A great article. I got a little bogged down in the first 8 pages running through the history of separation of church and state, but I found this very very interesting:
Quote:
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Similarly, we must somehow find a way to accept the fact that, given the immigration policies Western nations have pursued over the last half-century, they now are hosts to millions of Muslims who have great difficulty fitting into societies that do not recognize any political claims based on their divine revelation. Like Orthodox Jewish law, the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands. It is an unfortunate situation, but we have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual respect can help, as can clear rules governing areas of tension, like the status of women, parents’ rights over their children, speech offensive to religious sensibilities, speech inciting violence, standards of dress in public institutions and the like. Western countries have adopted different strategies for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, others permitting them. But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low. So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected.
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It is an issue you can see, not just when it comes to immigration. I recall a college course where we were discussing indigenous cultures and how they are treated (and mistreated) within the states in which they live. Typically the sentiment went along the lines of "live and let live" would work best - i.e. Self government for native cultures.
The question was posed "what do we do when the values of those cultures do not line up with our own?" For example, a lot of cultures do not have equal rights for women. If we respect their culture, do we also respect each of their beliefs, even when they contradict our own?
Or do we impress upon them our own values - even though that assumes a guise of cultural superiority on our part.
And more importantly, how do we deal with entire countries on the world stage that operate under such fundamentally different paradigms?