The Sign of the Cross
No one in Germany paid much attention to a suit brought before the Federal Constitutional Court by two disciples of the humanist Rudolf Steiner from a remote village in Bavaria, alleging that their three small children had been “traumatized” by being regularly obliged to see the spectacle of Christ on the cross on the walls of the public school they attended.
But every last family in the country knew—and a good many of them were left openmouthed in astonishment to learn it—that the high court charged with ensuring that the principles of the constitution are justly upheld in the political, economic, and administrative life of Germany, and that admits no appeals, had found in favor of the plaintiffs. As announced by its president, the eminent jurist Johann Friedrich Henschel, the court’s eight magistrates ruled that the Bavarian school’s offer to replace the crucifixes on its walls with plain crosses—in the hopes that this simplification would “detraumatize” the plaintiffs’ children—was insufficient, and they ordered the state of Bavaria to remove all crosses and crucifixes from classrooms since “the state must be neutral in religious matters.” The Court then proceeded to stipulate that a school could keep the Christian symbol in its classrooms only by the unanimous agreement of parents, teachers, and students. The shock waves from the scandal have reached even the peaceful lake in the Austrian woods where I’ve come seeking refuge from the heat and dryness of London.
The state of Bavaria is not just a paradise of cholesterol and triglycerides, though the world’s best beer and sausages may be had there. It is also a stronghold of political conservatism and a place where the Catholic Church is solidly rooted (I’m not suggesting that the one is related to the other): more than 90 percent of the 850,000 Bavarian schoolchildren come from practicing Catholic families. The Christian Social Union, the local variant and ally of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic party, exerts undisputed political control over the region. The leader of the CSU, Theo Waigel, was the first to protest the Court’s decision, in an article in the party organ, Bayernkurier. “Because of the Court’s ostentatious efforts to protect minorities and progressively relegate the needs of the majority to a distant second place, our established values and constitutional patriotism are in jeopardy,” he wrote.
A measured response, if we compare it with that of His Excellency the Archbishop of Munich, Friedrich Cardinal Wetter, who was brought to the verge of apoplexy and—even more serious from the democratic point of view—civic mutiny by the affair. “Not even the Nazis removed the crosses from our schools,” exclaimed Wetter. “Are we going to allow a democratic state governed by the rule of law to do something even a dictatorship couldn’t?” Of course not! The cardinal has urged civil disobedience—all schools must defy the Court’s ruling—and plans to convene an open-air service, on September 23, that will surely attract the papist masses. The act will be celebrated to the belligerent eurythmics of a slogan coined by this same prince of the Church: “The cross is here, and it’s here to stay!”
If the poll takers have done their work well, a healthy majority of Germans support the rebellious cardinal Wetter: 58 percent condemn the Court’s decision, and only 37 percent approve of it. Seizing the moment, Chancellor Kohl has hurried to reprove the magistrates for a decision that seems “contrary to our Christian tradition” and “incomprehensible from the point of view of the content and the consequences that it may have.”
But perhaps even more damaging still for the cause that the Constitutional Court is championing is that the only politicians who have thus far come out in its defense have been that handful of shabby and vegetarian parliamentarians, lovers of chlorophyll and fasting—the Greens—whom nobody in this country of dedicated sausage and steak eaters takes very seriously. Werner Schulz, their parliamentary leader in Bonn, has proclaimed the state’s duty to maintain a rigorous neutrality in religious affairs, “especially now, when, because of the actions of Muslim fundamentalists and other sects, the freedom of worship is threatened.”
He has asked that the state stop collecting the tax that subsidizes the Church and that it replace the classes on Christianity taught in the public schools with teaching on ethics and beliefs in general, without privileging any specific religion.
From the refreshing cold waters of Lake Fuschl, I’d like to raise my hoarse voice in support of the Constitutional Court of Germany and applaud its clear-thinking judges for a ruling that, in my opinion, furthers the steady process of democratization that the country has been embarked on since the end of the Second World War. This ruling is the single most important development in recent history insofar as the future of western Europe is concerned. I say this not because I have the slightest aesthetic objection to crucifixes and crosses or because I harbor the slightest aversion for Christians and Catholics. On the contrary: although I’m not a believer, I’m convinced that a society cannot achieve a sophisticated democratic culture—in other words, it cannot be fully free or lawful—if it isn’t profoundly suffused with spiritual and moral life, which, for the immense majority of human beings, is indissociable from religion. That is the opinion of Paul Johnson, who for at least twenty years has been documenting in his prolific studies the primordial role that faith and Christian religious practices played in the appearance of a democratic culture in the midst of the fog of arbitrariness and despotism in which the human race was stumbling.
But unlike Johnson, I’m also convinced that if the state doesn’t preserve its secular character, and gives in, for example, to quantitative considerations like those being brandished by the adversaries of the German Constitutional Court (why shouldn’t the state be Christian if the great majority of its citizens are?), and identifies with a specific church, democracy is lost, in the short or the long term. Lost for one very simple reason: no church is democratic. All churches postulate a truth that is overwhelmingly backed up by the transcendence and wand-waving omnipotence of a divine being; against this omnipotence all rational arguments must dash themselves and be shattered. Churches would negate themselves—they would cease to exist—if they were flexible and tolerant and prepared to accept the basic principles of democratic life, like pluralism, relativism, the coexistence of contradictory truths, the constant mutual concessions required to arrive at a social consensus. How long would Catholicism survive if, let us say, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception were put to the vote of believers?
The dogmatic and intransigent nature of religion becomes evident in the case of Islam, because the societies where Islam has put down roots have not undergone the secularization that, in the West, separated religion from the state and privatized it (made it an individual right rather than a public duty), obliging religion to adapt to its new circumstances, or rather, to confine itself to activities that were ever more private and less public. But it is supremely naïve to conclude from this that if the Church were to recover the temporal powers it has lost in modern democratic societies, those societies would still be as free and open as they are now. I invite optimists who believe such a thing, like my esteemed Paul Johnson, to have a look at those Third World societies where the Catholic Church still has the power to sway the making of laws and the government of society, and see what is happening there vis-à-vis film censorship, divorce, and birth control, so that they understand that when Catholicism is in the position to impose its truths, it doesn’t hesitate to do so any way it can, and not only on the faithful but also on all the nonbelievers within its reach.
That is why a democratic society, if it wants to continue as such, not only must guarantee freedom of worship and nourish in its bosom an intense religious life but also must take care that the Church—any church—not transgress the bounds of its proper sphere, which is the private. It must also be kept from infiltrating the state and imposing its particular convictions on the whole of society, something that can only be done by violating the freedom of nonbelievers. The presence of a cross or crucifix in a public school is as abusive toward those who aren’t Christian as the imposition of the Islamic veil would be in a class where there are Christian and Buddhist children as well as Muslim ones, or the Jewish kippah in a Mormon seminary. Since there is no way to observe everyone’s beliefs at once, the state’s policy can only be neutrality. The judges of the Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe have done what they should, and their ruling does them honor.