by Matt Sitman
The British philosopher Roger Scruton sees accepting the legitimacy of your opponents as necessary for politics – and always threatened by the intrusions of religion:
In our own system the opposition is a legitimate part of the legislative process. Laws are seldom steam-rollered through Parliament without regard for disagreement, and the general assumption is that the final result will be a compromise, an attempt to reconcile the many conflicting interests. This idea of legislation as a compromise is an unusual one. The natural order is that described in the Old Testament, in which kings rule by decree, taking advice perhaps, but not allowing a voice to interests other than their own.
There are aspects of human life in which compromise is either suspect or forbidden. In battle you don’t compromise with the enemy. In religion you don’t compromise with the devil. And it is when religion intrudes into politics that the political process is most at risk. This is the reason why, in the history of modern Egypt, successive presidents have tried to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. The Brotherhood believes that law and politics are not about compromise but about obedience to the will of God.
He looks to the teachings of Jesus for one way of handling these tensions, seeing in his teachings the sources of the West’s distinctive approach to the matter – “religion, in our society, has become a private affair, which makes no demands of the public as a whole.”
The Dish 