Introduction: The Price of Forgetting
The most radical idea of the Enlightenment was also the simplest: one law for all. It marked the end of trials by ordeal, the end of church courts with their secret verdicts, and the end of justice dispensed by bloodline or by faith. The law became blind and public, answerable to evidence rather than to status. This was humanity’s great equaliser. It remains one of our finest inheritances.
But great ideas can be quietly forgotten. Today, across much of the world, we see renewed attempts to smuggle religion back into the courtroom, not as a matter of personal belief but as a parallel system of justice running alongside the state. In the name of tolerance we are asked to allow it, and a surprising number of people, acting in good faith, agree to do exactly that.
“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.” – Karl Popper
What is dressed up as tolerance here is something closer to surrender. It risks undoing centuries of hard won progress, one polite concession at a time, until the principle of equality before the law has been hollowed out from the inside.
Why One Law Matters
Law is the backbone of citizenship. It tells us what we may do, what we may not do, and what happens if we cross the line. The whole concept works only because the law is the same for everyone who lives under it. A millionaire and a beggar are meant to stand as equals before the court, and the dignity of that arrangement collapses the instant some people are quietly exempted from it.
The moment parallel systems appear, that hard won equality begins to rot. A person born into a devout community can suddenly find themselves facing a tribunal not of the state but of the sect. Family disputes, inheritance battles, and even criminal accusations end up settled according to doctrine rather than evidence, and the verdict often depends on who you are rather than on what actually happened.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire
This is not freedom in any meaningful sense. It is pressure dressed up as piety. It leaves the citizenry split into two unequal halves: those who are genuinely free under public law, and those who are privately judged by codes they never chose. A republic that tolerates such a split has already begun to abandon its own founding promise.
Historical Lessons We Should Not Ignore
History is brutally clear about what happens when faith and law are allowed to merge. Europe’s own past stands as a long cautionary tale of ecclesiastical courts, inquisitions, and heresy trials. Women accused of witchcraft were hanged or burned not by lawless mobs in the dark, but under duly recognised religious law, with clergy presiding and scripture cited as justification.
The Enlightenment thinkers who fought to separate church and state understood precisely what they were dismantling. Voltaire, Diderot, and many others risked prison and exile to insist that reason, and not revelation, must be the final arbiter of justice. They had seen what the alternative produced, and they refused to hand the courtroom back to the priesthood.
And yet, here in the twenty first century, we are politely invited to forget all of this and to welcome faith based arbitration back into civil life. It is an extraordinary case of historical amnesia, the kind that only takes hold once the original horrors have faded far enough into the past to seem unreal.
The Multicultural Temptation
Supporters of parallel legal systems very often frame them as a form of multiculturalism, as though equality before the law were somehow narrow minded. But genuine pluralism does not mean a patchwork of separate law codes. It means many beliefs coexisting peacefully under one shared law, each free to flourish so long as none is permitted to coerce the others.
When the state defers to religious law, it is not respecting culture at all. It is quietly outsourcing justice to whoever happens to hold authority within a given community. And that arrangement almost always wounds the weakest first: women denied an equal share of inheritance, children placed under clerical guardianship, and dissenters punished for the supposed crime of apostasy.
“Culture is not your friend.” – Terence McKenna
Culture can inspire and console, but it can also confine and oppress, and the two faces often belong to the same tradition. The proper role of law is to protect the individual even from their own tribe, especially when that tribe has decided that one of its members must be silenced, shunned, or stripped of their rights.
Case Studies: Where Parallel Justice Fails
Consider the family courts where so called voluntary arbitration under religious law is quietly offered. In theory, anyone is free to walk away and seek a civil hearing instead. In reality, social pressure makes such a refusal almost unthinkable. A woman challenging an unfair divorce settlement risks not only losing property, but losing her standing, her relationships, and her entire place within the community that raised her.
Consider, too, the countries where blasphemy laws are still actively enforced. There, the accusation alone is often enough to destroy a life, regardless of any evidence and regardless of intent. When belief and law are fused together, free speech becomes the very first casualty, because the right to question is precisely what such systems cannot survive.
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
These are not abstract worries dreamed up to frighten the secular faithful. They are the documented, repeating results of letting doctrine sit in the judge’s chair, and they fall hardest on the people least able to push back.
Secularism Is the Shield, Not the Sword
Secularism is not an attack on faith. It is the guarantee that no single faith can dominate the rest. It is the principle that actually allows belief to flourish in peace, precisely because it stops any one religion from seizing the machinery of the state and turning it against everyone else.
Properly understood, secular law protects the devout every bit as much as it protects the atheist. A Christian living in a Muslim majority country, a Muslim living in a Hindu majority country, and a nonbeliever living anywhere at all, each have exactly the same stake in one neutral law that answers to no creed. The shield works only if it covers everyone. No exceptions can be carved out for the favoured.
The Test of True Tolerance
True tolerance is not the warm, easy feeling of letting everyone simply do their own thing. True tolerance means protecting the right of individuals to step outside the codes of their birth without fear of punishment. It means insisting that there is always one, and only one, route to legal redress, and that route is the public court.
It is easy to be tolerant when nothing whatever is at stake. The real test arrives only when belief collides head on with equality, when a religious rule says one thing and the civil law says another. At that decisive moment, a society must choose openly which one it will allow to win, and the choice reveals what it truly values.
If we choose the religious rule over the civil one, we are no longer a secular democracy in anything but name.
Holding the Line
The door must stay wide open to worship, to prayer, to fasting, and to conscience in every honest form. But it must stay firmly shut to any rival legal system, no matter how softly and reasonably that system is first introduced. The pressure rarely arrives as a demand; it arrives as a request for a small, sympathetic exception.
“The law of the land is not a suggestion.”
None of this is anti religion, and it should never be mistaken for hostility to the faithful. It is squarely pro equality, and it is the only reliable way to prevent the slow creep of sectarian law from undoing the progress that took centuries of struggle to win.
Conclusion: No Special Pleadings
The secular settlement is more fragile than it looks, and we forget its bloody origins at our peril. Tolerance must never be allowed to curdle into capitulation. The law of the land must remain one, indivisible, and supreme, applied to the powerful and the powerless on identical terms.
The next time a faith asks for special legal treatment, the answer must be polite but perfectly firm. The law is for everyone, equally and without favour, and that is exactly why it cannot be carved up and shared out among competing creeds.