European Secularism Imperils Religious Freedom

Liberal Europe’s secular project and its pandering to potentially
violent Islamist critics has imperiled religious freedom, said Dr.
Jenny Taylor in Prague at the conference on Understanding and Reporting
on Religion in Europe.
  
Taylor, founder of Lapido Media,
which works for religious literacy in the media, had been covering
racial issues in Europe for some time when she realized that religion,
not race, was the real story. She also noticed that European media were
missing this story because they did not understand or respect religion.

 
“I discovered how badly religion was being covered throughout the
media - and how central it was to the way the world turns and is
turning,” said Taylor.
 
The religious ground was shifting under Europeans’ feet, but no one
seemed to notice. Taylor says that the number of Muslims in Europe now
stands at approximately 54 million, or approaching ten percent of the
population. Statistics cited for Britain’s Muslim population are
probably unreliable, having remained steady at 1.6 million, or 3.4% of
the population, for about a decade.
 
Religious illiteracy afflicts European governments, as well, Taylor
said. European political systems take a view of blind “neutrality”
toward all religions. This approach is faulty, Taylor argues, because
it assumes that religions have no substantive differences.
 
“All religions are equally mad, or equally benevolent or equally
vicious to the religiously illiterate — secularized — mind,” Taylor
affirmed.
 
This blind neutrality ignores Islam’s very troubled track record on
press freedom, Taylor said. Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the
Reporters without Borders Index of Press Freedom,
half are Muslim. These same countries, especially Pakistan and Somalia,
provide a high proportion of migrants to the European Union.
 
Yet Europe’s public institutions lack the discourse and will to address the religious aspects of culture.
 
“Europe convinced itself, exceptionally, that religion was a thing
of the past, a phenomenon of patriarchalism and oppression,” said
Taylor. “Islam did not exist as a political reality, because we had
ideologically blinded ourselves to it.”
 
Taylor argues that Europe’s media are beginning to accommodate the
strictures of these immigrant communities out of fear and ignorance.
This accommodation threatens freedom of expression and religion.
 
She cites the example of the novel Fatima’s Scarf,
which was written by a respected journalist and was critical of Islam.
Publishers praised it in private but abandoned it publicly out of fear
of Muslim backlash, Taylor claims.