Is It Rightful To Blame Religious Communitarianism?

The willingness of a group of people to secede from mainstream society is a phenomenon observable across five continents. Most often this withdrawal from the rest of society can be linked to religion, but not always. To list some examples, the secessionists could be Amish, Orthodox Jews, Salafists, or survivalists.

Why is that? Mainly because they are in opposition with the general logic of the country where they live.This should be a source of thinking for the very countries instead of putting the blame on these groups. Instead of blaming these groups, the countries in question should think about the root causes causing this.

One major reason for this secessionism is a gap between two approaches: a country is by definition non-essentialist whereas an individual or a group of people sharing the same belief could choose to follow an essentialist life. What is essentialism? It consists basically in getting rid of the non-essential in order to focus on a path, on the essential, on what matters the most to someone. Thus, for instance if one believes technology is an obstacle to his or her spiritual life, he or she needs to put him/herself aside from those distractions as well as people who believe progress is not an issue and celebrate it. At first glance this disagreement seems harmless; there are simply two people  have opposite goals and ambitions are opposite. However, it does challenge the integrity of a State itself since its vision and rules – and even its laws sometimes – are not applied in every part of its land. It might cause trouble if this State wants to impose its non-essentialist approach forcing and  force people to interact with other members of the society. Either the country acknowledges the differences of its people and defines itself as multicultural or multimodal – having different ways of living in a society – or if not it will come to a head-on collision with the unwilling citizens (as we may have already witnessed in a few countries).