cites numerous examples of Pétain’s concessions to the Church which have not been reversed, even now.

Unfortunately, my recent experiences of French justice lead me to go further. I have witnessed clerics not being held accountable under secular law for the sexual abuse of minors, nor for reporting their knowledge thereof as the law requires. In my opinion, the Church in France appears to be above the law, just as it was before the Revolution. The most spectacular example of this was the trial of the then most senior Catholic in France, Cardinal Barbarin (who had papal ambitions), for failing, as had been unlawful since 2000, to report abuse by a priest of numerous scouts over decades. Barbarin’s awareness of the abuse was not in contention, but the public prosecutor refused to initiate the case. Yet Barbarin was convicted after a private prosecution in 2019. In a bizarre development, however, the conviction was overturned by an appeals court, on the basis that Barbarin was not legally obliged to report the abuse allegations, because his victims were adults at the time when they alerted him. This decision was upheld on appeal by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil proceedings.

As to living memory, in 2019 I stayed at a family hotel on the south side of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) in the French spa town of Thonon les Bains in the department of Haute Savoie. It is famous for its maquisards, the guerrilla fighters opposing the Vichy regime, whose numbers included many Catholics. Some joined to avoid the ‘Compulsory Work Service’ (STO) that provided forced labour for Germany.

The patriarch of the hotel, a delightful man by then in his nineties, had been a maquisard. I shook his hand as he told me proudly of standing next to de Gaulle at the liberation of Paris.

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Festivals are an important PR opportunity. When they are religious festivals, they become a way of exhibiting the beliefs that the organisers want to showcase, and the image of the religion that they want to project. In South Asia, such festivals are often grotesque illustrations of majoritarian muscle-flexing.

Ram Navami witnessed a surge in violence against Muslims in India last week. The celebration of Ram’s birth provides the Hindutvaadis in India with the chance to reaffirm the deity as a symbol of Hindu supremacism. Chants of ‘Jai Shree Ram’ (‘glory to Lord Ram’) were weaponised by Hindutva mobs that had been emboldened by the triumphant construction of the Ram Temple on the disputed Ayodhya site. In the 16^th century, a mosque was built on the site, which many conservative Hindus believe was the birthplace of Ram, by the founder of the Mughal Empire; in 1992, the mosque was demolished by radical Hindu mobs.

The weaponising of Ram Navami mirrors a similar weaponisation of the ‘love’ for Muhammad in Pakistan. The Islamic festival of Eid Milad-un-Nabi, the commemoration of Muhammad’s birth, has often been marred with violence against the constitutionally excommunicated Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The latter has been targeted for commemorating any Islamic festival, owing to the community’s belief in their sect’s founder, which is deemed by Islamists as sacrilegious. Ahmadiyya Muslims believe their 19^th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, is an Islamic messiah; clerics of other sects deem this belief contradictory to Muhammad’s status as the final prophet of Islam.

Similarly, during the Islamic month of Ramadan in recent years, people have been imprisoned, fined or left to languish in Pakistani jails, or beaten up by Islamist mobs in both Pakistan and the officially ‘secular’ Bangladesh. The Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other jihadist groups in the region like Isis, often increase militant activity during Ramadan. They claim that jihad during the holy month is more rewarding, citing the victory in the Battle of Badr in 624 AD. According to Islamic tradition, this battle was the first between Muhammad’s army and the pagans of Mecca. The triumph of the outnumbered Muslims has been attributed by many Islamic theologians to the month of Ramadan.

As Islamic militancy has spawned regionally, and indeed globally, Hindutva radicalism has also caught the imagination of many in Hindu-majority Nepal. Meanwhile, Buddhist extremists are hoping to erase religious minorities in Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

Varieties of supremacism

In comparing varieties of religious extremism in South Asian states, it is important to stress the differences as well as similarities between them. Despite its precipitous anti-Muslim plunge under the Hindutva regime, Hinduism in India is not (yet) as dominant as Islam in Pakistan, where the religion is more brazenly institutionalised. For instance, not only is Islam the state religion in Pakistan, its supremacy is codified in the penal code. Sharia is used both to sanction violent penalties and also to legally discriminate between crimes committed against the majority and minority religious communities, such as blasphemy.

Multiple mosques remain under construction in India, whose constitution still dubs it a ‘secular nation’. In contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed in Pakistan over the past 75 years, while around 95 percent of minority places of worship have been erased since the country was created in 1947.

In Afghanistan, like Pakistan, religious supremacy for Islam is etched in law via antediluvian sharia clauses. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s constitution upholds the ‘foremost position’ for Buddhism in the country, codifying the protection of this ideology as the ‘duty of the state’. In contrast, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan remain formally secular, despite attempts by hardliners to give precedence to the religion of the majority. In Bangladesh, for instance, Islamists are demanding codification of sharia, and using Islam to suppress women’s rights or vandalise Hindu temples. In turn, the government looks to counter the religionist narrative – albeit unsatisfactorily – by issuing reminders of the country’s secular identity or of the fact that it does not have a state religion.

Despite these differences, religious supremacism is a common ailment in South Asia and often manifests itself in similar ways.

Across the region, the elevation of the majority’s religion, whether in law, government narrative, or via unhinged majoritarian radicals, results in its own fragmentation and an internal contest among the divisions to assert their supremacy within the religion. Different factions within the majority’s religion struggle to establish their interpretation of religion as the true one in their country. For instance, just as Islamic extremism in Pakistan has evolved into a quest to subjugate minority Muslim sects, and the millennia-old subjugation of ‘lower’ Hindu castes is upheld by the Hindutva regime in India, so, in Sri Lanka, the propagation of the Theravada strain has accompanied the rise of Buddhist radicalism.

Whenever such a contest erupts within an ideology, especially one that is propounding supremacism, those with the loudest voices are the advocates of a more fundamentalist, radical interpretation of their religion. The result is that minorities even within the majority religion are sidelined, and anyone who does not toe the radical line is shunned by the dominant faction as a ‘traitor’ or ‘blasphemer’ – two terms which have come to be used interchangeably. In a region increasingly in the grip of religious nationalism, allegations of this kind have been used against dissenters in an unrelenting assault on freedom of speech and thought.

Freethought under attack

Examples of the religious oppression of dissenters can be found across South Asia. Perhaps the most punitive cases are found in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which have blasphemy laws that prescribe death for criticism of Islam. In Pakistan, the blasphemy law encourages vigilante violence against those who offend Islamic sensibilities. A recent example of this was the death of Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan, in the town of Sialkot in December. He was lynched by an angry mob after being accused of removing posters with Islamic prayers printed on them. Bangladesh has also witnessed a witch-hunt against blasphemy: hit-lists have been released of freethinking bloggers, with Islamists forcing atheists and secularists to flee.

At present, India’s blasphemy law treats all religions equally, and does not sanction death for offence to any religion. However, in 2018, a Member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Jannata Party (BJP) introduced a private member’s bill that would have imposed the death penalty for cow slaughter – in other words, a Hindu blasphemy law. Although the bill was rejected after a debate, BJP members have vowed they will seek to introduce it again.

In different parts of India, slaughtering cows can attract various legal penalties, including imprisonment, although in some parts it is not criminalised. However, allegations of selling or consuming beef can still encourage Hindutva mob violence across the country, just like blasphemy accusations in Pakistan or Bangladesh. For example, in June, a man was lynched in Rajasthan for transporting cattle, while another was thrashed last month for ‘suspicion’ of carrying beef in Mathura.  

Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is the dominant religion, has also seen mob violence similarly fueled by claims of attacks on Buddhism. In March, a 600-strong Buddhist mob broke into a church demanding that the worship be halted. While the country has not so far invoked jurisprudential protection for religiously-motivated suppression by the majority in the manner of India or Pakistan, incidents such as radical Buddhists instigating mob violence against minorities are becoming increasingly common.

Religiously motivated mobs form the first line of attack against freethought. Religionist governments use them to intimidate dissenters, while at the same time using the hordes’ extrastate identity to distance themselves from the consequences. The governments of India and Pakistan, for instance, would on the surface urge citizens to not take law into their own hands. At the same time, however, they profit from pressure by vigilantes which practically quash any debate on whether such laws – which effectively protect the intangible sensibilities of the majority’s religion – should even exist.

But dissent is also being silenced via official channels in South Asia. These days, courts in Pakistan have even imposed the death penalty for ‘sacrilegious’ WhatsApp messages. The Indian state is clamping down on all forms of art that a sufficient number of Hindus can claim to be offensive to Hinduism, such as film, theatre festivals or digital streaming productions. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the government’s ‘Buddhist Publications/Texts Regulatory Act’ enables the state to dictate what can be published, especially in the realm of religion, including what can and cannot be said about Buddhism and its founder.

There are complex political roots behind the move of these governments to silence criticism of the official religious line. Ethnicism, regionalism, linguistics and a wide array of other factors all support the respective power structures in each state. Overall, however, religion is the binding force that upholds the autocratic machineries in South Asia. The dominance of a particular religious and political ideology in each state is an obstruction to all kinds of freedoms, but above all to displays of conscience which challenge the ideology in question.

The hegemony of religion

South Asia has been a melting pot of organised religions from around the globe, Abrahamic and dharmic, for millennia. Although Islam is Abrahamic in origin, two Islamic strains from the Sunni sect take their appellations from cities in India: the Deobandi and Barelvi. The latter, Barelvi, originated as a syncretic brand of Islam that merged Sufi, Indic and dharmic characteristics. South Asia’s indigenous polytheistic and nontheistic faiths have similarly coopted rigid monolithism; as a result, the principle of religious and philosophical pluralism is being sacrificed at the altar of unyielding homogeneity.

One characteristic of South Asian culture, which was well established long before the arrival of the Abrahamic faiths, is its subservience to superstition and attribution of paramount authority to religion. This culture remains entrenched today in the different states, regardless of which religion is dominant. But while those embracing theocratic constitutions – such as Afghanistan and Pakistan – would have no qualms about flaunting religious authority, even supposedly secular states in the region are more or less subservient to religious hegemony.

Secularism in India, unlike in Western countries, has translated into letting different religions have their own spheres of influence, while the state claims to treat all religions equally. The consequence of this has been that, in practice, religion has increasingly been allowed to interfere in civic life. This can be seen in the way in which cow vigilantes are now forcing everyone to make dietary and ritualistic choices based on Hindu beliefs.

Elsewhere in the region, states are letting religions rule their communities, thereby eroding their claims to secularity. The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, for example, in a 2007 ruling on a case against mosque loudspeakers, maintained that the country is ‘secular’. However, it has elsewhere conceded that its constitution only mandates the protection of Buddhism, while the minority religions are not similarly safeguarded. This underlines the point that establishing the constitutional supremacy of one religion inadvertently breaches minority rights, even when they might be separately engrained in law.   

The current situation in India demonstrates the way in which allowing different religions to govern communities plays into the hands of the majority. Once the followers of a dominant religion are given the power to impose its rules on their own community, by a religionist ‘mission creep’, they try to extend its authority even to nonbelievers.

Moreover, the custom of creating separate spheres of influence for different religions may ostensibly be designed to safeguard minorities, but in practice, it can hinder social progress. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the minimum age for marriage is 18 years, but the child marriage of Muslim girls is allowed because Islamic sharia governs family law in Muslim communities, since religious laws are allowed to rule domestic matters. This undermines women’s rights. In India, Muslim men were permitted to ‘instantly divorce’ their wives under sharia law until 2019, even though the practice had already been outlawed in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Allowing religious ideologies to be imposed on different communities inevitably leads to clashes and contradictions within the state. For instance, the court in the Indian state of Karnataka last month upheld the ban on ‘unessential’ religious symbols in secular schools. This led to a gross contradiction in the right to don religious garbs, wherein Muslim girls could not wear the hijab but Sikh boys could continue to wear turbans.

A secular state should not be determining which practices of any given religion are or are not ‘essential’. Instead, the state should uphold a uniform civil code which applies equally to the entire population. Where the adherents of some religions are treated preferentially to those of other or no religions, freedom of thought and expression cannot but suffer in the process.

‘Progressive’ suppression

In some cases, even advocates of liberal and progressive views have felt a misguided obligation to support the religious hegemony. The widespread liberal support for sexist Islamist modesty tools as symbols of ‘liberation’ is a case in point.

But a religion is just another ideology. A truly liberal approach is not to treat schoolchildren wearing religious clothing any differently from those wearing flags of a political party or jerseys of a particular sports team. Where there is good reason for imposing a uniform dress code, such as in a school, no exceptions should be made on the grounds of religion, any more than they would be in the case of manifestations of a political or sporting affiliation.

In India, defending the Muslim right to flaunt Islamic garb could be interpreted as challenging the already skewed religious narrative in the country, since the targeting of Islamic practices, regardless of how regressive they might be, stems from Hindu majoritarianism more so than any adherence to secularism. However, many self-avowed liberals or progressives in the West have called their own countries’ institutions ‘Islamophobic’ for treating Islam like other religions. Once again, secular progressivism should mean that religious beliefs and practices are treated the same as any other ideology. It does not mean that they should be viewed with a misplaced reverence, or especially privileged.

The support for religious dogma by progressives, in misguided defence of human rights, has unfortunate repercussions in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the same dogmas are used as a tool of oppression. The claim that satirising Islam is an attack on Muslims – even in states that allow significantly harsher mockery of the majority’s religion, such as France – is being used as a ‘progressive’ argument in countries like Pakistan, where criticism of Islam is violently suppressed.

This in turn has adverse effects on debate on religion in these countries, where both religionists and liberals seek to ‘reclaim’ religion. In Pakistan, for instance, the goalposts have been shifted so that the question is no longer whether Islamic dogma should have any bearing on whether people should be executed for blasphemy, but on whether blasphemy is, as some liberals now argue, ‘un-Islamic’.

Many progressives, like Pakistani-born American author Qasim Rashid, cherry pick Islamic theology so as to suggest that violence has ‘nothing to do’ with Islam. At the same time, minorities – including Rashid’s own Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Pakistan – are being violently suppressed, explicitly using 1,400-year-old Islamic laws against blasphemy. Opposing discrimination against Muslims should not translate into liberals’ defending Islamic scriptures against their critics, or into propagation of the term ‘Islamophobia’ in countries where fear of Islam is perfectly rational.  

India, which has a long tradition of self-questioning and indigenous criticism of Hinduism, is now seeing staunch secularists lecturing Hindu nationalists on what it actually means to be Hindu. This is a classic ‘no true Scotsman’ argument, since it claims that that anyone using violence in the name of Hinduism is not a bona fide member of the religious community. Such an approach is a cop-out, since it looks to avoid addressing the Hindu roots of Hindutva; it is also a clear surrender to religion, and religious identity, as the undisputed power centre of both the religionist and secularist spheres.

India’s upholding of Hindu traditions as the bedrock of Indian civilisation is mirrored in Sri Lanka’s promotion of Buddhist heritage as intrinsic to its national identity. The association between civilisation and religious tradition has reaffirmed the latter as central to political dynamics in Sri Lanka, where loyalty to the Buddhist heritage was initially codified in the constitution and is now being rammed home by majoritarian mobs.

Altogether, there is less and less room for political discourse in South Asia that does not involve religious frames of reference.

Denying universalism

While adherents of Islamic and dharmic doctrines see their religious beliefs as antithetical to one another, today they use similar arguments to defend their religion’s supremacy. Such arguments have been dutifully propagated by progressives in those countries as well. Where national environments have become increasingly hostile to religious self-reflection, those in power simply label criticism of Islamic or Hindu traditions – especially that originating in foreign countries – as a ‘western’ narrative.

As a result, critics of organised religion are increasingly silenced in South Asia. The unequivocal rejection of religious doctrine or tradition is depicted as a ‘western’ value; thus, anyone who advocates this view can be accused of being disloyal to their community. The criticism of religion is also dismissed as being grounded in an insufficient understanding of religious doctrine. This approach implies that criticism of religion is itself illegitimate; thus only those who believe in the religion, or at least refrain from criticising it, have the right to discuss it in the first place.

But denying the ability to criticise the majority’s religion freely is to deny a tradition which has deep roots both in India and among many Muslim philosophers. Moreover, to label freethought and the criticism of religion as illegitimate is to imply that they have no relevance in South Asian countries. In fact, though, freedom of thought and speech are universal human rights, which ought to be just as inalienable here as in the West.

There is no reason why the practice of thinking and speaking freely need automatically lead to a complete rejection of all theology. The crucial point is that the advancement of a pluralistic, tolerant and liberal democracy is only possible if no one religion is privileged above others, and if criticism of all religions is freely permitted. For that to transpire in our neck of the woods, freethought needs to be wrestled back from the South Asian ideologues who have pushed all matters of social, civilisational, and human significance into the intolerant domain of religion.

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A satisfactory apology?

The Church of Rome has finally started to face up to some of the historic abuses committed in its name. Earlier this month, a remarkable series of meetings was held between Canadian Indigenous leaders and Pope Francis I. The latter issued an apology, in Italian, for ‘the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church’ who had participated in the abuse of the Indigenous children caught up in the government’s coercive system of residential schools between 1883 and 1996. At least 150,000 children were forced to attend the schools, and more than 4,000 died.

The long-festering scandal of the schools took on increased prominence in May 2021, when the unmarked graves of 215 children were discovered by ground-scanning devices at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Several hundred more unmarked burial sites have since been detected at other former schools. The continuing shock of these discoveries has been such that, in the Canadian media, the five-day Rome meetings sometimes overshadowed even the war in Ukraine.

Not all those present at the meetings, however, and even fewer of those watching from Canada, were entirely satisfied with the Pope’s apology. By limiting its terms to only certain ‘members’ of his Church, the Pontiff has been perceived by some to be ducking responsibility for the failure of the institution as a whole to renounce the evils of its past.

‘His [the Pope’s] words may be what some want to hear, but there are no repercussions for what happened,’ said Gene Gottfriedson, a 58-year-old survivor of the Kamloops school and a former altar boy. ‘Forgiveness is not easy,’ wrote journalist Tanya Talaga, who is of Indigenous descent, in a response to the Pope’s apology in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. ‘Reconciliation does not stop here at the Vatican. And it will not end until we bring all our children home.’

The harm caused by the residential schools

In Indigenous tradition, harm done to an individual can extend through seven generations of their family. This has truly been the case of the school survivors. On top of the sexual and other physical abuse many suffered at the hands of their priest teachers, they were forbidden to speak their native language, were taught nothing of their tribal heritage, and emerged, in many cases, as rootless teenagers who went on to become parents without having learned any parenting skills. Associated harms include the alarmingly high rate of Indigenous prisoners in Canada’s jails: this is seven times that of other Canadians, accounting for 27 per cent of the inmate population while representing only 4.1 per cent of the Canadian population as a whole.

The so-called ‘education’ that residential school children received was heavy on Bible teaching, but proved useless in enabling its students to lead normal adult lives. After they finished school, most returned to the ‘reserves’ – inferior land set aside for Indian tribes in the 1800s – and subsisted on government welfare. They were forbidden by the Indian Act to own property, to borrow money to start businesses, or to leave the reserves without a pass issued by the local Indian agent, a government employee. (When South Africa established its apartheid system, it used Canada’s Indian reserves as a model.) Ironically, thousands of Indigenous families later became adherents of the Christian churches in which they had suffered abuse.

Truth, reconciliation and the Catholic Church

Today, the schools are viewed by most Canadians as a national disgrace and a stain on the country’s reputation as a tolerant, secular, liberal democracy. Two prime ministers, Steven Harper and Justin Trudeau, have previously apologised for them. The issue has occupied political and public centre stage since the signing of the Indian Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. The agreement, involving the government, Indigenous organisations, and the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches, led to the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard 6,500 witnesses and in 2015 issued a report containing 94 ‘calls to action.’

Every denomination has since met their obligations to provide reparations and assistance to surviving Indian school residents and their descendants – except the Catholic Church, which operated about 70 per cent of the 130 schools.

Under the Schools Settlement, most of the $4.7 billion (£2.9 billion) paid to survivors of the schools and their families came from the Canadian federal government. Together, churches and dioceses of the Catholic Church in Canada pledged $54 million in various cash donations to compensate survivors, plus an additional $25 million in services in kind. In the event, they fell seriously short in their promises – despite the fact that cash reserves, property and other valuables owned by the Church in Canada amount to billions of dollars, making it reportedly ‘Canada’s largest charity by far’.

Shamefully, the federal government let the Church off the hook to the tune of millions of dollars, because, according to government lawyers, there was little chance of recovering the funds through a lawsuit. However, in an apparent response to mounting pressure following the recent discoveries, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops last year announced plans for a second fundraising campaign for survivors of the schools; this is still in progress.

The residential schools and secularism in Canada

For all the furore over the visit to Rome and the Pope’s response, most commentators have overlooked the consideration that the harm done to Indigenous children would have been largely avoided if Canada had required a secular education to be provided in its Indian residential schools.

The residential school system was intended to be managed by the Catholic and Anglican churches. In 1879, just as it was being finally approved, George Jacob Holyoake, the British secularist and coiner of the term ‘secularism’, met with the Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, over lunch in Ottawa. While the record is silent on this issue, Holyoake would, one imagines, have cautioned Sir John on the adverse effects he had observed in England on schools that retained religious management of their classes and curriculum.

Any advice that Holyoake may have given ultimately fell on deaf ears. The schools, set up to ‘take the Indian out of the child,’ ignored every principle of secular education that had been provided by the public school systems since 1867, when Canada became a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire.

Canada’s failure to adequately anchor its laws and institutions in secularism has led to tragedy, persecution and indifference. It has harmed generations in the 160 years since Confederation and has delayed the development of a clear national identity. There are still a number of anti-secular legislative provisions in force in Canada, including the public funding of Catholic schools and tax exemptions for churches. While humanist and secular societies in Canada have campaigned to abolish such provisions, they have so far made little progress.

The Canadian Constitution Act, created in 1982 out of the old British North America Act, flies in the face of secularism in its declaration that Canada ‘is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God’. The Fathers of Confederation saw Canada as a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch, whether Queen Victoria in 1867 or Queen Elizabeth in 2022, would reign as both Head of State and ‘Defender of the Faith’ – the ‘faith’ being that of the Church of England.

Despite such legal provisions, many Canadians appear to go about lives that are largely secular. According to a recent study, ‘Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019’, the share of people who reported having a religious affiliation fell from 90 percent in 1985 to 68 percent in 2019. Those who attended a religious activity at least once a month dropped from 43 to 23 per cent. The jettisoning of religious affiliation and the growth of secular sentiment in Canada go a long way to explaining public indignation over the failure of the Catholic Church to atone for its mistreatment of Indigenous children.

The Pope is expected to visit three Canadian cities in July – Quebec City, Edmonton, and Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavit in northern Canada. According to CBC News, ‘the delegates who travelled to Rome expect Pope Francis to deliver a fulsome apology on Canadian soil for the church’s role in running residential schools.’

Demands that he recognise the Catholic Church’s institutional failures are likely to increase as the visit draws near. Will Francis show true contrition, and will he provide just compensation for the victims? As far as many Canadians are concerned, he has a long way to go – spiritually as well as geographically.

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