In view of the controversy surrounding our decision to publish four of the Danish "Muhammad cartoons" in the April/May 2006 Free Inquiry-particularly, the decision by Borders Books and Music and Waldenbooks to deny their customers access to the issue-it seemed appropriate to revisit our reasons for republishing the cartoons. The decision was not universally appreciated even within the Council for Secular Humanism; the current Secular Humanist Bulletin includes a vigorous critique by the Council's Executive Director, David Koepsell. Still, Free Inquiry Editor in Chief Paul Kurtz, Muslim apostate scholar and Center for Inquiry Fellow Ibn Warraq, Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion Director R. Joseph Hoffmann, and I felt that republishing the cartoons was not just appropriate but, in a very real sense, our obligation.
In my introduction to the cartoons in the last issue, I cited the importance of standing in solidarity with the European newspapers that dared challenge radical Islam. I stressed the importance of the principle that, in a free society, every human endeavor, religion included, must be subject to debate, commentary, critique, and even ridicule. Against those contentions, Koepsell and others objected that the cartoons constituted a gratuitous, hence unjustifiable, insult to believers in Islam. But is it true that insult never has a place in legitimate discourse? Some might argue that insult is uniquely off-limits when the subject is religion, but I reject that contention out of hand. Religion has no claim to be treated differently from any other human activity; indeed, precisely because strong religious belief can cause adherents to act in ways that so powerfully affect those around them, I think religion is too important for any sort of buffered handling.
Given a commitment to treat religion equivalently to other human projects, can insult ever be justified? Given that as journalists and Americans we enjoy a constitutional right to insult, when and why should we exercise it? That is not a question of law but of propriety. So, given that Free Inquiry had the legal right to reprint the Danish cartoons, was doing so proper? I believe so. Reprinting the cartoons, even if genuinely offensive, was not only permissible but incumbent upon us in defense of the fundamental social principle of secularism. After all, if America's largest-circulation secular humanist magazine won't stand up for secularism, who will?
In a very real sense, the United States of America represents an ongoing experiment. Throughout human history, there has never existed a protractedly successful society in which members of numerous incompatible faith traditions coexisted as equals. In previous multicreedal societies, one faith has always dominated, and it has exterminated, oppressed, or at best patronizingly tolerated the others. Only the United States has lasted for 230 years trying to run a multicreedal society of equals. It's a dream we have realized only imperfectly; other Western countries that began their experiments later have arguably outdone us. Still, no nation has run this particular experiment nearly as long as the United States. What has made it work, at least so far? In a word, secularism.
What is secularism? To borrow a word from civil-liberties attorney and Council for Secular Humanism board member Edward Tabash, secularism is a covenant among believers and disbelievers in all religions-a tacit agreement that, in order to make our multicreedal society possible, we will conduct our most significant political, social, and ethical discourse in a realm that, within its own boundaries, transcends the claims of each participant's religion. However fervent they may (or may not) be about their faiths, to be American is to have signed on, at least implicitly, to this idea of an overarching secular domain in which we all treat our deepest faiths as if they were private-as if they were mere opinions. That was the ideal of secularism proclaimed by the leading mid-twentieth century church-state lawyer, Leo Pfeffer. Current American discourse falls tragically short of this, to be sure. Precisely because religious controversies loom so important on the public square, our national failure to have realized Pfeffer's vision more fully poses terrible dangers.
The Pfefferian covenant encodes an understanding that the religious proscriptions that bind one faith community do not-cannot-bind us all. The U.S. Supreme Court's Yoder decision (1972) confirmed that the Amish have the right to end the education of their own children after the eighth grade. But they can't ban high-school and college education for others-not even in a local community with an Amish majority. Likewise, Christian Scientists have broad rights to refuse medical care, and Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse blood transfusions, but they have no right to ban hospitals or criminalize phlebotomy.
Taken seriously and at face value, Islam is the most perfectly absolute monotheism active today. It claims to have the sole and only truth applicable to all humans, and it generally presses that claim out of a tradition unleavened by experiences comparable to the Reformation or the Enlightenment that planed down the similar arrogance of Christianity and Judaism. For the radical Islamist, it follows as naturally as thunder after lightning that any practice Islam proscribes (say, making pictures of the Prophet) is wrong, not just for Muslims but for everyone.
What's wrong with Christians, Jews, Hindus, or atheists making images of the Prophet? What's wrong with their appreciating or publishing such images, even if doing so offends Muslims? Our secular society imposes on all religions the obligation to realize that each creed's laws hold sway only inside that particular community of belief. Secularism provides that, through all creeds will be respected, none-not even the majority creed, which Islam in any case is not-will enjoy deference. Islam as interpreted by its most zealous adherents recognizes none of this. If images of the Prophet are forbidden for Muslims, their logic runs, they must be prohibited for all.
Imagine that tomorrow Christian Science and Jehovah's Witness zealots fan out through our cities and blow up all the hospitals. Imagine that American Jews manage to outlaw the raising of pigs and the consumption of pork. Such acts are all but unimaginable, because we know that these communities have internalized America's secular covenant-as have great numbers of American Muslims. Yet, radical Islam persists in demanding that all Americans-of every religion and none-observe its own internal prohibitions. We need to recognize this for what it is: an overt attack on our secular covenant. It is an attempt to end our 230-year experiment in multicreedalism, by doing the equivalent of breaking into the laboratory and knocking over the equipment. Such an overt attack demands an apposite response.
Secular humanists, non-Muslim religionists, and even moderate Muslims must act unequivocally to reaffirm our secular covenant . . . to bolster the firm boundaries that stand between each believer's private commitments and the discourse of the public square. Radical Islam has striven to push into that square, to resacralize it on its terms alone. When that occurs, we who appreciate the secular covenant need to push back. And, in doing so, we may need to reach for some of the harsher, more jagged-edged arrows in our rhetorical quivers . . . even cartoons.
Still, even when we have the legal right to give offense, we should do so only when circumstances demand nothing less. I, for one, believe that the confrontation between our secular and broadly humanistic society (not just in the United States, but across the Western world) and the absolutism of radical Islam has created such a circumstance. It is time to push back. The editors of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten recognized that. The editors at other European papers recognized that. Shamefully, far too few American editors have followed suit.
Without our secular covenant, what is now the West's experiment with multicreedalism ends-effectively the goal of radical Islam. As editor of Free Inquiry, I am proud to have pushed back. I'm dismayed that so few of my fellow journalists have recognized the same obligation-and disturbed that Borders and its Waldenbooks subsidiary behaved so timorously.
Tom Flynn is Editor of Free Inquiry.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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