Culture adequacy
Cultural adequacy is originally a legal term that is formed from the nouns "culture" and the legal technical term " adequacy " derived from the adjective "adequate" .
The requirement of "cultural adequacy" was formulated in the so-called tobacco ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court in order to set practical limits to the religious freedom guaranteed by the constitution . According to the Basic Law, freedom of religion should only be guaranteed insofar as it is compatible with the ideas of modern civilized peoples. This "culture adequacy clause" remained controversial for various reasons and is today probably not considered by the majority as "part of the constitutional concept of religion".
The question of cultural adequacy is currently relevant again due to the increased presence of supporters of non-Christian world religions in Germany. In view of this relatively new situation, Peter Badura asks whether the demand for ideological neutrality of the state implies the schematic equal treatment of all religions, whether differentiations are not allowed that are based on the actual differences between religions and worldviews and are therefore not irrelevant.
Above all, the problem area of Islamic religious education raises the question of the extent to which the state has to pay attention to culturally appropriate teaching content.
The problem of cultural adequacy has also been addressed from a non-legal cultural-scientific point of view. If, first of all, one assumes that religions cannot be reduced to the status of a private matter, but that, due to their content, they are factors that determine culture, and if one also suspects that Christianity has strongly shaped the culture of Europe and America, While the basic demands of the European Enlightenment are possibly inspired by Christian ideas, then it seems justified to demand evidence of cultural adequacy from representatives of other religions before they e.g. B. the possibility of school religious instruction is granted. This is countered by the widespread understanding that different religions practically do not differ in their moral consequences, while the dogmatic content is a purely private matter that cannot be talked about in public. This monotheistic and secular understanding of religion, which corresponds entirely to the Enlightenment and is exemplified in the "Ring Parable" from Lessing's Nathan the Wise , can be asked whether it actually does justice to the reality of the different religions and their consequences.
Kofi Annan puts universality before any cultural relativism or cultural adequacy: " Human rights are not alien to any culture and are anchored in all nations. ... It is the universality that gives human rights their power."
Individual evidence
- ↑ So Thorsten Anger, Islam in school . Legal effects of religious freedom and freedom of conscience as well as state church law in the public school system. Münster contributions to jurisprudence 152, Berlin 2003, p. 69f .; 88
- ↑ Contribution by Peter Badura in: The Basic Law before the Question of Religious and Philosophical Pluralism , in: Günter Baadte (ua) (Ed.), Religion, Recht und Politik , Graz (ua) 1997, pp. 39-61 (pp. 60).
- ↑ See the above-mentioned work by Anger, who of course answered this question negatively, also Simone Spriewald, Legal issues in connection with the introduction of Islamic religious instruction as a regular subject in German schools , Juristic Series Tenea Vol. 33, Berlin 2003 ( Memento des Originals dated January 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 178f.
- ↑ For the following, see Meik Gerhards, Golgatha and Europe or: Why the Gospel is one of the lasting foundations of the West, Universitätsdrucke Göttingen, Göttingen 2007 (PDF; 1.1 MB).
- ↑ Cf. the "preliminary remark" in the above-mentioned essay by Gerhards
- ↑ Kofi Annan, Their Universal Validity Gives Their Power to Human Rights , Declaration on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1997
