Participants' Reports
Brent Goff
Berlin, Germany
November, 2003
Religious Battlefields in Germany & the U.S.
She is a Muslim, lives in Germany and wants to wear a headscarf when she teaches. Fereshta Ludin was suspended from her duties at a school in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg because she refused to remove her headscarf during instruction. The school district justified its decision through its policy of forbidding teachers from showing bias for or against any religion in the classroom. After suing her employer on the grounds of freedom of religious expression and appealing the case to Germany's constitutional court, Ludin received a ruling in September that left her standing where she began. The court decided not to decide, instead ordering the states to determine for themselves what is appropriate. The result: a divided society. Eight states will likely pass legislation permitting religious clothing and therefore, expression, among teachers in schools. Eight states look poised to issue a ban. Legal experts say that once a state outlaws the headscarf, it is inevitable that a teacher will sue and appeal once again to the highest court. In the meantime, Germans are searching for an answer to the question: how much religious tolerance can a Western country withstand without losing its identity?
Ludin's case mirrors, albeit only from certain angles, a religious dilemma in the United States that has taken on new dimensions in recent years. The latest chapter centers on a 2.6-ton stone replica of the Ten Commandments, coined by the press as Roy's Rock. Roy Moore is a State Supreme Court Justice in Alabama who personally placed the rock in the public rotunda of the Supreme Court building in Montgomery. Civil liberties groups complained that Moore was deliberately sanctioning a religion in a public space, which violates the separation of church and state. It took a federal court order before Judge Moore allowed the Ten Commandments to be removed. The courts had offered a solution: the Ten Commandments could remain alongside other sources of American law such as the Magna Carta. Moores refusal and his public words promoting a stricter adherence to Judeo-Christian doctrine convinced the federal judges to issue their decree for removal. The issue divided Americans so intensely that one reporter remarked that the angry rhetoric coming out of the state capitol in Montgomery reminded him of the explosiveness of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
The legal cases of Fereshta Ludin and Roy Moore reveal a culture war over religion taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Germany is trying to find room for its more religious minorities without feeling alienated in its own national, secular skin. Religious America is becoming more religious. Evangelical Christians are growing in number and becoming a stronger social and political force. Liberals and secular groups fear this could weaken the constitutional barriers that keep the church out of the realm of the state.
Evangelicals and the Fight
The U.S. is considered one of the most religious nations in the world. Ninety-five percent of Americans claim a belief in God, and more than 50 percent say they attend religious services nearly every week. There is one church, synagogue or mosque per 865 people, the highest percentage on Earth. These statistics have remained fairly constant over the last decade, however the number of Americans who consider themselves born again has increased significantly. Today they account for one-third of all Americans. Businesses are not ignoring this demographic trend. The evangelical pop culture industry includes a growing book market with publishing houses such as Warner Books and Bertelsmann competing to sign new Christian authors. Contemporary Christian music is the fastest growing segment of the music industry. The conservative, Christian radio commentator James Dobson has more listeners than CNN has viewers (a ratings victory Dobson shares with the Fox network).
Observers say this flourishing of conservative religious culture explains the galvanizing of the Christian right politically. Religion and politics have never been top-secret bedfellows, but they are overtly sharing the covers now. Political strategists are aware of the potential power of this growing population as an electoral group. President Bush's top political advisor Karl Rove has stated that four million of the 19 million evangelical Christians did not vote in 2000, and that while they made up 20 percent of the electorate in 2000, the goal in 2004 will be to increase that figure to 24 percent.
This will include targeting minorities such as African-Americans and Latinos, who tend to share conservative social attitudes. GOP strategists insist Bushs cultural traditionalism will earn him as much as 40 percent of the Latino vote alone in 2004. Considering Schwarzenegger s impressive performance in California against a Hispanic-American candidate, Republicans may be on the verge of claiming what was once exclusively Democratic electoral territory.
Liberal social critics are alarmed by this trend and see a direct threat to the interpretation of state and national laws if the conservatives succeed in winning the next federal election. They point to the public conservative reflex exhibited earlier this year after the Supreme Court struck down so-called sodomy laws. According to a Gallup poll, before the courts June 26 decision, public support for legalizing gay sex stood at 60 percent. After the decision, the number plunged to only 48 percent. Support for same-sex civil unions dropped from 49 to 40 percent.
If the Bush administration enjoys a second term, it is expected to exploit such social unease to justify appointing more right-wing justices at all levels of the federal court system. The White House could make it difficult for the Senate to block nominations by pointing to the fact that many legal issues such as sodomy laws are intertwined with social mores and values. Considering that 60 million Americans consider themselves born again and, more often than not, subscribe to less tolerant ideas of society, senators from both sides of the political aisle will find it difficult to stand in the way.
Sociologists say the more liberal a religious community is perceived to be, the more members it loses. Hence, the churches in the U.S. with expanding congregations are conservative, i.e. Evangelicals, Mormons, etc. Political strategists need only to look at the Anglican Church to understand how issues of conservatism versus liberalism can divide a body. Perhaps they should simply refer back to Roy s Rock. A Gallup poll showed that 77 percent of Americans opposed the federal order to remove the monolith. Veteran Democratic political consultant Hank Scheinkopf said the roots of the growing schism in America have changed: Race is no longer the dividing line in this country its religion
How Much is Too Much?
Germany's trade unions still consider Sunday a holy day and they are willing to strike to honor it. Not because their workers parade into church every Sunday to worship, but rather because their workers want to sleep in. This is a classic example of a religious tradition that has been transferred into the realm of secular ethics. In fact, less than ten percent of Germans attend a worship service on a regular basis. The religious values that were once integral to the German experience have been secularized and institutionalized by the state, i.e. the bureaucracy of social welfare. The root may be in the church, but the contemporary identity is so far removed one could argue that it borders on the sterile. Take the preamble of the new, unfinished European Union constitution. It omits any mention of Christianity or God among the cultural forces that shaped the modern value system of the continent s peoplesa decision Gerhard Schr_der, who omitted So help me God during his swearing in as chancellor, supports.
Social scientists have placed Germany into the secular state-secular politics category, which is correctly associated with Western post-Enlightenment developments. But this does not mean that religion is totally absent. Indeed the combination in pure form is nowhere to be found in Europe. The Christian Church is maintained in Germany by church taxes, for example. And even Bundestag members regularly attend a Gebetsfr_hstck (prayer breakfast) to discuss current political issues.
However, it is the presence of a certain sacred alternative, Islam, which has Germany enveloped in a discussion about religion and tolerance. With a population of 3.2 million, Muslims comprise the largest religious minority in the country. In Berlin alone there are 227 thousand Muslims, mostly of Turkish origin, making Germanys capitol the largest concentration of Turks on Earth after Istanbul. There are 2,500 mosques and that number is growing. For example, in Berlin eleven super mosques are in the works, with blueprints calling for restaurants and swimming pools in addition to prayer rooms, which will hold hundreds of people.
Berlin s most recently constructed mosque, more specifically its two towering minarets, has become a symbol of the uneasy coexistence of Germans and Muslims. The Mosque am Columbiadamm in Berlins Neukoelln district was scheduled to be opened this year just before the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. However, upon their final inspections city zoning officers discovered the minarets are about ten meters higher than the building permit allows. A subsequent investigation revealed the violation was probably intentional because the concrete used is designed for tall structures.
The city fined the mosque 100 thousand euros and agreed to let the minarets stand. More important, municipal officials, citing a breach of trust, told reporters all future applications for mosque construction will be subject to a public hearing, a usual procedure that was lifted for the Mosque am Columbiadamm in order to avoid conflict with the nearby residents. However, that good intention proved fruitless. Germans now refer to the Mosque am Columbiadamm as an example of the incompatibility of Islam with the rule of law. One editorial in a Berlin daily newspaper criticized the architects for behaving as if Germanys building code is great, yet Allah is greater.
In its reporting of the head scarf controversy, Der Spiegel magazine reflected this sentiment by accusing Ms. Ludin of demanding tolerance for intolerance and by asserting that the head scarf has become the new symbol of an Islamic fundamentalism at odds with the values of the West.
They're like them
According to the European Values Study published last summer, only about 21 percent of all Europeans said religion was very important to them. A Gallup poll conducted this year with a slightly different methodology found that 58 percent of Americans defined religion for them that way. Fifty-one percent of Americans say they attend a religious service at least once a week. In Western Europe, the number is 20 percent; in Eastern Europe only 14 percent.
The religious divide between Germany and the United States appears to be widening according to the World Values Survey conducted by the University of Michigan. It poses questions concerning traditional values, i.e. religion, and self-expression to people in 78 countries (85% of the world s population). In the past 25 years Northern European countries, including Germany, have shifted further into the self-expression category and have reported weaker reliance on traditional values. The U.S., like its European counterparts, has also developed stronger self-expression characteristics. However, the break in similarity becomes evident when Americans respond to questions regarding traditional values. There, the US finds its closest relative in Turkey and Nigeria. The Europeans live on another end of the spectrum. Whereas Germany, Sweden and Denmark are categorized as having strong secular-rational and self-expression values, the United States stands as an anomalyfirmly in the camp of self-expression, but also at home in the traditional values club. Ireland is the only other Western country with a similar demographic.
This finding is strengthened by the World Values Survey s strength of religiosity scale. It shows the United States as a nation strongly tied to religionmore comparable to Iran and Syria than Germany. In fact, the nation with the second weakest level of religiosity in the study is the former German Democratic Republic. After China, the GDR stood as the antithesis to America a fact that influences the demographic reality of present-day eastern Germany.
No surprise, then, to conclude that America and Germany are indeed worlds apart. However, there are similarities in commitment to religious traditions and values, namely in Americas Evangelicals and Germany s Turks. The World Values Survey shows that both the U.S. and Turkey exhibit almost identical levels of religiosity. Although the Turkish minority in Germany exhibits more secularized characteristics than the majority of their rural compatriots at home, Turks adhere to their religious practices and predicate their value system upon that tradition more than their German neighbors. According to a study by the Zentrum fr Trkeistudien at Essen University, 79 percent of Germanys Turkish residents fast during the religious holy month of Ramadan. More than a third pray on a daily basis and 22 percent attend mosque frequently.
Social values are also more conservative than those of mainstream Germany. Almost two-thirds say they would not approve of their son or daughter marrying a non-Muslim. Twenty-percent favor a strict gender separation during school sports, while a quarter believes Muslim women should wear a headscarf in public.
Although the faiths are different, Evangelicals and Germany s Turkish Muslims would find themselves closer on a scale of religious commitment and social conservatism than most Germans and non-Evangelical Americans. And both are growing in number. While Evangelicals already represent a strong political constituency in the U.S., Turkish Muslims in Germany remain a blip on the countrys political radar. The former Bundestag parliament member Cem _zdemir, a German citizen of Turkish heritage, has made the case for his countrys Turkish community to mobilize and lobby to increase political clout much as America s Latinos are successfully doing. However, that goal seems as remote as the idea of over-flowing German churches.
Religion, mainly Christianity has evolved for many Europeans from a precisely guiding creed into an amorphous spiritual inclination. Religion is there when Europeans want it. It is convenient, and never enters into the personal sphere uninvited. For the majority of Americans, religious has a place at the tablein private and in public and the trend is more attention to that religiosity. While the fundament of separation of church and state remains intact, there is a growing desire to water down the boundary.
Europeans are more aggressively challenging traditional religious teaching. For example, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany have granted same-sex couples legal protections and benefits. In the United States, those same forces encounter formidable social resistance. One example is sponsorship of a bill in Congress to outlaw same-sex arrangements that bestow benefits similar to the institution of marriage. The row over the ordaining of an openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church is another. Conservative streams in the church have threatened to break awaymoving in unison with their counterparts in third world nations.
Yet, there is more at work in Germany and the United States than simply societies reacting to the competition of interest groups, i.e. Evangelicals versus secularists, Christians versus Muslims, state versus church. Questions arise that are inherently more salient to proofing the validity of our value system. Does being secular automatically imply a belief in nothing? Are fundamentalists of any religious community to infer that a vulnerable void of values exists in a state that defines itself in non-religious terms? In both societies regardless of the role of faith in mainstream culture religion remains a powerful force that, like it or not, will determine to a significant and perhaps pivotal degree the future of national identity. Germany and the U.S. can already see the sketches of what looks like two very different pictures.
An NFO-Infratest Survey taken in September, 2003, shows Germans equally divided on whether mosques should be allowed to be constructed in urban centers. Forty-six percent said yes, 46 percent responded with no.