By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Manent, Pierre. Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge. Translated from the French by Ralph Hancock and Daniel J. Mahoney. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016. 115 pp.
To say this is a timely book is almost an understatement. In its opening pages, Manent quotes Machiavelli to the effect that states may be slow to address important civic issues, but eventually some extrinsic accident such as war or revolution forces members of a nation to face a disruption to their common way of life. Manent is convinced that France has reached Machiavelli’s “deciding moment.”
In fear or in hope, France, and we might say Europe, is now confronted with what is held in common and what threatens it. The choices French citizens make in the present will haunt the lives of their descendants in the years to come, and will determine as well as the future character of France.
Apart from the simple demographic composition of its peoples, whether France will remain solvent and prosperous, whether its citizens live in peace and free from violence, whether its laws will be just, whether civil rights and liberties will be respected in word and in deed, becomes an open question.
In the 1960s, France, in common with other European nations, experienced a loosening of the bonds of civility; as Manent puts it, “The delegitimation of collective rules, both political and social.” The moral and cultural bonds that once provided by a common religious perspective were abandoned as a secular humanism took hold.
Today European elites see religion merely as individual opinion, something private, a feeling that is incommunicable. The power of this perspective over us, Manent says, is all the greater because it is essentially dictated by our political regime.
Accordingly, public institutions are viewed as responsible for guaranteeing the rights of the individual, among which is the right to hold whatever opinion one wants on this world and on the other. Given this enlightened or progressive point of view, religion has no role to play; it is no longer a powerful and significant motivator that it once was, but a thing of the past.
Thus Europeans were greatly surprised when Islam became a major factor in the political life of the Muslim world. Its intellectual elites had failed to take religion seriously. Today, France in particular is confronted by the fact that a significant percent of its populace chooses to live by the word of God and under its own law of sharia. The influence of political Islam cannot be dismissed. Where Christianity is concerned, religion’s loss of collective influence is a verifiable fact, but not where Islam is concerned.
Manent points out that the old inhabitants of Europe never had the chance to accept or reject Muslim immigration. It was never put to a vote but dictated by policy formulated in Brussels and the other capitals of European nations. Once the massive influx of Muslim immigrants occurred, the official interpretation of rights dictated that Muslims be considered exclusively as rights-bearing individuals and not as bearers of a collective form or, one might say, alien culture.
Before it is too late, Manent writes, “It is important to take advantage of the time allotted to us to make a transition from a passive coexistence between a society of rights and an Islamic morality to the active participation of both groups in a common political form that can only be the national form.” He then asks, “Where can a nation so weakened [by liberal ideology] find the political and spiritual means to rise to the heights of such an unexpected and arduous task?”
The rights of the individual have been radically separated, he maintains, from the rights of the citizen. We are the first people in history to give over all elements of social life to the unlimited sovereignty of the individual. It is impossible to live together without having something in common. What may provide the common bond?
In bringing his discourse to a conclusion, Manent writes:
“Although Catholics seem to be pushed ever further towards the periphery of public life, the Church as a spiritual domain is at the center of the Western configuration. Her responsibility is proportional to this centrality which in truth is inseparable from her identity. Just as the universal Church seems alone up to the task of holding together the configuration that joins her with Judaism, Islam, evangelical Protestantism, and the doctrine of human rights, the Church in France, that is, French Catholics, have a special responsibility for the common good in which the other spiritual forces of our country participate.”
Muslims for their part must recognize that they have entered a domain that they did not create. They are not entering an empty space, but will have to find their place in a world that is spiritually and culturally different. The French who accept them have in principle the spiritual and intellectual resources to be generous without being complacent. The immigrant who is accepted must want to participate actively in the life of a political body that does not and will not belong to the umma.
In short, for peaceful coexistence, Muslim immigrants have the obligation to accept a degree of separation from the umma. A rational solution to be sure, but given the objectives of a militant Islam, is it possible?
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