Drawing on their recent research Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood consider whether the British or American social compact is conducive to the incorporation of Muslims, and find that while the US may be more of a secular state, the UK is a more secular society and with a more secularist political culture. They argue that both can offer meaningful routes to not only political participation, but also meaningful incorporation of Muslim minorities

Meer, Nasar

Modood, Tariq

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/04/25/a-jeffersonian-wall-or-an-anglican-establishment-the-us-and-uks-contrasting-approaches-to-incorporating-muslims/A ‘Jeffersonian’ wall or an Anglican Establishment: The US andUK’s contrasting approaches to incorporating MuslimsDrawing on their recent research Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood consider whether the British orAmerican social compact is conducive to the incorporation of Muslims, and find that while the USmay be more of a secular state, the UK is a more secular society and with a more secularist politicalculture. They argue that both can offer meaningful routes to not only political participation, but alsomeaningful incorporation of Muslim minorities.Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination, his rhetoric onMuslims has enthralled American political discourse.  Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic, Trump’sproposal to ban Muslims from entering the US triggered a petition, signed by over 570,000 people,seeking in turn to ban Trump from Britain.  While Islamophobia is certainly not absent from Britishpolitical discourse, the Trump phenomena and reactions to it across both sides of the Atlantic raisesan interesting question as to the comparative status of Muslims and Islam in the public square in theUS and Britain.On first inspection the contrast between the two countries is stark and, on paper at least, conditionsare possibly less favourable for Muslims Britain.  After all, the First Amendment of the US Constitution erects a‘Jeffersonian’ wall of separation between Church and State, requiring that Congress ‘shall make no law respectingan establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’.  On this relatively slender clause has come torest a great deal of legal and political architecture that ensures freedom of all religion.  In the UK by contrast, theEstablished Church reflects the continuing Christian dominance in the identity of England, in spite of the consistentchallenges to its superior status by other Christian denominations (in Scotland the national church is Presbyterian,and was disestablished in 1921).In a recent study published in Social Compass, we explore the contemporary implications of these settlements andconsider which is more dynamic and conducive to the incorporation of American and British Muslims, respectively. The findings are interesting in highlighting that British Establishment has been no less successful in thisincorporation than the US. This is the case despite there being no effort to disestablish the Church of England, eventhough many secularists argue that the constitutional status of the Church makes it more difficult for Muslims toachieve the kind of integration into the nation that their co-religionists are achieving in the United States.We show there is no evidence that the Anglican establishment has actually alienated British Muslims, who includemany vocal political groups which between them have made numerous critiques of socio-economic deprivation,religious discrimination, incitement to religious hatred, various foreign policies, anti-terrorist policies and so on.Indeed in both countries we observe that Muslims have and continue to be subject to significant racialisation inpolitical discourse and often in security-led public policy.  Yet despite this, there is no record of any criticism by aMuslim group in relation to the religious establishment.Of course the Muslims in the US and Britain can have quite diverging histories and experiences of socialisation.Both countries include some of the most heterogeneous Muslim communities at any time or place, but one strikingand often overlooked feature of American Muslims is not only that Islam is the second-largest expression of Blackreligion in the United States, but that the US is relatively unique in having its largest single group of its Muslimsconsist of indigenous converts. There is of course an important genealogy of a much longer presence of Islam in theAmericas that was carried with Atlantic slavery, and which has largely been lost.  In Britain Islam has been mainly1/3carried through post-colonial and economic migration and settlement, and is the most populous faith afterChristianity.  A small majority of all of Britain’s Muslims were born in the UK.Credit: Joe Germuska (Flickr, CC-BY-NC-2.0)As the study shows, in both cases the place of Islam in the public square is important in understanding nationalidentities, because in each case religious repertoires have translated into registers of national identity, and backagain.  This is not unique to Islam as there has long been a close connection between religion and nationhood, eventhough this is under-recognised. The variety of territorially-anchored Protestant Churches in post-reformationEurope illustrates this relationship, and even where organised religions have not achieved the ‘established’ status ofthe Anglican or Lutheran Churches, or have been subject to Church–State separation, this has not resulted in God–State separation. This partly explains why political theorist Ernest Barker insisted that ‘nations [have] long dreamt fortheir national unity in some common fund of religious ideas’. The historian Linda Colley too characterised an earlierBritain as ‘a protestant Israel’, and the political theorist Geoff Levey reminds us that despite its wall of separation,the US has always remained ‘One Nation Under God’. Going further, in his Chosen people: Anglo-American mythsand reality, Longley put it well in insisting that ‘we are never going to reach the bottom of issues of national identityuntil we delve into the religious dimension … Religion is a weightier ingredient in these national stories than mostmodern English people or Americans would expect’ .So where does this leave us?  Taken together the implications of our analyses are significant for theories of religiouspluralism. It is clear that there is a current movement towards a synthesis between religious and national identitiesby Muslims themselves, and that this synthesis is facilitated by creative public spheres and dynamic civil societiesthat have historically incorporated other religious minorities in both the US and Britain. While the US may be more ofa secular State than Britain, the latter is more of a secular society and has a much more secularist political culture.As a consequence we might say that there are two quite different social compacts at work: in the British case the‘deal’ is that the religious majority can have State recognition at the highest level, but it must exercise self-effacement in relation to the democratic process, if not public culture as well. The ‘deal’ in the US is that if allChurches can agree to allow a certain limited area of public life as ‘religiously neutral’ and ‘beyond religion’, the restof public life is an open field for religion. In the US, all religious groups are free to lead the nation, to seek to makethe nation in their own image – as long as it is not through establishment. In both cases an anxious, and too often, a2/3hostile public discourse against Muslim predominates. Yet, while both nations differ dramatically in the normativerole religion plays in their political cultures, we argue that both can offer meaningful routes to not only politicalparticipation, but also meaningful incorporation of their respective Muslim minorities.This article originally appeared at the Democratic Audit blog, and  is based on Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood’s2016  article ‘Religious pluralism in United States and Britain: its implications for Muslims and nationhood’, in SocialCompass.Please read our comments policy before commenting>. Note:  This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, nor ofthe London School of Economics. Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1pxWwVQ_________________________________ About the authorsNasar Meer – University of StrathclydeNasar Meer is Professor of Comparative Citizenship and Social Policy at the University ofStrathclyde. Tariq Modood – University of BristolTariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, and the founding Director of theUniversity of Bristol’s Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and CitizenshipCC BY-NC 3.0 2015 LSE USAPP3/3

A ‘Jeffersonian’ wall or an Anglican establishment: the US and UK’s contrasting approaches to incorporating Muslims

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

LSE Research Online