Last week’s Equality Court judgment exposes secularism’s central contradiction: the state claims neutrality while retaining the power to define the limits of religious belief in public life. When Islamic morality conflicts with secular-liberal understandings of equality, sexuality and harm, religion is ultimately required to yield. The result, argues Mowlana Uwais Dockrat, is not genuine pluralism but religious diversity permitted only within boundaries set and enforced by the secular state.
The recent Equality Court judgment should not be viewed merely as another dispute about sexuality or discrimination. It exposes a much deeper problem within the South African secular-liberal order: the claim that the secular state is neutral towards competing religions and worldviews.
It is not.
A more accurate description of secularism is not simply “the separation of religion and state”. It is the subjugation of religion to the state. Religion is permitted to exist, but the secular state reserves for itself the authority to determine where religion may operate, how far its convictions may extend into public life and when its teachings must surrender to the state’s preferred conception of rights, morality and social order.
That distinction is crucial.
South Africa describes itself as a diverse and pluralistic constitutional democracy. Its Constitution claims to protect religion, conscience, belief and opinion alongside equality. The critical question, however, is what happens when religion actually disagrees with the dominant moral conclusions of the secular-liberal order.
That is where the claims of neutrality and pluralism begin to unravel.
In the recent Equality Court case, a Muslim businessman relied, among other things, on Islamic convictions concerning homosexual relationships. The court ultimately found that his conduct constituted hate speech, unfair discrimination and harassment. He was ordered to apologise publicly and pay R200,000, and the matter was referred to the National Prosecuting Authority.
The important question is: who ultimately determines the boundary between permissible religious conviction and prohibited public conduct?
Under secularism, the answer is clear: the state does.
And this is precisely what is meant by the subjugation of religion.
The secular state says to religion: You may exist, but under our authority.
You may believe, but we determine when those beliefs may be acted upon. You may preach, but we determine the legal boundaries of acceptable expression. You may maintain your moral teachings, but when they collide with our conception of equality, dignity or harm, we decide which must yield.
Religion, therefore, does not stand alongside secularism as an equal worldview. It operates beneath a legal and moral framework whose boundaries are ultimately interpreted and enforced by state institutions.
This is why the language of “neutrality” is so misleading.
The secular state does not remove morality from public life. It establishes a particular moral framework and gives that framework coercive legal authority. Concepts such as autonomy, equality, identity, sexuality, dignity and harm do not interpret themselves. They depend on philosophical assumptions about what a human being is, what freedom means and what constitutes a good society.
Yet secular liberalism rarely presents these assumptions as one worldview among others. Instead, it presents them as neutral public reason, while Islamic morality becomes a “religious belief” that must justify itself before the state.
The hierarchy is obvious.
Secular-liberal morality becomes the standard.
Religion becomes the defendant.
This becomes especially evident in contemporary debates surrounding queer theory and gender identity.
There is an enormous difference between protecting a person from violence and requiring society to affirm every philosophical claim concerning sexuality, gender and identity. Queer theory itself contains contested propositions about identity, social categories, sex, gender and power. These are intellectual claims and should remain open to criticism.
But increasingly, disagreement becomes “harm”. Non-affirmation becomes “erasure”. Traditional religious morality becomes “intolerance”.
Once disagreement itself is reclassified as harm, state coercion becomes much easier to justify.
And here secularism reveals its true power.
It does not necessarily close the mosque. It does not need to confiscate the Qur’an. It does something considerably more sophisticated: it determines which parts of Islam may have public consequences.
Islam may govern your prayer mat, but not necessarily your understanding of public morality. Islam may determine what you personally abstain from, but the state determines when acting upon those convictions becomes discrimination. Islam may tell you what is right and wrong, but the secular order reserves the final legal authority to decide which expressions of that morality are tolerable in public.
That is not the absence of state power over religion.
That is state supremacy over religion.
This is also why “pluralism” must be interrogated carefully.
Pluralism is tested when two worldviews make irreconcilable moral claims. If Muslims are welcomed as part of a “diverse” South Africa only on condition that Islam progressively conforms to secular-liberal conclusions on sexuality, family, gender and morality, then what is being offered is not genuine pluralism.
It is managed diversity within secular boundaries.
The secular-liberal state may therefore call itself neutral. It may describe itself as pluralistic. It may celebrate religious diversity.
But the real question remains: who has the final authority?
When the answer is that the state defines the boundaries of acceptable religion, decides when religious conviction must retreat and possesses the coercive machinery to enforce that decision, then religion has not simply been separated from the state.
Religion has been placed beneath it.
And the recent case is one more example of that reality.
