A Case of the Mondays: Religion is Like Race

A lot of secularists mistakenly believe that religious discrimination is somehow different from racial discrimination. The tipping point that drove me to write this article was reading about Sam Harris's beliefs about the acceptability of denying Muslims basic civil rights. Since being religious is a choice, the argument goes, there's no real analogy between religion and race.

But in fact, religion is very much like skin color, in that it's an ethnic marker. Endogamous cultural groups can be distinguished on the basis of language, color, national origin, or creed. In the US, the difference between blacks and whites is about color while this between Hispanics and Anglos is a combination of color and language. In Bosnia, the difference between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats was entirely religious, as is the difference between Sunnis and Shi'as in Iraq. The exact nature of the difference rarely matters; there's no material difference between distinctions based on religion and distinctions based on skin color.

Like the other ethnic markers, religion is intimately connected to group identities. Even apostates often have some cultural connection to religious customs: secular Jews hold Passover Seders ex-Christian atheists usually celebrate Christmas, and secular Muslims in Turkey tend not to eat pork. Ontologically, Stephen Roberts made sense when he said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Sociologically, he didn't, because a person's religious identity tends to be independent of what religion he adheres to. This religious identity is weaker among secular people, but it doesn't disappear entirely, as Bosnians discovered in the early 1990s; analogously, linguistic identity is weaker among polyglots than among monoglots, and racial identity is weaker among people whose social circle is racially mixed than among people whose social circle is racially uniform.

And politically, it's easier to understand conflicts when one regards religion as just another ethnic variable. The Bosnian genocide involved peoples who differed only in religious markers, but proceeded like any non-religious ethnic conflict. Al Qaida provided aid to the Muslims, while Russia sided with the Eastern Orthodox Serbs; however, that religious sense of kinship was hardly different from the pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements that fueled World War One. Of Iraq's three constituent groups, two are distinguished based solely on ethnicity and language, while two are distinguished based solely on religion.

Further, group distinctions can morph over time. European anti-Semitism began as exclusively religious in the Middle Ages. As Jews accumulated money in the late Middle Ages, it became increasingly a class issue, and then, during the Enlightenment, focused more on culture and less on religion. By the late 19^th century, it became racial, reflecting an overall increase in the prevalence of racial pseudoscience in Europe; it has had a strong racial component ever since. But that story will reveal very little about the exact ways anti-Semites hurt Jews. A more instructive way of characterizing it is that anti-Semitism has been populist for most of its history, but was systemic between roughly 1890 and 1945.

The artificial division of religious and nonreligious distinctions seems by and large restricted to the secular West. It's a mistake endemic to atheist activists, like Harris or Richard Dawkins, that religious conflicts will disappear if atheism only gains more credence. In fact, although religious fundamentalism has been a motivating force behind Western supremacist views, the Western elites justify supremacist views based entirely on secular arguments. Samuel Huntington doesn't say that the West is special because the Reformation's theology is the best of all the theologies of major religions and denominations; he says the West is special because of its mix of human rights, democracy, and separation of church and state.

Ultimately, this is a conflation of two different dimensions of religious distinctions. The first, the one between secularism and fundamentalism, is what is most familiar to people who are only familiar with one religion, such as most Westerners. That distinction is similar to distinctions between liberals and conservatives, and has very little to do with ethnic markers. But there's another distinction, that between different religions. Plural religious societies, such as those of India or Iraq or even those Islamic societies that are in regular contact with the West, tend to emphasize that distinction instead.

This conflation allows a lot of people to hold beliefs about religious groups whose racial equivalents are too racists for any member of the Western elite to fathom. For example, take the idea that Islam is inherently degrading to women. In a way it is, but so is Christianity; the implicit idea is that Christianity is superior to Islam, because Christianity has been less successful at defending its misogynist traditions than Islam. Arguments rarely get more self-contradictory than that, but the conflation of cross-religious differences with the difference between secularity and religion effectively masks that contradiction.

But in fact, there's little difference between distinctions of religion and distinctions of language or race. Different religions have different practices, but that hardly merits a special mention, in light of the different customs of different nationalities or cultural groups. In particular, discrimination and conflict have very little to do with whether the bone of contention is religious or national. Very rarely, religious groups will wage an ideological religious battle, as in the Crusades. More frequently, religion will be a proxy for something else—nationalism in the cases of Al Qaida, Israel, and Palestine; racism in the case of Western anti-Muslim attitudes; and a combination of racism and class consciousness in India.

The common secularist belief that every religious conflict can be analyzed in the same way as American-style culture wars is just not true. Most people never choose their own religion in the same way secularists chose to be nonreligious. In practice, religion works more like skin color than like the secular/religious spectrum; holding supremacist views about one religion is racism; and massacring people of a different religion is genocide.

Comments

[Jon H]

"the implicit idea is that Christianity is superior to Islam, because Christianity has been less successful at defending its misogynist traditions than Islam."

That interpretation suggests your own religious antipathies.

Rather than failing to "defend its misogynist traditions", it may be because Christians have been more successful at identifying and abandoning stupid traditions that don't deserve to be maintained.

Because you know what? Sometimes traditions were founded by ignorant assholes. What's the point of maintaining such things?

Muslims would certainly be a lot better off if they were able to do the same.

[Goffredo]

"For example, take the idea that Islam is inherently degrading to women"

Take the Idea? Idea? Is not a fact? Are you suggesting that maybe it is just a misconception?
Islam has just been better in defending its mysogenist views, that’s it?...
I hope it's just my poor English (I am not a native speaker and redundant prose does not help), but this looks like a strange, sad page on TQD.

[Abbas Raza]

Alon, I think you have written a sparkling gem of an essay here. Some things really fell into place for me (in terms of understanding various conflicts) as I read this, and I thank you for that. And I think that you are exactly right in pointing to the over-simplicity of Harris and Dawkins's formulations (Dennett is different, in my view). Brilliant!

[Abbas Raza]

Jon H and Goffredo,

Taken out of context, Alon's statement that each of you quote may look strange, but clearly what he is saying is that Islam and Christianity are, in many ways, both degrading to women, but Christianity is, for historically contingent reasons, no longer able to defend literal and fundamental interpretations of itself, while Islam still is able to (unfortunately). It is not crazy to think that this is not because of something inherent in either religion (read the old testament for some truly horrific stuff). Consider Alon's whole argument, don't argue with a single sentence!

[Alon Levy]

Abbas, thanks for the compliment, and sorry for being even later than is usual for me.

Goffredo, I say "Take the idea...", but the next sentence begins with, "In a way it is." Of course the Qur'an has very misogynist verses - just like the Bible. What I'm arguing against isn't that literal interpretations of scripture are bad, but that Islam is inherently worse than Christianity.

[Goffredo]

Abbas, Alon
thanks for claryfing the matter. It was not my intention to argue with one single sentence; I highlighted just the part that left me quite disturbed, since I had interpreted it differently.
I am not very much concerned about which religion is better, but it seemed to me that in the article the plain fact that Islam - today - is degrading to women is somehow disputed on the ground that, if only they could, christians would do worse.

G.

[Mark]

I found this to be a well written, well thought out essay.

[John Martin]

Is there a link to the article of Sam's that you are referring to? Or if it's offline, some pointer as to where we might find it?

[Tasnim]

This is a very well written essay. For a couple of decades, since I stopped practicing religion, I kept blaming all the ills in the world on religious beliefs and kept arguing (mostly with myself) that only if people would get over the religious beliefs, the world would be a peaceful place. Until recently, when I discussed this subject with my son, Asad, who suggested that we should take a neutral stand towards religion and campaign for non-violence instead (we were discussing various conflict in the world with religious overtones). Since then it occured to me that if there were no religion, people will find other ways to form social groups and fight on the basis of language, nationality, race etc. You have obviously reached a similar conclusion but have expressed it much better than I could. While I enjoyed Sam Harris' book: 'The End of Faith' very much, after reading it I felt even more convinced about solving our differences peacfully, with or without religion in the picture. As someone pointed out in reviewing Dawkins' book that there is a trace of intolerance in his views very similar to the religious people he was critical of. We need to respect diversity and learn tolerance. But above all be non-violent in our approach to solving problems, in the mold of Thoreau, Gandhi or Mrtin Luther King. Thank you for a very learned and well written post. Tasnim.

[Arifa Khandwalla]

I enjoyed your piece. Thank you for writing a clear headed essay without the usual knee-jerk reaction filled with the usual stereotypes.

[JonJ]

Yes, I certainly agree that the complete triumph of secularism (if that were possible) would probably not end intergroup prejudice, since not all prejudice is religiously based. The mistake of Western atheists like Dawkins and Harris on this point is probably due to their assumption that atheism is a fruit of superior intelligence, and so is freedom from prejudice.

But it doesn't take superior intelligence to arrive at either atheism or tolerance of others (plenty of persons of average intelligence show both). Also, and intelligence doesn't necessarily produce either atheism or tolerance, since there are a lot of very intelligent religious people and very intelligent prejudiced people (I'm sure we all know quite a few examines of both). We must recognize, on this holiday dedicated to social change, that that change is a much more complicated project that these oversimplifications would lead us to believe.

[Ihsan D.]

It seems like this post and all the comments are totally missing something here. Yes, granted, if religion is like an ethnicity then people should be protected from laws that would burden them because of their religion -- but suppose that one's religion is nothing like an ethnicity and is *purely* an intellectual stance one takes, an opinion one holds of the world. Is it Levy's view, and the view of all these commenters, that in this case it would be okay for the law to pick out people of certain religions in order to place a burden on them? What is going on here?

In the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" has been interpreted especially to protect people from laws that burden them because of their race, their sex, their ethnicity, their national origin, their status as aliens . . . but has not been interpreted specially to protect people from laws burdening them because of their religion because you already have the First Amendment offering that protection. Now this discussion reminds me that the First Amendment protects not only "free exercise of religion," but generally free speech as well. Who is going to support laws that single people out for special burdens because of an opinion that they hold? While we're at it, shall we go ahead and make it a crime to believe that capitalism is a transient phase in world history?

[Scott Ahlf]

Sam Harris advocated denying Muslims civil rights? I would like to see that statement---
Just another meme infected believer in the belief in religion--
As a host for toxic religion parasites, reason is no longer possible--

[Scott Ahlf]

From pharyngula -------
American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science
Category: Creationism • Politics
Posted on: January 11, 2007 10:57 PM, by PZ Myers

Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.

(click for larger image)
The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent's religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.
It looks to me like being a fundamentalist means you're about half as likely to believe in evolution as a non-fundamentalist of the same level of education and place on the political spectrum. The majority of fundamentalists of any kind (except the liberal ones with a grad school education; I wonder how many of those there are) reject evolution. To get a majority of conservatives to accept evolution, you have to drag them through grad school and make sure they aren't fundamentalists.

It's not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.

One problem I have with these data, though, is there is no indication of the sample size in each category. It's taken from a total of 3673 respondents, but I rather suspect that the liberal-fundamentalist category was significantly smaller than the conservative-fundamentalist group in raw numbers, so that, for instance, there are actually many more fundamentalist grad students who disbelieve evolution than believe it.

The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist's belief in evolution, but what we don't have here is any data on what kind of college education we're talking about. The fundamentalists may have mostly attended a bible college that reinforces their ignorance for all we know, and they may have had a very different experience than the non-fundamentalists, who would have been more likely to attend a secular school.

The association of anti-evolutionism with conservatism is not a particularly reassuring trend to me. Despite being liberal myself, I think the acceptance of good science ought to be independent of political affiliation; the data says it isn't. The chart is about belief in evolution, and that's a good word for it—if you are saying you agree that humans evolved from earlier species of animals because your political views say you should, you may not be evaluating the evidence rationally…or perhaps liberals are simply more receptive to education.

Mazur A (2007) Disbelievers in evolution. Science 315(5809):187.
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Comments
I've always had the impression that to fundamentalists, given their gross misunderstanding of how science workss, science is another religion, one with a different (and a mostly incorrect theology). This would seem to support that argument, at least tangentially.
Posted by: Keanus | January 11, 2007 11:12 PM
They create their own reality.
Posted by: Coin | January 11, 2007 11:16 PM
..The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist's belief in evolution, but what we don't have here is any data on what kind of college education we're talking about.
I knew a guy in Zaire (now Congo). He was a missionary, very hard right. I have many stories about him and his wife, interacting with me and my colleagues (anthropologists/biologists, etc.) And the other missionaries.
But for now just this:
He went to college. Oral Roberts. "Why was he a missionary in Zaire?" I asked him once. He told me he had been told by god to go to zaire. How did god tell him to go to Zaire, my colleague asked?
He told us he was walking around one day wondering where to go for his mission work, and a car drove by. It had a bumper sticker on it that said "Zaire". There could be no reason for that if it was not god telling him to go to Zaire.
My colleague and I kept a straight face. (well, two straight faces, I suppose). Later we had quite a laugh out of that, because both of us could only think one ting: He had misread the bumper sticker.
There was a store at that time, which has been replaced pretty much everywhere by Wallmart and Target. They had a bumper sticker they used for advertising.
So this guy is out in the rain forest in Zaire, and meanwhile, god is pissed. God has been stood up by him and is waiting for him in his local Zayers. Presumably in the Travel Luggage section..

[beajerry]

Very interesting essay.

I don't find Harris and Dawkins to be too simplistic, just very radical.

Yes, belief systems are more ingrained traditions than not. Are they as important an organ to a culture as language or race? Maybe. This is an issue I'd like to explore more.

My inital reaction though is that Fundamentalism and other perversions of belief systems ARE choices, no matter how ignorant they may be.

It is one thing to believe your futbol team is the best, and quite another to burn an opposing fan's car.

Perhaps the essay points more to the relation of sociopathy to crowds?

[maniza]

Lyrical article--but I wonder--something is missing--something doesn't read right.

I'm wondering about your opening sentence--that "A lot of secularists mistakenly believe that religious discrimination is somehow different from racial discrimination." Do secularists, alot of them believe this? I don't think they bother with whether discrimination is religious or non-religious--they bother with discrimination and bigotry and I would say they base the roots of discrimination and genocide in threats to and differences in class and income--the holding on to or the wresting of power.

Sam Harris advocates denying Muslims civil rights?

And could you clarify when and how Al Qaeda provided aid to Bosnians? As far as I know this is baseless.

[Jesse M.]

I think it's too simple to say religion is "like race"--for example, we could also say religion is like political affiliation, which is affected by both your choices and beliefs but also by your temperment and what region you were born and even your ethnicity and sex. Denying civil rights to Muslims is wrong, but it would also be wrong to deny civil rights to Democrats or Libertarians. Still, that doesn't people from arguing vociferously against certain political ideas and thinking the world would be better off if they lost all credibility.

But of course, religion isn't quite "like" either one. We should always be cautious about taking analogies too literally, although they can certainly be useful.

[Ali Choudhury]

"Taken out of context, Alon's statement that each of you quote may look strange, but clearly what he is saying is that Islam and Christianity are, in many ways, both degrading to women, but Christianity is, for historically contingent reasons, no longer able to defend literal and fundamental interpretations of itself, while Islam still is able to (unfortunately)"

I think the historical veneration of the Virgin Mary had a lot to do with women's status generally being better in Christianity. At least that's what J M Roberts thinks.

[Justin]

"Of Iraq's three constituent groups, two are distinguished based solely on ethnicity and language, while two are distinguished based solely on religion."

Something doesn't add up here.

[Alon Levy]

There are a lot of very worthwhile questions here. Tackling them in a random order:

1. I don't have any explicit quote of Harris' that rivals Ann Coulter's pronouncements about Muslims. But Lindsay's post about Harris raises a lot of questions about his politics and morality. For example, he tries making a pragmatic case for torture, which rests on the false premise that "'ticking-bomb' scenarios actually do occur."

2. The study about belief in evolution has some problems - for a start, the definition of "fundamentalist" is based on self-reporting. Since in the US the word "fundamentalism" carries a somewhat negative connotation, a good study should use a neutral term such as "Evangelical."

3. Muslims venerate Mary at least as much as Christians. The Qur'an has an entire chapter dedicated to her life. Besides, if the worship of Mary made societies less misogynist, there'd be more gender equality in Italy and Spain and Portugal than in Germany and Sweden and NL, whereas in fact the opposite is true.

4. Secularists often claim that religious discrimination is singularly the result of religion, and will be cured by secularism. That is true when the religious discrimination is directed against nontheists, but not when it's directed against members of other religious groups. Secular groups are a lot more divided on European discrimination against Muslims, such as France's hijab ban, than they should be.

5. Al Qaida apparently did send Mujahideen to Bosnia. Wikipedia quotes Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network as saying that Al Qaida did in fact play a role in the Bosnian conflict.

6. Religion has some parallels with politics, of course, but not so much when it comes to historical and societal inequality. Outside identity politics, political views rarely form people's identities. Many black people have a black identity, many white people have a white identity, etc., but only activist-minded liberals have a liberal identity. Actual discrimination on the basis of politics is even rarer, with the obvious exception of political activism. Businesses often discriminate against people of the wrong race or religion or sexual orientation, but not against people who vote for the wrong party.

7. My statement about Iraq's constituent groups works out fine if you count distinctions instead of groups. There's the Arab/Kurdish distinction (it rarely breaks down into Shi'a/Kurdish or Sunni/Kurdish, but when it does, it's Sunni/Kurdish more often than Shi'a/Kurdish), which is ethnic, and the Sunni/Shi'a distinction, which is religious.

[beajerry]

"Evangelical" is neutral?

[maniza]

I'm sorry to belabor the trangential point on Bosnia when we should be arguing your premise on secularists, --However I must say you are surely joking with the reference that you provide on Al Qaeda and Bosnia! Wikepedia--and a quote in Wikepedia from some "sorry assed network"that nobodies heard of??!!!

[Deets]

Beajerry,

Evangelical is the term they use to describe themselves (or sometimes "Charismatic"). It's a superior term for scientific purposes as because it gets to the heart of the identity, which isn't so much centered on the specific interpretation of the bible, but on transmitting that interpretation. In this sense it's not too distant a synonym to "jihadi."

As for the matter of whether or not religion or any belief system is a matter of choice, I would be very hesitant to say we "choose" our beliefs. Sometimes, as a thought experiment, I have intentionally imagined that there was a god, to remind me what that felt like when I was a child. But my atheism (at least regarding the personal god) is a part of me, emergent from all that know and feel, and I can't select alternate beliefs the way I might "choose" who to marry or what career to switch to.

Even if I were to change my mind, based on argument, or even a "religious experience," the change would not be a choice as we commonly understand the word.

Furthermore, for many people who might like to explore alternate beliefs, in the absence of a pluralistic society (as in most of the non-urban world), there really is no choice. To change professed belief is to change identity, and therefore to detach oneself from all the social benefits of belonging to a community. In short, self-exile, which for a human is no choice at all.

It's mystifying to me that Dawkins and Harris will compare their lot, as the atheist minority, to homosexuals before Stonewall, and then turn right around and say they are out of patience for other people's egregious beliefs. In what possible way is the progressive thought?

[Ihsan D.]

I've already put up one comment here, and it looks like it's been ignored. Normally I would let it be at that, but I'm going to try again because I like this blog a lot and I'm truly shocked by what I'm seeing here. If someone holds the view (whether Harris holds it or not, whatever) that Muslims do not deserve the same guarantees of civil liberties that other people deserve, then the right response is absolutely not to say, "Oh, but one's religion is a lot like one's race, and therefore the civil liberties of Muslims had better be protected as much as anyone else's." Of course, the person who holds the view that Muslims do not deserve the same guarantees of civil liberties that everyone deserves is off his rocker, but this response to that view is as bad as the view it's responding to. Here you have someone saying, "Muslims are out to destroy us so let's crack down on them," and the response you have is, "No, don't crack down on them, because they haven't chosen that identity for themselves." I mean, how much worse can it get?

Sure, the person who says "Let's crack down on Muslims" is probably racist and when he says "Let's crack down on Muslims" he probably takes comfort in his belief that anyone Muslim is also of a certain race. He's an idiot, yes, but regardless, you've got to be able to answer this guy's argument head on. The answer is (1) actually, Muslims are not out to destroy us, just a handful of lunatics who insanely claim to speak for the entire religion, and (2) as a separate matter, even if some lunatic (not your typical Muslim!) does wish to destroy us, we do not punish people for wishing or believing things, we wait until they've started on a course of criminal conduct before we brand them as criminals -- in fact, we *protect* people's freedom to believe what they want to believe.

There are some other, much more minor, things about this post that bothered me. One of them was this line: "secular Jews hold Passover Seders ex-Christian atheists usually celebrate Christmas, and secular Muslims in Turkey tend not to eat pork." The first two items in this list suggest that "secular" is being used to mean "atheist." But if that's how it's being used, then why is Turkey being singled out as a country with a lot of "secular Muslims"? Turkey is "secular" in the sense that its politics is separate from any religion. That doesn't mean that it's people are atheists! You're falling into exactly the trap of the nutcases if that's the road you're going down.

Another misguided point made in Levy's post is this one: "It's a mistake endemic to atheist activists, like Harris or Richard Dawkins, that religious conflicts will disappear if atheism only gains more credence. In fact, although religious fundamentalism has been a motivating force behind Western supremacist views, the Western elites justify supremacist views based entirely on secular arguments. Samuel Huntington doesn't say that the West is special because the Reformation's theology is the best of all the theologies of major religions and denominations; he says the West is special because of its mix of human rights, democracy, and separation of church and state." Well wait a minute. Huntington says a lot of things that are just so wrong . . . but *this* idea that's being attributed to Huntington (whether correctly or not, whatever) -- *this* idea is surely okay! Human rights, democracy, and separation of church and state are superior to the alternatives!

These all seem to me to be such basic matters, I am really surprised to read what I'm reading here.

[maniza]

Here's a response to you Ihsan--that's it--that's what was bothering me about this article--you've said it. Thanks.

[beajerry]

Was it Nietzsche or Rank who said if you remove someone's religion from them you must replace it with something else?

"Evangelical" actually points to "choice".
I did not mean to say that people have a choice in their core belief systems, but they do in their usage.
Evangelicals "choose" to transmit their interpretation.
This is a ritual, not a belief.
Can the two be separated? I say yes.

By studying other peoples' religions one can gain a more objective understanding of their own. It may not alter their core beliefs, but it will certainly make them question their rituals and their meanings.
The issue here is religious symbology. Most believers in any religion get caught up in the soot and baggage of the past few thousand years and follow misinterpreted symbols (which coagulate into different denominations).
The core beliefs of Christianity don't change, but how people "choose" to worship do.
And their "choice" is often made by not choosing, by not seeking, by following.
Most believers are irresonsible.

Harris and Dawkins go too far by asking for people to drop not just their rituals but also their beliefs. What they should be doing is demanding people practice their religions more responsibly.

[Deets]

Ihsan,

You're right, but it's more complicated than that. Sam Harris argues that "belief is action" -- that certain beliefs compel the believer to violence. I would hope the First Amendment's protection of religious exercise extends to the belief which underlies practice, as you say, but in the present political climate I wouldn't presume anything.

I would also certainly hope any judge or justice confronted with civil rights violations based on religious (or, for that matter, political) beliefs, would understand both the 14th and 5th amendments to be operative.

Beajerry, this goes to your statement that there is a distinction between "belief" and "ritual." You're correct that Harris does not care about the distinction.

The money quote of course is "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them." It is hard to imagine a more harrowing ethical axiom.

[beajerry]

That money quote is indeed harrowing. Perhaps I give too much in believing it was not well thought out but was rather reckless radicalism.
I could be wrong though.