Letters to the Editor
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Clueless Ranting
This article is a perfect example of how clueless many secular critics are concerning the Church, and how paranoid nationalism blinds THEM as almost as much as it does the fundamentalists. Rowan Williams is totally mischaracterized here. Totally clueless.
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I assume there are countries that operate under Sharia law...
...so people that want to live under Sharia Law have places to go. Yet many move to Europe. Why?
Europe is being colonized by the middle east. Turnabout is fair play, I guess.
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On Faith
This entire issue was far more thoroughly and effectively discussed in the Washington Post On Faith blog.
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Re: Anonymous 7:34
"As an Englishman teaching in a US public school, I'm shocked how complete that separation is. You can't teach the Crusades, you have to talk in vague terms about 'European tyranny' as the reason for emigration to America, you can't even teach something like Hamlet without ignoring great chunks of the play."
I'm having trouble believing you. In four years of teaching English in a public school, not once did I skirt or skip the religious issue when it presented itself in a text, be it "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Julius Caesar," or even "Antigone" (in the latter two we discussed Ancient Greek and Roman religion so that we could understand the motivations and actions of the characters). Our English literature books had Psalms from the KJV Bible because they are examples of transcendent English language poetry. We covered Milton's "Paradise Lost," Donne's poetry, and Jonathan Swift's essays. The Book of Ruth and Ecclesiastes (both KJV) were on the county's approved reading list. Our American lit. books had religious poems by Anne Bradstreet and sermons by Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather.
The world history classes covered the history of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the conversion of the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Crusades, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, Henry the VIII, religious persecution in Europe and the Americas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Any time religion featured a prominent role in historical events, it was covered. Such topics are covered in the Maryland state exams and the AP exams.
Not once did a student, parent, or those bogey-men the ACLU or Americans United for the Separation of the Church and State so much as whisper about us not keeping church and state separate. And far from being an exception, my experience (as a former public school teacher and a former public school student) is par-for-the-course in the USA.
The law and legal precedent clearly affirm that religious topics may be discussed in terms of history and religious texts read and taught in terms history and literature. Proselytization is the legal line in the sand which a teacher can not cross. I know all of this not only because of my teaching experience, but because I had to take a class on legal issues in public education when I got my master's degree.
If what you've describe is true (and honestly, I have trouble believing that it is), you are in a bad school with a terrible administration (the two always go hand-in-hand), as well as ineffectual department heads who doesn't understand the legal issues and doesn't back up their professional staff. If this is the case, you need to start teaching the way you want to teach (so long as you don't proselytize) and have your union back your ass up if parents and administrators starting claiming a violation of church and state separation.
BTW - your letter plays right into the hands of the "religious right" who claim that they are persecuted by the public school system. What you describe sounds word-for-word like the misinformation (lies) they disseminate about Church-State Separation in public schools.
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a thought about Beth Dins...
In America, where, last I checked, separation of church and state still exists, the experience of Jewish courts may shed some light on what can happen even when religious bodies are not sanctioned by the government.
The major raison d'etre of beth dins, at least in those in the New York area, seems to be granting divorces. Under Orthodox Jewish law, a civil divorce is not enough to allow a religious Jewish woman to remarry. She becomes an "agunah," neither a widow nor a wife and prohibited from marriage.
The growing influence of more and more reactionary intrepretations of Judaism has made some rabbis less willing to grant divorces -- and, some say, more susceptible to abuses of power. This often leads to unethical if not illegal behavior on the part of men who are empowered to ruin their exes' lives. Because of this, beth dins become more and more irrelevant except in ultra orthodox communities -- with the result that the decisions of enlightened beth dins areignored.
We have civil law, and a civil society, precisely to insure that such abuses are not permitted to stand.
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One sided
This article is rather one sided.
Here is a quote from Wkipedia
In response, Williams stated in a BBC interview "... certain provision[s] of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law; ... we already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justified conscientious objections in certain circumstances in providing certain kinds of social relations" and that "we have Orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country legally and in a regulated way because there are modes of dispute resolution and customary provisions which apply there in the light of Talmud."
Williams also denied accusations of proposing a parallel Islamic legal system within Britain. Williams also acknowledged that Sharia, "In some of the ways it has been codified and practised across the world, it has been appalling and applied to women in places like Saudi Arabia, it is grim."
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A problem with state religion
Why on Earth a free people would let any citizen be abused in some other quasi legal religious system is beyond me. If they want to do some religious thing for mediation, great. But once they get into the legal system, there should be only one law. Otherwise you will have chaos.
So what are you going to do, have 10 different types of religious police or teach police 10 or 100 different legal systems, one for every sect of every religion? Then what stops people from choosing to beat their wives under sharia when they aren't really Islamic? What will you do with the rest of society who do the same thing? Are you going let the Hindu burn their wives for not suppling enough dowry? Sure, these things may not be officially allowed under the respective religions, but another bad thing about religious law is it isn't exactly codified and you can't appeal it to the supreme court. Like the Christians that kill abortionists - they all say abortion is murder so no problem. But the Bible clearly says killing the unborn is a property crime - you kill a women's unborn, you pay a fine. So who is to decide? Are you going to let some religious nut case terrorize your whole society as we do the Christians with abortion clinics?