Translated from GegenStandpunkt 4-2012

The circumcision debate:

The foreskin between salvation and bodily harm

1. The religious significance of the ritual act

A court in Cologne declares that the religiously motivated trimming of foreskins among the young is a punishable offense. Neither the ruling nor the public laws triggered by it require even a single argument against its religious motive to criticize this ritual act. On the contrary: The religious-ideological message that distinguishes this bodily harm from other body modifications such as tattoos is not only well-known, but respect for it is explicitly demanded and affirmed, as it is recognized that the initiation rite is “more than a pious custom for Jews and Muslims” and “a mark of distinction from the perspective of the respective religions” (FAZ, June 29, 2012). After all, that’s exactly what Christian baptism is all about too, and none of the critics of circumcision ask what there actually is to distinguish a newborn. What is being celebrated in fact is the honor of being assigned to the community that the Lord God has chosen to promote faith in Him throughout the world.

All world religions claim that they have the special relationship with the Almighty Lord which sets them apart from the rest of humanity. The Jews coined the aptly presumptuous expression of God’s chosen people for this idea. Being chosen is already somewhat upside down here: it is not the believer who is free to choose his religion and its associated deity, but rather the other way around. Faith is said to get its irrefutability from the idea that you can’t choose it, but rather that the God of your imagination chooses you to be His follower.

This reversal of one’s own freedom into an act of divine decree obeys the inner logic of that irrational mode of thought known as faith. Someone who frees himself in his religious thinking from all real determinations and lets himself be guided by the need to find – behind all the worldly interests, purposes, and demands he gets involved with – a final cause, an absolute meaning that can’t be found in the interests that dominate his life, can attribute this meaning only to a purpose that no person can set themselves, but which is set – predetermined – for people. So the need to make one’s personal inner peace with the world, even and especially when it is full of hardship, misery, and violence, and to manufacture an inner contentment that transcends these things, leads to the notion of a supreme, otherworldly authority that holds all earthly destinies in His hands; who has a plan which, even if humans do not understand it, follows a higher Reason for Everything. Knowing that one is safe and secure in this providence brings about fundamental agreement with God and the world.

What therefore constitutes the identity of every religious community is the self-confidence of having nothing less than the supreme ruler of the universe as its personal leader – and every community claims this exclusively for itself. Anyone who gives up so much agency as a human being that he conceives of himself as the instrument of a lifelong mission, who humbles himself so much that he represents a wretched creature in comparison to his Lord and Creator – such a powerless servant exalts himself precisely by being permitted to serve the unrivaled Almighty, to whom all are subject, even those who don’t know it or believe it. This is the source of the unshakable sense of righteousness in people of faith, who may take many missteps in life, but follow an infallible path in their service to God thanks to being a member of the one true community of believers.

*

It’s no coincidence that this peculiar, meaning-bestowing dialectic of submission and supreme righteousness is also what defines initiation rites as such: like Christian baptism, circumcision is performed on a child – among Jews, on a newborn, and among Muslims, somewhat later. This act, performed on an immature subject, fulfills its deep meaning as a preconscious, pre-volitional act beyond any calculation, as the parents have it carried out on the novice just as it was once carried out on them. By marking the body with a permanent feature, circumcision is intended to give membership in a religious flock the irreversible quality of biology, the authenticity of a natural characteristic.

No matter how far the specific initiation goes, in the eyes of the believer there is nothing arbitrary about joining a religion, but rather the ritual takes on the symbolic significance of an order from on high – of being chosen. As for the Lord’s will, suspecting it of arbitrariness is out of the question; consequently, believers have a responsibility to prove themselves worthy of the mercy of being chosen, which they must earn through their fear of God. Anyone who is bound by such a duty can’t begin making sacrifices as proof of their servitude early enough; best before they even want to in the first place. In this regard, circumcision – which allegedly represents a comparatively civilized loosening of the Abrahamic tradition of human sacrifice and castration – may still strike some modern believers as crudely archaic and outdated, but they should also be familiar with the importance of humility and a willingness to sacrifice in the religious view of humanity and the world.

*

The people’s religious morality is, in principle, welcomed by those who really rule. While the days when those in power legitimized themselves by invoking divine grace are certainly over in this country, even a modern secular state does not cease invoking a supreme value and mission. No state which aspires to be more than just a utilitarian apparatus eschews an ideal justification for its sovereign power. The bourgeois state can also make use of its citizens’ religious-irrational mindset; it is valued as a binding force between the people and the rule. In the freedom to interpret the world religiously, the believer does indeed submit to someone else – his absolute Lord – yet at the same time manages to give the reality of his life a wholly personal meaning which normally also includes his loyalty to the real authorities. To that extent, and as long as this form of affirmation functions, the conceit of being out and about on a special mission for an extraterrestrial being has its recognized place in bourgeois society.

2. The foreskin as a legally protected right

In light of the amicable relationship cultivated between the state and religion – each knows what it gets from the other – and in light of the respect that the religious content of circumcision enjoys, one wonders what it is exactly about this ritual act that bothers representatives of our legal system. At first glance, it may seem inappropriate, even beside the point, when judges speak of a criminal case of bodily harm when the organizers of the event do it, after all, for the divine grace of eternal salvation. While they celebrate the sign of being chosen, it occurs to the guardians of secular law that it hurts.

But what seems so off-target is precisely the interpretation of the religious act as a violation of rights – hence in practice a very valid way of making the topic unfamiliar. And one quickly notices that, at its core, this is not about harm. When representatives of civil law target religious rituals, it is not merely foreskins that are being snipped off, but rights along with them. In this respect, the juridical examination and treatment of religious practices – even if it might fasten onto a minor detail – quickly touches on fundamental issues, as the reaction of outraged rabbis and Muslim leaders makes clear. They refuse to be lectured by the state, reject any interference in their affairs – and misunderstand the right to religious freedom when they think that this is none of the state’s business.

For the state, by granting religion its own fundamental right – by which it protects its freedom – nails it down to the exercise of this freedom. What this lays down has big implications. Although everyone is free to believe in whomever or whatever they want, just as they are free to think whatever they want, religious opinion counts as much – that is, no more – than any other opinion among many which are all equally valid, hence disregarded and inconsequential in practice. The ideological absolutism of religion basically gets along poorly with such relativism and pluralism, yet the secular state expects that the churches, which it permits to exist, will fall in line with precisely this disregard of religion. The churches are free to organize their flock’s celebrations of their own piety, to lead them in preyers in which their God stands above all else, and to do whatever else they want to do as His representatives on earth within their associations. But it must be clear that in doing so they represent and oversee only a private view of life, while the state sovereign, as such, stands inviolate above all meaning-giving worldviews. As a freedom, as state permission to practice, religion is thereby downgraded; the church is subordinated to the rule of law and thus made functional for the civil community.

However well the churches have come to terms with this assigned place, as affirmatively as they interpret the world and as loyally as their adherents serve the secular power – the contradiction does not go away and it lurks in its fundamental nature at the most seemingly obscure points of friction and settings. This is further underscored by a footnote to the debate: namely that in this case, the Christian church has declared its solidarity with its Jewish and Muslim counterparts. When it comes to the state versus religion, the religions want to stand together.

*

The legalistic way in which this state demand on religion is presented consists here of relativizing the surely respected freedom of religion to another basic right: the right to bodily integrity. The religiously motivated procedure thus confronts a judge with the question of which right is more violated or needs to be protected here: the child’s right to remain intact or, in the case of a ban, the parents’ right to raise their child religiously? In legal parlance, this is called a “conflict of two legal interests” – and then carefully weighed.

It’s like a high school essay, especially when the debate spills over into the public sphere – from the opinion pages and the arts sections all the way to the letters-to-the-editors of newspapers: On both sides – for and against circumcision – the same values are invoked. In both camps, advocates and experts speak out for the child’s well-being – what else?! This merely needs the appropriate interpretation: Some know full well that a baby is a human incarnation of the cry for a religious footing: “Isn’t secure knowledge of belonging to a religious community important for a toddler striving for trusting and reliable relationships?” (SZ, Oct. 1) Critics, on the other hand, warn of “lifelong trauma,” while advocates rate the procedure as harmless “as a measles vaccination” (FR, July 12). So the debate gains momentum and can be expanded into all sorts of irrelevant considerations. Foreskin preservationists bolster their position with psychological-educational-medical expertise: they serve up the child’s right to a non-violent upbringing, as well as to erogenous zones. Conversely, on the other side: Anyone who wants to can see the removal of the foreskin as primarily a hygienic preventive measure. The fact that the custom has existed for a few thousand years and exists almost worldwide is also a good argument – for it, obviously.

Just as all these positions are presented as a matter of rights, they find their abstract synthesis in the right to personal freedom: even critics of circumcision speak in the name of religious freedom. Precisely because the bodily injury is irreversible, it violates the circumcised individual’s right to decide their own religious beliefs. This leads to the proposal to postpone circumcision until the age of “religious maturity.” A compromise version seeks to grant at least a veto right to Muslim children who are circumcised somewhat later.

These sorts of claims are in turn relativized by the legal knowledge that, given the immaturity of a child, the freedom to make decisions naturally falls to the parents. But setting aside the fact that all this legal wrangling over free will largely misses the point of the ritual’s passivity – that is, the idea of being chosen – the only criticism of such a terrible, lifelong trauma is that the person does not freely and maturely say yes to their trauma; even in the eyes of its critics, the injury loses its horror when in effect it is preceded by a self- in bold print.

At this point in the public debate, the theoretical fundamentalists of free will make their entrance. They ultimately elevate the dispute to the heights of the history of philosophy and speak of the conflict between religious archaism and Enlightenment reason. From the vantage point of the superstructure, they survey “the long and arduous path our society had to traverse before the idea that every human being is by nature free and autonomous could take hold” (FR, July 19) – a path that these antediluvians still have ahead of them. Yet the spokespersons for reason in fact reject even the slightest criticism of the irrationalism of religion; on the contrary: “It is an insult to the believer when rituals thousands of years old are called into question – rituals whose purpose is to establish membership in a community, that is, identity-forming rituals that are of immense importance for a man’s self-understanding as a Jew or a Muslim. Religions, however, exist neither in a legal vacuum nor in a space exempt from accountability. They may regard God as the highest authority. They may be convinced that they know his words and commandments precisely, as recorded in holy books and spoken by their prophets. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely because of this – they must, like everyone else, put up with criticism in our enlightened society.” (FR, July 19)

So what kind of “criticism” do people of faith have to put up with? The sympathetic understanding that dismisses criticism as an “insult” is followed with a however – the empty insult of self-relativization. The friends of the Enlightenment emphatically admit that believers enclose themselves in their reason-free zones and cede self-determination to “God as the highest authority” – but at the same time, these believers are expected to recognize individual liberty as the binding supreme value. Whereas the “identity-forming” of the religious person is fulfilled in being chosen and predestined by a higher will, the defenders of free will say: Go ahead and imagine that, but in the truly valid final instance, the state is the guardian of free will, and this holds true even for those who believe they have been chosen. As long as religion relativizes itself to that effect, it is apparently quite compatible with a rationality that equates the fetish of free will with the supreme moral values of human rights and glorifies the state as a servant of those same values.

3. The intensifying debate and its Solomonic resolution

Obviously, the descendants of Abraham view the archaic nature of their religion somewhat differently – namely, as proof of its indisputable validity. The political homeland of the Jewish religion does not even bother to respond on the level of intellectual-historical blather; instead, announcements come from Israel of an unambiguous character. As the political arm of the chosen people, this bourgeois state, which permits itself the peculiarity of declaring the Jewish faith to be its state religion, sees this ruling by the German constitutional state not merely as an attack on a ritual, nor even on a religion, but rather on itself with its national religion: Israel “will not tolerate such a restriction of Jewish practices anywhere, and certainly not in Germany” (NZZ, July 10). The closing remark also ominously invokes Germany’s past and accuses the current legal ruling of an anti-Semitic bias – that is, a hostility toward the chosen people that the German mind apparently can’t shake off, much like a malignant genetic trait. On the Jewish side, at any rate, one wants “to feel the Holocaust is remembered”; they speak of the “death of Judaism” and ask the Germans: “Do you still want us Jews?” (SZ, Sept. 15-16)

This gives the debate a new turn, escalating it to a level that prompts Germany’s political leadership to take swift action. The Jewish outcry is taken as a wake-up call to account for a status of legal uncertainty in the “gray area of circumcision” (SZ, Sept. 26) which, as everyone agrees, is simply unacceptable. So legislation is introduced that deflates the issue in a way that stands in grotesque relation to the scale of public debate over state and religion. The drafted legislation, in fact, excludes any reference to circumcision’s religious occasion or content, defining it broadly as “bodily injury,” which – as long as it is performed “professionally” – is to remain exempt from criminal liability and left to the discretion of the parents of the circumcised child. Thus, the state regulates the matter by reducing the legal issue to a question of medical practice or the adequate training of those performing the circumcision.

The fact that, in the end, even doctors make a scene and challenge the professional competence of only religiously authorized snippers is perhaps the dull epilogue to a great debate. Jewish and Muslim religious officials express their satisfaction, Ms. Knobloch [President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany – trans.] remains in Germany, and the letters to the editor come to an end.