Kamil Pasha

The AK Party has often referred to their style of secularism as “the American system”, by which they mean that the government keeps an equal distance from all religions, or a “hands-off” policy. This is contrasted to the Turkish state’s secularism (laiklik), which authorizes the state to control religious public institutions and religious practice in the public arena. Confusion arises because the term laiklik is always translated as “secularism”, making no distinction (prompting the resort to terms like “the American system”).

I would like to thank a reader for calling my attention to the “Lemon Test” for the actual practice of US-style secularism (see the comment to the previous post). That is, secularism in the US is not just based on non-interference in an anything-goes manner, but is regulated by the state and continually negotiated between parties that wish to have religious rights and the state’s (or community’s) need to deny them. The courts are full of such cases. (See my March 24 post, “The Judiciary and Religion in the US”. Look in the Religion category, second page of posts.)

The following description of the “Lemon Test” is from Wikipedia:

”Lemon v. Kurtzman”’, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Pennsylvania’s 1968 Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which allowed the state Superintendent of Public Instruction to reimburse nonpublic schools (most of which were Roman Catholic) for teachers’ salaries, textbooks and instructional materials, violated the Establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The Court’s decision in this case established the “Lemon test”, which details the requirements for legislation concerning religion. It consists of three prongs:

1. ”The government’s action ”’must have a secular legislative purpose”;

2. ”The government’s action ”’must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion”;

3.”The government’s action ”’must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion”’.”

If any of these 3 prongs are violated, the government’s action is deemed unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Tags: Religion //