What’s a decent
secular liberal supposed to do for a daily newspaper these days? A refugee from
the indiscriminately pro-faithist and worryingly fundament-apologist Guardian,
I’ve recently found uneasy shelter in the pages of the Times. But this week has seen
the latter paper launch a full-scale, confected moral panic about an entirely imaginary threat to organised religion.
Last Saturday the Times’
front-page headline (£) screamed about ‘Christianity on the rack’. Leave aside for
one moment the unfortunate metaphor (historically, it has tended to be
Christians who have used the actual rack to extort confessions from heretics
and unbelievers). What on earth had happened, one wondered? Had the church been
disestablished, the bishops kicked out of the Lords, door-to-door preachers
arrested, or Salvation Army bands banned from town squares? No. A judge had
told a town council that opening meetings with specifically Christian prayers was
inappropriate, when councillors these days were members of all religions and
none (a ruling that, paradoxically, would hardly provoke a ripple in most parts of the
ultra-religious US, where this kind of separation of church and state is
written into the constitution as a guarantor of religious freedom).
The Times headline
was disingenuous to say the least – downright dishonest would be nearer the
mark – in its claim that the judge had banned ‘public prayers’, as if this were
some kind of ominous foreshadowing of a totalitarian future. There was nothing
in the court’s ruling barring Christians, or anyone else for that matter, from
praying in the street, or even in shops or restaurants, if they wanted to. The judgement related specifically
to official political meetings, and was designed to protect the rights of
non-believing representatives (presumably the majority these days, if opinion
polls are to be believed).
And then today,
when you’d think a serious paper would have better things with which to lead
its front page (continuing repression in Syria, anti-bailout riots in Greece, that sort of
thing), we have a story (£) about the Queen, no less, riding to the rescue of a ‘beleaguered’ Church, beneath a photograph
of Rowan Williams bowing gratefully to the monarch. Apparently Her Majesty has
made a speech defending the role of the good old C of E in public life, ‘after
a week in which religion has come under intense attack’.
Apart from the
National Secular Society’s court victory over council meeting prayers, of what
did this ‘intense attack’ consist? Well, it seems that on Tuesday, the Richard
Dawkins Foundation, which we are told ‘propagates a vehement atheist agenda’
(note how the word ‘atheist’ is rarely used by pro-faithist commentators
without some kind of hostile qualifier: if not ‘vehement’ then ‘militant’),
published a survey ‘claiming many people who identified themselves as
Christians did not take a literal approach to Christian doctrine and the
Bible’. Well, knock me down with a feather. Oh, and Baroness Warsi ‘defended
religion during a trip to the Vatican to meet the Pope’. And, er, that’s it.
So a judge
defending the rights of non-believers not to have religious rituals imposed
upon them in their workplace, a bunch of atheists quoting what people actually think about religion, and a publicity-seeking politician actually defending religion – all this amounts to an ‘intense attack’? And
doesn’t the Queen weighing in sort of make the secularists’ case for them:
that, far from beleaguered, the Church remains at the heart of the
Establishment, its official leader none other than the head of state?
The piece was
written by Ruth Gledhill, the paper’s normally level-headed religion
correspondent (well, compared to the Buntings, Odones and Armstrongs whose
bylines adorn the faith-related papers of other broadsheets), and I was
inclined to blame the skewed agenda of the paper’s editorial team for the overblown
headline and the tendentious slant of the piece. But then I saw that Gledhill had written a
‘commentary’ piece inside today’s paper, under the headline ‘The new atheists have
succeeded only in uniting faiths against them’. It’s basically the same thin
gruel (a dash of Dawkins, a burst of Warsi) rehashed into a pro-faith and
anti-secularist polemic.
What is one to
make of all this? Well, firstly, I ought to re-state the usual personal
caveats. I am by no means anti-religion. I had a religious upbringing, was
quite devout in my youth, and retain a deep fascination with and on-and-off
attraction to faith, which somehow rubs along with my wishy-washy liberal
humanism. Having got that out of the way, I’d like to make three points.
Firstly, I think
it’s absurd to claim that religion in general or Christianity in particular is
under attack in this country. The Church has an enviably prominent role in
public life, is well-represented in the media and public prints, and believers
of all stripes enjoy complete freedom of belief and practice. If there’s any
beleaguering going on, it’s the fault of the Church itself – of its failure,
for good or ill, to hold on to mass appeal in an age of increasing
secularisation, declining religious practice and diversification of beliefs.
Secondly, to claim
victim status, to cry wolf at every minor slight or offence against faith,
hardly seems in the spirit of the Christian gospel, as I understand it. Did Jesus
exhort his followers to claim constitutional positions, privileged media
access, or special rights? Did he say, when you are persecuted for my sake,
complain about it endlessly in the press? Or did he, on the contrary, advise
believers to expect persecution, even to rejoice in it? Surely a church that
whinges at every sign of opposition is an unhealthy, declining church: a
vigorous, vibrant body of believers would surely welcome debate and challenge
as an opportunity to show its mettle?
Thirdly, the call
for the followers of different faiths to make common cause in defence of
religion, while sounding nicely harmonious and ecumenical, is actually quite
worrying. This week has seen the distinctly odd spectacle of a British Muslim
politician (Baroness Warsi) defending Christianity in a speech at the Vatican. Even the Queen’s
speech (in a passage which I suspect was supplied by her spiritually eclectic
son and heir, who has expressed a wish to be ‘defender of faiths’, plural) argued that
the job of the Church of England was not to ‘defend Anglicanism to the
exclusion of other religions’ but ‘to protect the free practice of all faiths
in this country’.
This is all very
well, but pro-faithists like Baroness Warsi want believers of different faiths
to unite against the imaginary and
loosely-defined bogeyman of secularism. But what if some Christians, for
example, feel their values are closer to those of their secular humanist neighbours
than of some other religions? Elsewhere in today’s Times, we read claims
that the leader of the Scientology cult, David Miscavige, ruled by terror and
subjected dissenting employees to torture, harassment and abuse. Should
Anglicans see their role as defending the right of Scientologists to practise this kind of religion freely? And as for the ridiculous claim that the freedom of religion
is under threat from atheists and secularists, I can do no better than quote
from Douglas Murray’s characteristically spot-on riposte to Baroness Warsi:
(It) is so much easier to blame the diminishment of Christianity in Britain on ‘militant’ and 'totalitarian’ secularists. All this despite the fact around the world today we do not see any secularists, in the name of separation of church and state (or mosque and state), murdering or attempting to murder a believer for their differences of opinion. What we do see, around the world every single day, is Christians being killed for their beliefs. And the people who are doing the killing are notably not secularists.
The real, rather than imaginary danger to believers comes not from secularism but from others acting in the name of religion, and as always, the best guarantee of continuing freedom of religion is a secular constitution and the secular rule of law. In their obsession with a hyped-up secularist threat, the Church and its pro-faith supporters are in danger of creating imaginary enemies, and choosing the wrong allies.
