The burnings had already become a geopolitical conflagration thanks to Sweden’s Nato accession, which effectively led to Sweden’s bid becoming hostage to the whims of Turkey’s President Erdogan. However, beneath the surface of immediate security politics looms a question of the status of religion and the position of minority religious communities in Swedish political culture. The Government’s rhetorical embrace of human rights, including respect of religion, runs in conflict with Sweden’s institutional arrangement that is hostile not only to religion, but also to communitarian claims at large.

As Henrik Berggren and I have argued in our recent book, Sweden is not only one of the most secular countries in the world — its social contract is based on a radical alliance between the state and the individual. The central purpose is precisely to liberate individuals from families, religious communities, charities and other institutions of civil society that limit individual freedom in the name of communal identity. And this moral logic results in a civic universalism that is fundamentally hostile to communitarian claims, including, perhaps especially, those that are made in the name of religion.

In this regard, Sweden sticks out in studies such as the World Values Survey. Not only is the contrast to the Islamic world particularly dramatic, Sweden also stands out compared to Western countries such as  the US and Germany, whose social contracts afford a far greater role to religious and ethnic communities. In Sweden, religious freedom is conceived as a right to practise religion as a private matter. Thus, the Swedish idea of religious freedom is as much, maybe more, a question of freedom from religion as it is a right to religion.

Faith in God or gods takes place inside the home, inside the individual mind, and only collectively in congregations conceived of as private, voluntary associations. Insofar as a church acts publicly, it is expected that they adhere to the values, laws, and mores of secular society. This “civil religion”, focused on individual citizenship, gender equality, and children’s rights, always trumps what is seen as outdated and conservative claims rooted in premodern notions of religious faith and moral codes expressed in various religious texts. The “holy” texts of religion should accordingly have no bearing on the primacy of the constitution and laws of the modern, secular state.

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It is in this light one must understand the growing conflict between Sweden and Muslim and Islamist activists, religious leaders and political regimes. And while the burnings of the Quran are important, there is further pre-history to the recent uproar that provides a better context for understanding the heart of the current conflict. Here I refer to the recent social-media campaign in which Muslim activists claimed that Swedish social services were kidnapping the children of Muslim parents. The background is that Sweden has experienced massive immigration in recent decades, including many refugees from Muslim countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This has resulted in cultural collisions in general, but notably over their very different understandings of the role of the family, of parental rights versus children’s rights, and the place of religion and religious faith in a secular society.

While the social-media campaign is most often described as a matter of disinformation and misunderstanding, one must also recognise that what is viewed from a Swedish perspective as legitimate and necessary can, from a conservative Muslim point of view, appear hostile to family values and parental rights. It is also true that children are removed from their families in accordance with laws aimed at protecting and supporting children. This pertains to all families in Sweden, including ethnic Swedes, but foreign-born children are over-represented statistically. While around 10% of ethnic Swedish children determined to need support are removed, the figure for foreign-born families is just over 20%.

In a Swedish context, the state has not only a right but a duty to intervene when it is determined that parents fail to give their children proper care. But this is radically different from what pertains in the Muslim world, where a more conservative parent is likely to see interventions by social workers as an infringement of their right to bring up their children as they see fit: in accordance with religious belief, their views on parental authority and gender roles.

Another illustrative example concerns the demands sometimes made by Muslims, as well as conservative Christians and Jews, in favour of a right to religious private schools and, especially, home-schooling on religious grounds. These demands are routinely rejected by the Swedish state, which maintains that decisions regarding religion should be made once you are an adult. Through these measures, the reach of religious freedom is actively limited. Religion is transformed into something that is a private matter, appropriate perhaps for adults, but certainly not a consideration in an education that is aimed to produce autonomous, modern children.

But this value conflict has a philosophical element: a naïve and abstract sense of tolerance as a positive value, one that is poorly equipped to deal with enduring and concrete forms of cultural difference. My sense is that there has been an implicit expectation that, over time, immigrants arriving in Sweden from less modern, democratic, and developed nations would eventually embrace secular, democratic, liberal values. And there has been, empirically speaking, some basis for this expectation. Many of the refugees arriving in Sweden in decades past, from Chile and Iran, for example, behaved in much this way. Women escaping the Islamist regime in Iran saw opportunity for more freedom in Sweden; refugees from Chile found more political freedom in Sweden than under the repressive government of Pinochet.

Many of these earlier immigrants were well-educated and therefore also well-placed to integrate into Swedish society through employment. However, more recent arrivals, such as those from Afghanistan and Somalia, have tended to be less educated, as well as more conservative and traditional at a religious and cultural level. These contradictions have been hidden by Sweden’s long-standing love affair with being seen as a moral superpower — indeed, today there is more concern over the negative impact on Sweden’s reputation following the Quran burnings than a genuine concern for Muslim religious feeling.

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But what we may be seeing now is the unmasking of this idea of boundless tolerance. We have already witnessed a profound shift in Sweden’s foreign relations: from the vague idealism of autonomous neutrality towards the hardcore realpolitik of Nato membership. Likewise, abandoning our current longstanding but incoherent cultural relativism will open up for a more honest position. Of course, it will be a painful process, accompanied by considerable confusion and conflict. But it may over time lead to greater clarity over what Sweden actually stands — and is willing to fight — for.

For while we live in an era of the “politics of recognition”, which promotes respect for difference in the form of multiculturalism, it is useful to remind ourselves what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who fathered the term, noted in his essay of the same name in 1992. Namely, that while liberalism may involve tolerance as a core value, it is also a “fighting creed” that can and will at times collide with competing ideologies. When push comes to shove, tolerance is of little help in facing challenges from illiberal political and religious ideologies.

In his seminal book, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper put his finger on the same dilemma, which he termed the paradox of tolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Precisely where the lines must be drawn will no doubt be subject to ongoing debate — but for Sweden, one suspects that the primacy of freedom of expression will trump demands for the special treatment of religious sensitivity in the public sphere.

The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.

There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.

Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.

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Instead Stonewall went the other way, and decided to cash in on its victory. This is, of course, unsurprising. For it is at the point at which you are victorious that you are most popular, and those who were once not by your side swiftly become your allies.

So it was with the corporate world and the machinery of government. Both the private and public sector suddenly provided Stonewall great reservoirs of cash to keep the organisation’s coffers full. Both were willing to invite Stonewall in to tell them what they could or should do better.

For instance, Stonewall had for some years been producing a list of the top employers for gay people in the UK. Yet even though the battle for equality was all but finished during the Blair and Cameron years, major companies suddenly decided that they wanted desperately to be on the list; having Stonewall’s gay stamp of approval became essential. With time, it became standard procedure for a company to invite Stonewall in to grade their commercial operations. Thus was born a relationship which was compromised from the outset and rife with vested interests.

Meanwhile, the Government became increasingly obsessed with obtaining the same gold star from Stonewall, asking the group to instruct departments what to do in their own workplaces, as well as craft policies in the wider world.

In particular, one of Stonewall’s most influential money-making programmes of recent years has been its “Diversity Champions scheme”, in which members are invited to pay a fee to Stonewall to allow the group to vet their internal policies. Among the 850 groups who have signed up are GCHQ, MI5, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice.

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By Jonny Best

Yet the degeneration of Stonewall has been evident for years; indeed, you can see it in the calibre of people involved at the top. When Stonewall started out, its leaders were prominent in the British media and public life. They were known to people who were straight, and certainly known to people who were gay.

Can the same be said today? I doubt it. In fact, I suspect if you were to visit every gay venue, you would find that fewer than one person in a hundred would be able to name Nancy Kelley as the current head of Stonewall. They would not know who she was or what she does. And that is because the group is neither at any forefront, nor any barricade. It is instead a business still running largely for the comfort of its employees.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Stonewall is merely rich and benign. Far from it. For it is at just such a moment, when the coffers are full and the beneficiaries are content, that an organisation is liable to take a wrong turn. And that is what Stonewall has done in recent years. It says that its job is to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. But in reality, the first three letters of that acronym slipped off Stonewall’s radar at least six years ago. That was when Stonewall decided to sustain what campaigning impetus it had by arguing — along with a number of other legacy organisations — that nobody who is gay will be free until all TQ+ people have the same rights as everyone else.

And there are several problems here. Firstly, it is not clear that trans rights have any intersection (to borrow a popular term) at all with gay rights. In fact, they run very distinctly counter to them. It is, for instance, perfectly possible that boys and girls who do not conform to gender stereotypes may grow up to be happily straight or gay.

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Surely a group which protected gay people would recognise that there is a need for nuance here? It would certainly not jump on the increasingly dogmatic bandwagon that claims — running against all the progress made by the gay rights movement — that such children are most likely of the opposite sex.

Yet what is worse is that rather than being open to a discussion with gay people who differ on these issues, Stonewall has decided to undermine them — and in some cases actually persecute them.

The recent case of Allison Bailey is instructive. Bailey is a criminal defence barrister, a feminist and a lesbian who, in response to Stonewall’s “trans agenda”, helped to set up the LGB Alliance. Stonewall, as a result, attempted to get Bailey into severe trouble at work, not least by helping to get her barrister’s chambers to put her under investigation because of her views on sex and gender. All of this and much more reveals the despicable bullying tactics deployed by Stonewall. It has, to put it simply, turned into an organisation that hounds gay and lesbian people who dare to disagree with them.

This week sees the group celebrate its 32^nd anniversary — a landmark which nobody but its employees could possibly celebrate. Yet even they will likely do so with a sense of profound unease; in recent days, one of its founders, Matthew Parris, publicly urged Stonewall to stay out of the trans wars, while the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that it would not be renewing its membership.

And quite right, too. No taxpayer-funded entity should be funnelling money to Stonewall. And private companies who continue to do so should be made aware that they are supporting a group which has stopped looking out for gay people and started hounding them in their workplaces instead.

So happy 32^nd birthday, Stonewall. And no offence, but I hope you don’t make it to 33.

“Antisemitism, or any hate, become dangerous when three things happen. First: when it moves from the fringes of politics to a mainstream party and its leadership. Second: when the party sees that its popularity with the general public is not harmed thereby. And three: when those who stand up and protest are vilified and abused for doing so.”

He concluded:

“All three factors exist in Britain now. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. That is why I cannot stay silent. For it is not only Jews who are at risk. So too is our humanity.”

He’s right about the rising tide of religious and racial intolerance, fuelled by populism from the far-Right and the far-Left. It’s driven by a mix of factors and manifests itself in the form of identity politics, religious nationalism and extremism. The result is discrimination and persecution.

The intolerance is widespread. Few places are untouched. Here is an illustrative but by no means exhaustive run through:

In Burma, mainstream democratic politicians pander to militant Buddhist nationalists, resulting in a genocide of Muslims. In Indonesia, moderate Muslim politicians play the religion card and flirt with ultra-conservative clerics. India is led by a Hindu nationalist with a record of stoking hatred of religious minorities.

In Pakistan, where the notorious blasphemy laws have been a source of grave injustice for four decades, the new prime minister Imran Khan, on first appearance no extremist, is bolstering his religious credentials in ways which do not counter intolerance. On 7 July this year, at a rally of Muslim leaders, he promised to defend the blasphemy laws.

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By James M. Dorsey

In Sudan, religious leaders continue to face criminal charges for resisting illegal but officially sanctioned seizures of church property. And in parts of the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and of course Iraq and Syria, religious minorities continue to suffer.

Such intolerance is on the rise not only in countries where extremists from the majority religion have influence, but in countries which are officially atheist. In China, Xi Jinping’s regime has launched a crackdown on religion that has fallen upon Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Daoists and practitioners of the spiritual movement known as Falun Gong. Churches have been closed or demolished, hundreds of crosses torn down, bibles confiscated or destroyed, and children under the age of 18 banned from going to religious services.

In some parts of the country, Christians have been forced to take down paintings of Jesus Christ and replace them with portraits of Xi. In China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is reported that one million Muslims are now in ‘re-education camps’, taken away without warning simply for reading the Qu’ran, praying, abstaining from pork or alcohol, or wearing ‘Islamic’ dress.

So bad is the repression that Human Rights Watch published a detailed report – Eradicating Ideological Viruses: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims – and the United Nations has spoken out.

Vietnam’s Communist regime is also pursuing a campaign of persecution against its minorities, pressurising them to recant their faith, forcing eviction, denying access to public services; there is arbitrary detention, imprisonment, beatings, torture and sexual abuse. Defenders of religious freedom, such as Pastor Nguyen Trung Ton and the Hoa Hao Buddhist and legal expert Nguyen Bac Truyen, are in prison, and there are reports of deaths from torture and ill-treatment in custody.

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Why does the Pope trot out antisemitic tropes?

By Giles Fraser

In North Korea there is absolutely no freedom of religion or belief at all. Anyone who fails to demonstrate anything other than absolute, unwavering loyalty to the ruling Kim dynasty is punished severely; Christians face a lifetime in prison camp and in some cases execution.

In some countries, intolerance is driven by the government, while in others it is primarily non-state actors, but often with government complicity. In Indonesia, for example, the current president, Joko Widodo, is widely regarded as a defender of pluralism and a friend of minorities. Yet faced with re-election next year and an opponent, former General Prabowo Subianto, who is expected to play the religion card, President Widodo has chosen as his running mate a 75-year-old ultra-conservative Islamic cleric and head of the Indonesian Ulama Council, Ma’ruf Amin.

Human rights defenders are appalled at the choice, for Amin was responsible for the fatwa which landed the former governor of Jakarta, in jail on blasphemy charges. For Mr Widodo to pick for his vice-presidential candidate a man who was not only responsible for jailing the popular Christian governor, thereby delivering a hammer-blow to Indonesia’s reputation for pluralism, but one who also authored edicts restricting the construction of places of worship and the activities of Ahmadiyyas (a sect of Islam widely accused of heresy and persecuted by other Muslims), advocating the criminalisation of homosexuality, supporting female genital mutilation and promoting shari’a by-laws, is something of a setback for moderates in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

Mr Widodo’s defenders will argue that his choice has neutralised the religion question. Nonetheless it is a sign of the times that he felt the need to bolster his religious credentials rather than stick to his true instincts as a pluralist.

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Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

Indonesia’s reputation for religious pluralism has been increasingly threatened over the past two decades. The Ahmadiyya have faced periodic violence and restrictions throughout the country, and on the island of Lombok hundreds of Ahmadis are living in displacement camps because their homes were destroyed in violence.

On 13 May this year, three Christian churches in Surabaya were attacked by islamic suicide bombers within minutes of each other. Shockingly the bombers all belonged to one family: the parents had strapped explosives to their daughters, aged six and eight, and their teenage sons. At least 13 people were killed, and dozens injured. Against this backdrop, blasphemy laws continue to be misused, most recently in the case of a Buddhist woman in North Sumatra, jailed for 18 months simply for asking a mosque to turn down the volume on its loudspeakers.

Religious intolerance and violent extremism are not the same, but as the Wahid Foundation’s Alamsyah M Dja’far told me, “if intolerance increases, the threat of radicalism increases, and that will change the face of Indonesia”. It’s happening already. I was told this month of a Muslim man who asked his 12 year-old son what he had learned at school that day. “We learned about ‘kafir’ [‘infidel’],” his son replied. When his father asked what they had learned about infidels, his son replied simply: “We learned that they must be killed.”

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Such anecdotes are reinforced by footage showing marching children at a kindergarten in east Java, dressed in black robes and niqabs, wielding assault rifle replicas, with the theme “Fight with the Messenger of Allah to Increase Faith and Piety”. As Reverend Gomar Gultom, General Secretary of the Communion of Churches of Indonesia, told me, “the seed of radicalisation has spread throughout Indonesia”.

At its most extreme, intolerance leads to ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide, as we have seen in Burma. When I visited the refugee camps on the Bangladesh-Burma border in March almost everyone I talked to had seen loved ones raped or killed and villages burned.

I met Rohingyas whose eyes had been shot out and limbs blown off. “The Burma army was trying to drive us out of our land,” said Saiful, a young student from Maungdaw who escaped over the mountains. “They made it impossible for us to stay – how could we survive?” My abiding memory, though, is of 16-year-old Khalida, lying paralysed on the floor of her bamboo hut.  She had been shot multiple times in her leg, and was unable even to sit up.

“More than 300 Rohingyas in my village were killed by the Burma army in their attack,” she told me. “My father, two sisters and one brother were killed. My mother was also shot but survived.” Her 18 year-old brother, Mohamed Rafiq, fled their village before the military attacked, and discovered her among hundreds of bodies when he returned. They managed to flee to Bangladesh, where she could receive medical treatment.

Further reading

Why don't we care about Christians in the Middle East?

By Giles Fraser

It’s not only believers who are persecuted. Freedom of religion or belief, as detailed in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a fundamental human right for everyone, of every belief and none, and it protects the freedom to not believe as much as the right to believe. Alexander Aan is an atheist jailed for his beliefs. After writing on Facebook that he did not believe in God, he ended up in jail. There are similar cases in many parts of the world, as the annual report of the International Humanist and Ethical Union details.

In our divided world, intolerance comes from every quarter – from religious extremists towards perceived heretics in their own religion, adherents of other religions, secularists, woman, the LGBT community and others; and from militant secularists and atheists, either in authoritarian regimes or within society, towards those of other beliefs. It comes from all directions – theological, ideological, political and socio-economic. Sometimes it is out of genuine, if narrow-minded, conviction, but more often it is mixed with political motivations, perhaps tied with conflicts over land, natural resources and influence. It tears families, nations and the world apart.

To counter it, we need to promote freedom of religion or belief for everyone, everywhere, and strengthen the mechanisms we have available for this. The United Nations has a Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief, Ahmed Shaheed; the European Union has a Special Envoy, Jan Figel; the United States has an Ambassador-at-Large, Sam Brownback; Britain has recently appointed the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Lord Ahmad, as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on the issue; and countries such as Norway and Denmark have equivalent representatives.

Their roles must be supported, their influence strengthened. And we must strengthen initiatives to counter intolerance and extremism and promote dialogue wherever possible. There are various plans available already – agreed at gatherings at Rabat, Marrakech and Beirut for example – and they should be more widely implemented.

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The unlikely rise of China's 'boss Christians'

By Chloë Starr

All hope is not lost. There is still humanity amid the monstrosity. Within hours of the attacks on Surabaya, people of all faiths came to the churches to offer condolences and help clear up the wreckage. Such gestures took place across the nation. In Jakarta, two young Muslim women handed out roses to the congregation during mass at the Cathedral. It’s an important part of town. Jakarta’s Cathedral stands across the street from Indonesia’s largest Muslim place of worship, the Istiqlal Mosque: it’s symbolic of Indonesia’s pluralism.

In our world today, divided by political and religious tensions, we need to support those who will go to the place of worship of another faith with roses, not bombs. In so doing, we can overcome the hatreds of every stripe that are sweeping our globe. We need to open our doors to our neighbours. The titles of Jonathan Sacks’ books give us a nudge in the right direction: The Dignity of Difference; The Home We Build Together; To Heal A Fractured World. We should heed his hints.