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Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Religious Identity

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN

In many discussions of the topic, the word “cosmopolitan” carries an undertone of moral superiority, especially in relation to claims of faith. It does not advance the discussion, however, to locate religious faith and commitment prima facie on the parochial and particularistic side of the ledger, and enlightenment, universal consciousness, and other high-sounding things on the other. Rather, one should acknowledge this attitude of moral superiority and move past it. In an attempt to do so, I will approach the topic of the cosmopolitan idea and religion from an angle informed by political history and thought.

Among the eighteenth-century intelligentsia in Europe, the notion of the cosmopolite was often that of the Luftamach, the person who was at home anywhere, which is to say nowhere in particular. The cosmopolite could drop into cultures, be there for a period of time, and then move on. He or she traveled very lightly. This notion of the cosmopolite brings to mind Milan Kundera’s great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Some of those interested in cosmopolitanism surely know the novel. One of the female protagonists, Sabina, is very light indeed. She is born in Prague but finds a home in Switzerland. She sheds part of her identity as she goes, just as she sheds relationships. Her heavy identity is associated with her tragic homeland, Czechoslovakia, and she rids herself of much of that, winding up on the northeastern shores of the United States. The other female protagonist, Tereza, is very heavy. When Russian troops march into her homeland during the Prague Spring in 1968, she has to be there. It is her home and her native soil clings to her. She cannot be at home—truly at home—anywhere else. Thus the novel presents a contrast between two ways of inhabiting identities.

In terms of this contrast, one could ask, as an aspect of identity is religion light or heavy? To answer, certain religious identities are inhabited lightly, while others are heavy. American Protestantism is a very light religion that can be quite comfortable with a kind of thin universalism, indeed, that historically has been one of the bearers of that kind of universalism. But heavier religious identities represent a more difficult proposition. Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, and several forms of Judaism are all strong faiths, with strong claims of adherence. Most often we think of the claims of religion in relation to the claims of nationality. How do faith and citizenship comport? How is religion enacted in the public sphere? For the devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew, circumscribing the practice of their religion to the private sphere runs directly counter to requirements of faith that involve forms of public expression.

My experience as part of an ongoing dialogue with Arab Muslim scholars called the “Malta Forum” for half a decade is instructive in this respect. During our second meeting, we made something of a breakthrough. In our previous discussions we scholars from the United States heard that a thoroughly secularist society was unacceptable from a Muslim perspective. Our response was that there is secularism—and then there is secularism. Not all forms of the secular are the same.

We insisted that the American mode of dealing with the issues of faith and civic life is significantly different from the French tradition of laicité, for example. French laicité involves a hard separation not only between church and state, but between politics and religion on the level of civil society and civic expression. These principles of the secular, interestingly enough, are not in the name of no religion, but in that of a religion of the state. The notion of laicité anticipated that there should be a kind of civic religion. Certainly that was the project of the makers of the French Revolution and the ardent defenders of the laicité tradition in its aftermath. Atatürk’s revolution in Turkey also reflected these principles of laicité. But in America, the development of secularism was a different story. There was a juridical separation of church and state. There was no religion of the state, no establishment faith, but plenty of intermingling of religion and politics on the level of civil society, part of the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. This demonstrated, we insisted, that there can exist a secular state and at the same time a society that was not totally secularized. That is to say, there can exist a civil society in which concepts and ethics, concerns and enthusiasms inspired by faith might find a home, and indeed historically did so. At this point we would usually cite part of the enormous list of great civic movements inspired by faith in American history, including of course Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Where does cosmopolitanism enter into any of this? Perhaps we can work by analogy from laicité and the contrasting American experience. Certainly there is one version of cosmopolitanism that is openly hostile to any and all particular claims, whether they are the claims of a particular national, ethnic, religious, or other identity. According to this version of cosmopolitanism, we will meander in the darkness until we shed particularisms in favor of global consciousness, universal citizenship, or some such idea that is often presented in quite vague terms. But this is not the only option, surely. There is also a form of universal identity and consciousness, whether cosmopolitanism is the best name for it or not, that cherishes particular commitments and in fact views them as steps toward more inclusive identities that are infused with instances of universality—“universal moments”—and mutual interdependency.

Human beings certainly do not start out in a universal “someplace.” Rather, everyone starts out as a helpless infant in a very particular place, usually called home. As one grows older, one’s horizons expand, one’s vision extends, and one comes to see others in a variety of new contexts. The most robust universalism, however, never loses touch with the particular; there is a back and forth between it and strong particular commitments. In an essay from some years ago, the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote of thick and thin identities. On the one hand, if identity is too thick one can become mired in a kind of dogged nationalism or ethnocentrism, or a very defensive and bristling understanding of faith. That is, one may become not only an adherent of one’s own faith but also hostile toward the claims of the faiths of others. But on the other hand, if identity is too thin then one has no real commitments at all. The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt once insisted that one cannot be a citizen of the world, as one is a citizen of a particular polity. She was referring to concrete forms of responsibility and accountability. To say that one is a citizen of the world has a nice ring to it, but what does it mean in terms of concrete requirements or responsibilities? It might mean, for example, that if one thinks of citizenship in a more universalist way one wants to extend certain rights under the rubric of hospitality, or through some other understanding, to those who are not citizens of one’s own polity. But that very extension turns on a strong notion of civic standing. Thus one sees the back-and-forth relationship between the universal and the particular. One can also think of attempts to create a universality without reference to a particular, on the level of language with the project of Esperanto, for instance. The project of a universal language failed, and failed miserably, because it was entirely invented. It was not thick with life like our mother tongues. They are called mother tongues for a reason: they nurture us, they help us to grow up, and they help to orient us within a particular place.

In my own work in the past, I have suggested that cosmopolitanism is a way to try to connect moral intuitions and concrete recognitions to certain claims that are broader than those of the self. I have suggested that one of the reasons we can respond, for example, to the cries of the homeless, is that we know what a home means, and therefore have some idea of what it means to be homeless. We can respond to the orphan because we know what a family means. We can respond to the dilemma of being stripped of citizenship because we know what citizenship means. Everything we know about moral development demonstrates that we have to begin with strong, particular, concrete recognitions. We do not begin our moral development at the heights of abstraction with some Kantian categorical imperative.

Interestingly enough, this has implications for what we usually call ecumenism as well. For some, ecumenism means that one has to dilute every religious commitment until it becomes something that everyone can agree upon, but then one is left with only very weak commitments. Far more interesting is the version of ecumenism that challenges those who adhere to strong religious commitments to engage with one another, to share a world with one another, and to learn from one another without requiring one another to relinquish some vital belief. For example, if one were to ask a Christian to give up the belief in Jesus as the son of God in the name of ecumenism, the serious Christian could only shake her head in disbelief. Just as the belief in Christ as the son of God is central to Christianity, there are beliefs that are essential to Islam, Judaism, and all other religions that cannot be compromised without compromising the religion itself. If cosmopolitanism requires discarding strong, particular commitments and beliefs, then it is not compatible with serious faith. But if one imagines a more capacious and complex cosmopolitanism, then one can imagine a dynamic understanding that can accommodate both thick and thin religious identities. We can find ways to accommodate these identities and ways in which to enrich one another so that certain universal ideas and claims penetrate our understanding of the particular and conversely, our understanding of the universal is penetrated by concrete, particular recognitions that have some thickness.