Cameron’s bad faith

This is (some of) what David Cameron had to say about religion and secularism yesterday:

The Bible has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Christian values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that faith can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by faith or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

And this adapted version illustrates how utterly wrong he is:

The Conservative Party has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Conservative values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every party and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Conservative country and standing up for Conservative values we are somehow doing down other parties. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that party politics can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a party, their party can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by party politics or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

Cameron’s abuse of the term “secular neutrality” is striking: it means religious neutrality, not – as he seems to think – moral neutrality. This isn’t a petty point about semantics, much as I enjoy those. I’m actually trying to take him at his word and offer some helpful advice (he’s a regular reader here, and he knows I’m a big fan).

The final sentence of the quote (in either version) is, I agree, the most important. But it’s crippled by the rest.

If what you’re trying to promote is a moral code, a set of values that most of us agree are pretty sound even if we often don’t live up to them, you do not do it by branding those values with a sectarian label that lots of people don’t accept.

Yes, he litters the speech with polite caveats that of course people who aren’t religious can be moral. But his central argument rests on the opposite (and false) assumption that you can’t steer clear of religion without also abandoning morality.

Christianity has been a huge factor in British history. It’s still a big presence, but it’s fallen a long way. In terms of what British people today believe and practise (or don’t), it’s hardly accurate or helpful to say we’re “a Christian country”. If he can’t think of a way to promote morality without talking about “Christian values”, he’s doomed to fail.

C what he means

Damian (who, incidentally, made a point worth taking seriously about my AV explanation) has just tweeted this:


It’s not what you think it is.

(In that post, he asks: “Is the World ever going to grow the fuck up about sex?” I believe I’ve proved that the answer is no.)

What’s new about ‘new atheism’?

HE Baber says (via Ophelia):

Most people I know are atheists. But they're atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God and because they recognise that theological claims are controversial. Unlike the New Atheists they don't think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting.

Ophelia thinks that this is obviously false, and she’s right. But there is something new afoot.

So, what is ‘new atheism’? The phrase, apparently coined in 2006, seems mostly to be used pejoratively by critics, often accompanied by the words ‘strident’, ‘shrill’, ‘aggressive’, ‘intolerant’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘dogmatic’.

But what the term seems to refer to is people (there’s no coherent ‘new atheist’ movement) who believe, and are not afraid to say out loud, most if not all of the following: there is no god; belief in god is irrational; irrational faith is not good for the individual; religion is not good for society; religion is not good for government. Obviously, none of these positions is remotely new. But what’s new is the prominence of a few people taking these positions publicly and robustly (most notably Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – see this article and this video). What’s also new, crucially, is the context in which they do so.

As far as I can make out, ‘new atheism’ is a fairly small cultural phenomenon, existing primarily in parts of the media and academia, which is largely a response to the changed dynamic between Christianity and Islam in Western countries over the last decade or two. The UK story, very roughly, runs as follows:

From around the Rushdie fatwa, Islam in the UK has been increasingly willing to assert itself as a social and political force. Muslims in the country had been and remain mostly of south Asian origin, facing prejudice and often great poverty. Until the late 1980s, though, talk had been more of ‘Asians’ than of ‘Muslims’. This was to change, and of course the religious aspect of their identities became more prominent and more politicised after 9/11.

The political mainstream - mostly Christian and post-Christian in culture if not religion – has mostly responded by seeking accommodation with non-extremists. Islamic organisations were nurtured and listened to eagerly, religious ‘community leaders’ sought out and put on official task forces, and visible efforts made to promote Islam as part of a ‘multi-faith’ society.

Many Christian leaders and commentators, though, didn’t like the way this was going. It seemed to them that their (majority) religion was being ignored, taken for granted and even demoted, and so they made the effort to speak out on political and cultural matters from a more self-confidently Christian perspective. No doubt they had always said such things, but they took advantage of a new climate in which religion – in the form of Islam – had become much more of a talking point, and of a press that was keen for another twist in the story of the decade.

Some of these ‘new Christians’ (as it’s equally absurd to call them) were openly critical of Islam; others were conciliatory, focusing on the need for people of faith to come together.

All of which left people of no faith out in the cold.

The rise of political Islam in the UK – sometimes in the slipstream of extremists abroad, sometimes in opposition to them – presented Western critics of religion with something new. There had been little mileage in taking on Christianity, which had usually seemed an inoffensive, unremarkable default setting: near-omnipresent yet barely visible.

But Islam, brought to public attention through the worst atrocities of its vilest adherents, created scope and appetite for discussing the flaws of religion afresh. For most Brits, it was an alien religion: people wanted to know more, they were inclined to greater suspicion, and it had no stock of cultural goodwill to draw upon.

Then the Christian reassertion came, and the government felt bound by even-handedness to listen to all ‘faith groups’ alike. Religious influence over public policy – most notably in education – grew, and a political fightback became more pressing. Atheists, secularists and humanists spoke out, saying that religion shouldn’t get special treatment in politics, that most ‘religious hatred’ is inspired by rival religions against each other, that people with ‘faith’ aren’t thereby more virtuous or insightful than those without, and indeed that this whole god idea is deeply suspect.

The reaction to that, of course, was righteous indignation at these strident, shrill, aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, dogmatic atheists for daring to disagree without pulling their punches.

There wasn’t a ‘new atheism’. There was a new need for atheism, and for the humanist values and secular politics that often go with it.

The ‘secular bigotry’ con

The Moral Maze last night was the usual mostly pointless blend of point-scoring and bluster, on the relationship between morality and religion (available to listen to for a week). A few things that Melanie Phillips said to Evan Harris as she was cross-examining him leapt out:

You say that religion should not dictate the law, but why do you think that secularism should dictate the law?
…
You think that the law should be entirely and solely influenced by secular values, don’t you?
…
You seem to be implying that secularism kind of occupies a neutral space, that it kind of holds a completely objective, neutral ring, whereas religion is particular, has particular values that are divisive. I want to ask you whether there is such a thing as secular bigotry.

Harris held his ground passably well, but this rubbish is laughably dishonest. Hard to know why anyone, except the Daily Mail types whose prejudices she’s paid to stoke, takes Phillips seriously.

On the first question: secularism is the system whereby no particular religion gets to dictate the law; it’s opposed to theocracy, not religion per se. On the second: the law (in a democracy) should be influenced by the values that people hold; some of these will be religious and some won’t. Secularism means that the latter type aren’t treated as less important.

On the third point: there is and always has been religious disagreement, which often contributes to social and political disagreement. If we don’t want a dictatorship of one side or another, then we’ll have to try to carve out a neutral space, where no one gets advantaged or disadvantaged because they do or don’t adhere to whatever religion. Secularism is the name for this. “Secular bigotry” is the name for a straw man, raged against by those who want to slant the playing field in their own side’s favour.

Secularism is the public compromise between one religion and another, and between religion generally and the lack of it. The implication that the fair compromise would be between secularism and religion is a con; a shoddy con, but a dangerous one all the same.

The (comm)unionisation of feelings

Reader, you are a useless piece of crap so lacking in decency, intellect and humour that you’re not fit to rub ointment onto the genital warts of a rabid cockroach.

Have I offended you? Have I hurt your feelings? Well, hopefully not. But if I have, then that illustrates my point: your feelings are not entitled to legal protection.

Except…

Three straws in an increasingly pungent wind:

(1) Last month, Bushra Noah was awarded £4,000 damages for “injury to feelings”. She had been turned down for a hairdresser’s job that she had applied for on the grounds that she wore a headscarf covering her own hair. She claimed this was religious discrimination, and took it to an industrial tribunal.

Sarah Desrosiers, owner of the salon and cougher-upper of the four grand, said: “I never in a million years dreamt that somebody would be completely against the display of hair and be in this industry.”

(2) Last week, Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar working for Islington council, got a tribunal to rule that she need not conduct same-sex civil partnership ceremonies, on the grounds that her Christian faith holds that marriage (and apparently also secular civil partnerships) should only be between a man and a woman. Requiring her to do that part of her job would be discriminatory.

She said: “Gay rights should not be used as an excuse to bully and harass people over their religious beliefs.” But religious beliefs most certainly should be used as an excuse to bully and harass people over their sexuality.

(3) And now, Constable Graham Cogman is taking legal action against Norfolk Police (via Brett):

His complaint stems from a circular email sent to officers in early 2005 encouraging staff to wear a pink ribbon on their uniforms during Gay History Month. After receiving the email, PC Cogman sent a reply to his fellow officers featuring biblical quotations about homosexuality being a sin. He objected again the following year when a similar email was again sent to officers. He was subjected to a disciplinary tribunal and fined 13 days' pay.

Pc Cogman says: “The blatant support for homosexual rights in Norfolk Police makes being a Christian officer extremely difficult.” (That’s “blatant support” for the law. From the police.)

Norfolk Police says: “The force will not tolerate any form of homophobic behaviour.”

So there you go. If you have membership of a ‘faith group’, then your feelings – if they are related to how your religious beliefs are treated – can get legal recognition. Hurt feelings, especially in the workplace, are increasingly becoming theologically unionised. But these rights can only be claimed by people declaring themselves part of one of these unions (or rather, communions). If your feelings as a believer have been offended, then you’ve been discriminated against. And where there’s blame, there’s a claim!

It’s a curious blend of individualist self-assessment and communalist badge-wearing: you get to decide for yourself when your religious feelings have been hurt, but in order to do so you have to be a member of the right kind of group. Interestingly, the other members of your group don’t have to endorse your pain nor even share the belief that you claim has been attacked. But the group and the supernatural dogmas do have to exist – you can’t just say you don’t like poofs cos they’re dirty.

Brett argues:

It seems it is increasingly impossible for the government to manage comprehensive non-discrimination policies and make space for personal conscience and freedom of association. The only compromise I can think of is this separation of public and private spheres [the public sector must have zero tolerance of discrimination for any reason whatsoever; the private sector can discriminate however they like]. Anyone have a better idea?

There is a better idea: don’t compromise. People, religious or not, shouldn’t apply for jobs that they have freely decided that they ‘cannot’ perform properly because of their prejudices.

That religious people feel that their beliefs need special protection is pitiful; that many of these beliefs veer into bigotry means we have a social menace on our hands.

(And sorry about the cockroach thing. I didn’t mean it.)

Secular liberalism and social theocracy

Aidan Nichols, a Catholic theologian, says that secularism is detroying the fabric of society and that Christianity is vital to make us behave morally. I might have just let this go, but I’m starting to really worry about how much power and influence a Conservative government would give these people, what with David Cameron arguing that “public morality” is the answer to poverty, as he plugs the role that faith groups could play in public service provision, and in turn the C of E making doe eyes at this Tory rhetoric.

Nichols does not, at least not in this article, call for fully theocratic government, nor does he deny religious freedom. But he does insist that the key purpose of the state is “to guard the spiritual civilisation of its own society” – that spiritual civilisation being Christian. I’m going to describe his view as ‘social theocracy’.

He says:

Typically, secular liberalism finds it impossible to base rights discourse on anything other than the parity of each and all as they choose the way of life they prefer to follow, whether their preferences be well-founded in the objective moral order or not.

Well, no: if “the way of life [someone] prefer[s] to follow” involves causing undue harm to someone else, then secular liberalism decries it. And if the social theocrat thinks that his scriptures are a “well-founded” guide to “the objective moral order”, then good luck to him in convincing the rest of us..

Inevitably, this is a recipe for irresoluble quandaries in matters social: how should one adjudicate the preference of a feminist employer not to accept a polygamous employee?

These are clearly the comments of someone who has failed to think properly about liberalism. If polygamy is OK, then there are no grounds for discriminating against polygamists in the workplace. So is it OK? To judge that, we can look at the power relations involved – are the wives being coerced into accepting a husband’s dominant status? Through most of history, marriage has given husbands greater advantage than wives, which is a noxious condition – however many people are involved. Notably, most polygamy in the West today is religiously motivated.

If a group of people are, freely and equally, happy to join in a many-sided relationship – whether this involves a formal contract or not – then, if they injure no more than anyone else’s sensibilities, so be it.

(A libertarian, by contrast, would insist that any employer has the right to choose employees on any basis; the difference between that and liberalism is that the latter has more capacity to take note of power relations.)

Nichols says:

The human poverty of secular liberalism can already be inferred from the results of contemporary secularisation. In modern England, moral discourse is in danger of becoming a parody of infantile egoism. What I want becomes what I need, which in turn becomes my 'right'.

A vicious and preposterous lie. We all know of selfish people who feel entitled to all sorts of things that they merely happen to want – or rather they feel frustrated when they don’t get it, and may rant using the language of rights and entitlements – but liberalism, because it must apply equally to all, places no burden on anyone to satisfy anyone else’s mere wants. Likewise, Catholicism per se places no burden on choirboys to satisfy the wants of a priestly paedophile. Bad people will exploit the customs and practices of whatever culture they find themselves in.

It is true that the moral life begins with desire. But such desire, as Plato argued, is not the desire that leads us to pursue “enlightened” self-interest, in the form of the hedonistic calculus that asks how I can maximise pleasure. The desire that impels the moral life is, rather, desire for the good because it is beautiful.

And who gets to say what is beautiful? Most of us atheists find homophobia for example, a source of very little beauty indeed. Unless we accept that a necessarily human authority should tell us all what is right and wrong, then we must grant that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We must let each other be free to live as best we can. And of course we can learn from each other about what makes a life good. That’s part of – if I may say – the beauty of secular liberalism: social theocrats such as Nichols are free to make their case, and the rest of us are free to take as much or as little as we think worthwhile from it.

But truly, if you want “human poverty”, then social theocracy won’t let you down. Key to the wealth of humanity is our diversity, and a moral outlook that denies this, preferring Bronze-Age dogma to the intricate business of finding mutually rewarding ways to live with each other, is impoverished indeed.

He goes on:

Too much modern human-rights talk elevates freedom over virtue, not realising that any significant freedom – as distinct from my indifferently choosing a vanilla rather than a chocolate-flavoured ice cream – is always freedom for the good.

At this point I start to wonder whether he’s writing such drivel as part of a bet. Because if his Church gets to say what counts as “the good” for all of us, then that’s not “freedom” at all. Can it really be said, for instance, that Zimbabweans have the “freedom” to support Robert Mugabe? Giving people freedom allows them to show and develop and share their virtues. It’s the opposite of telling them what’s virtuous and then corralling them into a pen where they’re “free” to do just that.

And liberalism prevents no one from discerning the difference between more and less “significant” choices. Say you see a man clutch his chest and fall to the ground: you could walk on by, you could take his wallet and run off, you could stop to help as best you can. Does anyone imagine that this is far more morally freighted than vanilla vs chocolate?

And ponder this: how wrong would it be for the state to ban an arbitrary flavour of ice cream, with stern punishments for those found in possession? Some freedoms may seem trivial, but their denials are always serious.

But on one count I agree wholly with Nichols: “secularisation is not an inevitable process”. Indeed it is not. It is fragile and must be defended from its enemies.

The Guardian has recently been running a series of pieces on liberty. I’ll just quote a few as a contrast to Nichols.

Richard Reeves:

"The only freedom which deserves the name," according to John Stuart Mill, "is that of pursuing our own good in our own way". …
Equality before the law, and rights to fair trial were important precisely because they allowed people to live the way they chose, even if eccentric or even disgusting to the majority, so long as they did not actively harm others in so doing.
For Mill, liberty could therefore be threatened as easily by peer pressure, majority opinion and social intolerance, together creating "a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression". The state could coerce and oppress: but so could the citizenry. Society could "issue its own mandates" and when it did it left "fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs also protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling."

Shami Chakrabarti:

As we are essentially social creatures, our rights and freedoms are not isolating or selfish but protect us within the social units in which we thrive – family, trade union, faith community, democratic society, etc.

AC Grayling:

Liberty – individual liberty, the autonomy of the human – matters because no one has the right to dictate to others how they should live, what they should choose, whom they should love, or what goals they should pursue, except if any of these things threaten harm to others, where harm includes limiting others' freedoms to choose. …
Only in a pluralistic dispensation can all [human] variety express itself, and pluralism needs liberty because it is impossible without it.
No one should be the property of another, or of a system. We should each be volunteers in society, and should choose our place in it.

And Martin Bell:

Freedom is a secular state of grace which exists in permanent tension with tyranny and which we can claim for ourselves only if we never, ever, seek to deny it to others.

Muslim schools and the stealth crusaders

Cristina Odone can’t – or just doesn’t want to – tell the difference between licentiousness and secularism:

The school life of Muslim children is the battlefield in which the culture wars between traditionalist Muslims and Britain's secular culture are waged. Muslim children are taught one set of values at home, and a very different one at school: the one demands segregation of the sexes, the other claims anything goes; Muslims require halal or vegetarian food, the secular school will have pork for school dinners, and so on.

If ‘claiming anything goes’ means ‘not demanding segregation of the sexes’, then she’s right. But she doesn’t mean that at all. And if secular schools deny Muslim children a halal/veggie option, then she’s right. But they don’t.

It’s a sneaky trick that the new religious militants are playing: parents who want their children to grow up sharing their own – often intolerant – dogmas should be ‘respected’. Attempts by the state to educate their children in a more tolerant, secular setting therefore actually constitute intolerance of the parents’ views.

Odone sings the praises of Muslim state schools: “Here children are educated in the basics of their faith in an environment in which being a Muslim does not risk earning them pariah status.”

Oh, come on. Kids are bastards: they’ll grant pariah status at the drop of a hat for any of a thousand reasons. I was a swot and I was shy and I was very, very spotty at school. This exposed me to a fair amount of ridicule and unpopularity, but it would have been preposterous to set up a new sort of school for kids like me. Nasty idiots of all sorts are part of life; you learn to deal with them.

And she’s making another classic educational error: children who go to schools of type X do well, so these schools are a good idea. But what happens to the rest of the schools in the neighbourhood? Devoid of Muslim classmates, how will the attitudes of their children fare? Segregating kids and telling them everyone’s equal – with a few token inter-group meetings – cannot compare to the power of showing them, daily and hourly, that they’re separate because they’re different.

Now, going back to Odone’s comment that this issue “is the battlefield in which the culture wars between traditionalist Muslims and Britain's secular culture are waged”. No: the former editor of the Catholic Herald has broader concerns than that.

The fact is that Islam is the battlefield on which increasingly politicised Christian groups are waging their culture war against liberal secularism. Because if religious concessions can be won in the name of a poor persecuted minority (think Rowan Williams on sharia), then logically concessions to Britain’s bigger religions will follow.

Secularists have to know that this is what’s going on, and we have to stand firm to resist it.

Why secular humanists are neither Satan nor Stalin

One of the things I like about clergymen who demand a greater role for religion in public life is that it exposes their claims to proper scrutiny. It reminds us that they’re politicians as much as clerics and that their views can and should be treated as critically as those of any political party.

John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, says:

This religious vision needs once more to become a political vision for all to create a more just society and usher in God's rule of justice upon earth.

In doing this, he forfeits any ability to make the (always-dubious) claim for uncritical ‘respect’ that religion often does. This is no matter of private conscience about which we may cheerfully agree to disagree; he wants his movement to have more say in the running of our country.

Also, a report for the C of E due out today is reportedly critical of the Government, but they’re big boys and girls: they can look after themselves. More importantly, the report (as billed) serves to attack secular politics and humanistic ethics – as does Sentamu’s speech.

At the start, he makes the obligatory concession in noting that “Organised religion… can be both an instrument for good or for great evil.” This contrast, though, skips past a lot of greyer territory. He is not committing great evil in the name of religion. But he is advancing an agenda that’s illiberal and tribalising, even as he imagines he’s being tolerant and inclusive.

As does much archepiscopal politicking, his case proceeds by means of obfuscation and spurious redefinition. He takes ‘liberty’ to mean “the principle of respect for personality in all people”, which is a new one to me. To explain this, he quotes William Temple, one of his predecessors at York: “if each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society”.

This is no explanation at all. A notion of liberty that doesn’t mention being entitled to make one’s own decisions is a failure. Talking about worth in general is fine, but it’s something else. Talking about the worth of “each” is closer to equality than liberty.

But Sentamu’s thoughts on equality are also confused:

Temple believed that everyone had an equality of worth before God, but he did not see that this implied that everyone should occupy the same kind of position in society and be treated in the same kind of way. In his charge to the clergy of Manchester diocese he argued that:
"men are born with different capacities and different gifts, and if you insist upon the principle that everyone must be free to develop his own life [as William Temple did], the result will be an emphasis on Liberty, but there will be no Equality.
Whereas if you begin with an insistence that all are to be counted alike, however different their gifts and powers, then of necessity you will put great restraint upon many of the citizens and possibly on all."
Our current Government is in danger of sacrificing Liberty in favour of an abused form of equality – not a meaningful equality that enables the excluded to be brought into society, but rather an equality based on dictat and bureaucracy, which overreaches into the realm of personal conscience.

An A-level politics class could cut through this in under a minute on a hot Friday afternoon. Temple, as quoted, takes undeniable individual difference as his starting-point, and then notes that equality of opportunity (which he calls “Liberty”) will preclude equality of outcome (which he calls “Equality”). Then he notes that insisting on equality of outcome will require restrictions of liberty.

But hardly anyone – certainly not this Government – believes in equality of outcome. Most people – including this Government – believe in some form of equality of opportunity, and in using the resources of the state to advance this for those who find themselves lacking opportunity. To this end, resources come from tax, which restricts some of the economic liberty of those that pay it. The trade-off is broadly accepted. On the more general matter of equal moral worth, regardless of sex, race and all the other false grounds on which equality has been denied, there is majority agreement.

In some cases, though – sexuality being one in point – there are still too many who deny equal worth. Thus there’s also substantial agreement that the state should use some resources to prevent people from disadvantaging others based on prejudice such as homophobia. This, I am sure, is what Sentamu derides as “dictat and bureaucracy, which overreaches into the realm of personal conscience”. He is less liberal than he likes to think.

And his demands for religion to be more assertive in politics, as well as the overall style of his address, would do as much to divide society as any of his sweeter notions would do to unite it. He speaks as one Anglican addressing others; by preaching to the converted, he shuts out the rest of us and works to replace a national polity that can deliberate on its future as one with a culture in which tribal religions compete for influence.

Human rights without the safeguarding of a God-reference tends to set up rights which trump others' rights when the mood music changes.

This may mean that unless we stick to ancient scripture, then we might change our minds about things, or that relying on supernatural authority is a nice way to justify discriminating against gay people.

Many people do see religion as a bedrock for moral values; but for many more of us, it is the fog that obscures them. Take this quote again: “if each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society”.

The first part serves only to weaken the second. For one thing, a lot of us are sure there’s no God and a lot more are pretty dubious about the idea, which makes it a poor notion to collectively lean on. For another, this transcendent ‘worth’ simply swaps human preference for divine preference as its basis, while never explaining why that should make a moral difference. For yet another, it falsely implies that the only concept of worth that an atheist can have is the crude one of generalised social usefulness, rather than true individual value. And for one more thing, we’re not talking about a god in the abstract but the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, replete with wrath and bigotry, smitings and arbitrary diktats. This narrative does contain some good moral teaching, but it also contains a lot to divert us from more careful and open consideration of what really counts in matters of right and wrong.

Sentamu quotes another of his predecessors, Stuart Blanch, with an analogy for secular humanists: the Devil. He “had chosen to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven; he preferred to be a law unto himself instead of an observer of the law of God; he had decided to pursue his own objectives rather than the objectives which God had prescribed for him.”

The analogy fails so pitifully because there was only one Devil; for him, the alternative to divine service was his own rule. But our situation isn’t like that: there are tens of millions in this democracy of ours, and over a hundred times more around the globe. As a human, I have vital needs and best interests; I am a barometer of what matters. In this capacity, I am equal to the rest of my species. So in saying that there is no greater good than humanity, I am bound to accept that I myself am no greater good than my fellows.

Christianity accepts the rule of God. Where Sentamu errs most fatally is in imagining that abandoning this myth requires us to create a different sort of absolutist power rather than a free and equal community.

As such, his view of collective godlessness is very low: as examples of what happens to “society without religion”, he gives “the Third Reich, the former Soviet Union and the present regimes of North Korea and Burma”. This is too tedious for words; what these are really examples of is what happens when brutal, tyrannical governments crush their people’s freedoms – including, yes, freedom of religion. And governments can be brutal in service of all sorts of ideologies, including religious ones.

Take this one further passage:

Social fellowship teaches responsibility and inter-dependence. It demonstrates the fallacy that people can live disconnected lives, isolated and individualised or atomised from one another. This social fellowship is expressed through family life, school, college, trade union, professional association, city, county, nation, church, synagogue, etc.
It is an understanding that we sink or swim together. That we are bonded together by our common humanity. That we are members of the one race: the human race.

Excellent. But it’s escaped his notice that most of the group types he lists have nothing to do with religion, and that our human unity has nothing to do with being ‘under God’. His myths and his institutions are not all bad, but they are just part of many flawed, human ways of understanding and structuring our world.

I cherish the Church’s right to preach and practise, but its claims for special public status are completely unfounded.

Why the plebs need God to keep them nice

There are two failsafe ways of getting drivel published: the first is to run your own blog (I thank you), and the second is to be a bishop (archly or otherwise).

Michael Nazir-Ali has chosen the latter route, being Bishop of Rochester. His article is a fool’s goldmine, the general spiel being that Western values were built upon Christianity, and that discarding these foundations will lead to selfishness, relativism, the death of the family, violent Islamism and Deal or No Deal.

But in the process of making this argument, he also accidentally undermines it.

Society needs something to unite around, he says, and this “cannot be [done] only in terms of the ‘thin’ values, such as respect, tolerance and good behaviour, which are usually served up by those scratching around for something to say”; he also dismisses “decency and fairness” as “extremely thin gruel and hardly adequate for the task before us”.

Frankly, if everyone did display respect, tolerance, good behaviour, decency and fairness, the world would be dazzlingly better than it ever has been, but Nazir-Ali’s case is that in practice we can’t have these things without some sort of ballast – which can only be provided by religion, i.e. Christianity.

While some acknowledge the debt which Britain owes to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, they claim also that the values derived from it are now free-standing and that they can also be derived from other world-views. As to them being free-standing, the danger, rather, is that we are living on past capital which is showing increasing signs of being exhausted. Values and virtues by which we live require what Bishop Lesslie Newbigin called “plausibility structures” for their continuing credibility. They cannot indefinitely exist in a vacuum.

But a world without supernatural deities isn’t a “vacuum”, it’s a world full of real people with real hopes and dreams and fears and needs and opportunities and relationships. I don’t think that adding theological constructs to common decency does anything other than diminish “plausibility”.

(I find the idea of grounding values in theism to be inadequate and unnecessary, but that’s another story.)

But, as I said, Nazir-Ali undermines his own case. In describing Christianity’s historical role in shaping common values, he notes that a central part of this was driven by “the rediscovery of Aristotle by Europe”:

One of the features of the rediscovery was a further appreciation of the human person as agent by Christian thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas. They were driven to read the Bible in the light of Aristotle and this had several results which remain important for us today.
One was the discovery of conscience. If the individual is morally and spiritually responsible before God, then we have to think also of how conscience is formed by the Word of God and the Church’s proclamation of it so that freedom can be exercised responsibly. Another result was the emergence of the idea that because human beings were moral agents, their consent was needed in the business of governance.

Aristotle (384-322BC) was neither a Christian nor influenced by Christianity. If his writings could explore the notions of individual moral responsibility and government by consent, then why not look to that rather than Christianity? And if it took the rediscovery of his work for this centuries-old religion to stumble upon these notions, then that doesn’t speak too well of its own internal resources.

Since the Roman Empire decided to co-opt Christianity, moral thought in Europe has had to take place in the context of that religion – its position of political dominance explains its influence at least as much as its theological merits. In many ways, it came to act as the repository of the (sometimes brilliant) thinking that took place on its watch.

But things have gone wrong; society is fragmenting. The Bishop blames the 1960s:

Callum Brown has argued that it was the cultural revolution of the 1960s which brought Christianity’s role in society to an abrupt and catastrophic end. He notes, particularly, the part played by women in upholding piety and in passing on the faith in the home. It was the loss of this faith and piety among women which caused the steep decline in Christian observance in all sections of society.

Yep, pesky women. With their wanting to be free to think for themselves and spreading this monstrous idea, it’s all women’s fault – it goes right back to that bitch with the apple.

Nice. As is Nazir-Ali’s rueing “the destruction of the family because of the alleged parity of different forms of life together”. We all know what that means. And “alleged parity” is a pretty good paraphrase of Section 28’s distaste for “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Lovely.

The upshot is that we’re now in a “moral and spiritual vacuum”, and in public debate “crude utilitarianism, public approbation or revulsion (the so-called yuck factor) or the counting of heads are being found increasingly unsatisfactory” as grounds for ethical discussion. So we need Christianity to take a much bigger role in public life.

But that sounds like “crude utilitarianism” to me: support the Church not because it has the truth but because its prominence is socially useful. Crude, and no longer even remotely true.

A bad case for religious privilege

Stephen Law argues (hat tip):

One way in which the secular character of a society can begin to be eroded is if the religious start insisting their views are deserving of special, institutionalized forms of privilege or "respect”.
…
If you agree with some of these claims that religion deserves special institutionalized privilege or respect, cross out the word “religious” and write in “political” instead. Then see if you still agree.
…
If you reject the political versions of these claims, why suppose the religious versions should be considered differently?

Stephen considers (and rejects) a number of grounds on which religious belief might be deemed ‘special’. I agree with pretty much all he says, but I want to look further at one of his proposed reasons, as I think it approaches one significant, yet flawed, argument:

Religion often forms part of a person's identity in a way that their politics doesn't. That’s why we should institutionally privilege religious beliefs.

I think this could have been better put – largely because politics does form a key part of some people’s identities. The pro-religious privilege argument that I think this gets very close to is this:

Political beliefs are inherently public in that they relate to how we are governed, which will necessarily affect others of whatever political views or lack thereof. Religious beliefs, though, while they may well have outward-facing aspects that would relate to others, are at root a matter of private, personal faith.

We cannot privilege all political beliefs in the public sphere, as their policy implications are contradictory; to pick some for special treatment would undermine democracy. So the public sphere should be politically neutral ground as far as is possible.

Religion is different. Yes, there is proselytisation, and also there are times when religious individuals or groups make specifically political claims – but, excepting these, religious faith is a matter of personal and private concern. Certain sorts of attacks on such faith therefore cut deeper than criticism of political views, which are essentially matters for debate. Futhermore, the law should allow for religious people, individually and collectively, to live their personal lives according to their faith – this will relate, for instance, to matters of dress, education and jobs that ordinarily require actions contrary to their faith. So some specific allowances in public policy will be required.

I don’t buy this at all, but I hope I’ve given it a passable hearing.

The (main) reason I reject it relates to something else Stephen said:

very often, religious beliefs are political beliefs. … But why should the addition of a religious dimension to someone’s political beliefs mean that those particular beliefs are then deserving of a special, institutionalized form of privilege or “respect”?

All true. But what we’re looking at here isn’t a case of adding religion to politics; rather, the demand for special treatment in the public sphere is a case of adding politics to religion. It starts from the fact that religion is (at least at root) a personal matter, but then, by seeking exemptions from certain laws, funding for schools, privileged protection from criticism and the like, the personal (to coin a phrase) becomes political. Religion starts making demands on the rest of us.

So, to publicly exploit whatever ‘privileged position’ religion might claim in people’s private identities, it has to abandon that position for a public political stance. That’s why the argument is worthless.

Rowan Williams: slippery, sinister, incoherent – and wrong

When I saw the headline Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’ I briefly imagined a force of Islamic police, relentlessly chasing infidel villains around the country, always getting their man (or, perhaps more likely, their woman) – a sort of cross between the Bow Street Runners, the Mounties and the Taliban.

My second reaction was to chuckle that Rowan Williams had gone and dropped himself in it again, with his woolly, convoluted faux profundities and clumsy lack of common sense and political nous.

Then I decided to go and read the speech.

I’m happy to accept that he’s got one of the finest academic minds in the Church of England, but if so, then it seems that he’s being quite slippery in this speech. Otherwise, the logic of his argument is incoherent.

He notes initially that “our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level”. This bottom level would be that of the single, universal law of the land.

But, he continues, there is a danger “when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity”. He describes “a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice”.

So: within the space of just one paragraph he has slid slyly from our “social identities”, which obviously aren’t constituted or even dominated by our legal status, to “public and political identity”, which is a somewhat narrower but still multifacted notion, and then to what it means “to be a citizen” – which is narrower still.

In one sense, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that our status as citizens is precisely a legal one; in other senses, citizenship might include such things as participation in community and political life, group affiliations and so on.

His argument for legal pluralism (not as bizarre an idea as it superficially sounds) requires that citizenship in the former sense is about much more than legality, though. But it isn’t.

Universal legal equality isn’t the be-all and end-all of one’s place within society, nor (for those of us who take it for granted, at least) is it even close to being the most important. But, just as breathing is to life, it’s part of the essential bare minimum.

Williams, in proposing a role for sharia, need to head off the extremists. He proposes that where communally based “supplementary jurisdictions” might be established, they couldn’t just be based on anything: there must be “a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription” – this is in order to rule out illiberal practices, of which he disapproves.

But the trouble with trying to draw a distinction between religion and culture in this way is that religion is part of culture. There has never been, nor could there ever be, a ‘pure essence’ of Islam abstracted from all cultural considerations. Even from the beginning, scripture of any sort is written within a specific cultural context.

Indeed, he gives the following example:

It is argued that the provision for the inheritance of widows under a strict application of sharia has the effect of disadvantaging them in what the majority community might regard as unacceptable ways. A legal (in fact Qur'anic) provision which in its time served very clearly to secure a widow's position at a time when this was practically unknown in the culture becomes, if taken absolutely literally, a generator of relative insecurity in a new context

You see – the Qur’an itself was addressing a particular cultural context. The “new [modern, liberal] context” in which UK sharia would operate is itself, of course, a particular culture too.

There’s a tendency for some people to regard ‘culture’ as something possessed by minority groups. The rest of us, in our Western mainstream, are just the default setting for human existence. It looks as though this is what’s going on here.

But Williams has another proposal for allowing Islamically based ‘legal’ systems to operate while avoiding a descent into repressiveness:

If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.

It seems fair enough that nobody should be able to find themselves into a position where they’ve lost their statutory rights, therefore sharia courts shouldn’t be able to pass any ruling that infringed these. But that’s not quite what he’s saying. He’s saying that nobody should lose access to their rights, which is a little more sinister. While he does seem to enjoy verbiage for its own sake, this is no mere turn of phrase. Later on in the speech, he says again that communal jurisdictions should not “[interfere] with liberties guaranteed by the wider society in such a way as definitively to block access to the exercise of those liberties”.

The picture that’s subtly being sketched is of a system in which entrants do in fact sign away some of their statutory rights on entering the supplementary jurisdiction, so that they can’t exercise them if the relevant sharia court says otherwise – but they would always be free to leave that jurisdiction for the normal legal system, where they would then regain the ability to exercise the standard set of rights.

But, once any institution has become established, a presumption in favour of it (as the staus quo) develops. There would be a community stigma against quitting such a jurisdiction, an action that would be portrayed by those it serves well as being akin to signing away your Islam - ‘How can you be a good Muslim and yet want to renounce Islamic law?’

Interestingly, Williams quotes the Jewish legal theorist Ayelet Shachar, who discusses:

the risks of any model that ends up “franchising” a non-state jurisdiction so as to reinforce its most problematic features and further disadvantage its weakest members: “we must be alert”, she writes, “to the potentially injurious effects of well-meaning external protections upon different categories of group members here – effects which may unwittingly exacerbate preexisting internal power hierarchies”.

Well, quite. But here are the two key questions: is it the case that in some Muslim communities, patriarchs and other ‘authority’ figures place strenuous social pressure on less powerful, younger and often female members of those communities to conform to illiberal norms? I suggest that the answer is yes. And, if so, do we want to use the legal system to give these people an extra edge in their ability to manipulate and pressurise others? I personally don’t.

I’m happy for people to voluntarily submit their affairs to non-state third-party arbitration for binding resolution – as long as the principles used in the arbitration are consistent with UK law and any tribunal’s procedures are subject to appeal and scrutiny by the legal system proper.

And I’m happy for such arbitration to draw on principles from ancient documents, whether Qur’anic verse or Aesop’s fables, as long as nobody’s statutory rights are thereby eroded.

But I’m not happy for those who want to turn a generally secular state into a network of sectarian doctrinal fiefdoms to be given the legitimacy and tools to push their ambitions forward.

The overwhelmingly negative responses to Williams’s speech – including those of Anglicans and Muslims, and those of a very great many bloggers whose judgement I respect – is heartwarming. Our country isn’t going to the dogs, and it isn’t going to the theocrats either.

Stop playing religion with children’s lives

Those poor clergymen are being persecuted again by the nasty ho-mo-sexuals. I bet some of you ideologically crazed PC liberals thought this adoption stuff was about discrimination against gay people, didn’t you? How wrong you were.

The Archbishop of Westminster explains:

“… to oblige our agencies in law to consider adoption applications from homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents would require them to act against the principles of Catholic teaching.
…
“We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the Church and their own consciences by being obliged in law to provide such a service.”

It’s an interesting sort of discrimination that holds everyone to the same standard, isn’t it? But perhaps he thinks it’d be indirect discrimination, which while not directly targeting certain groups does have the effect of disadvantaging them.

So, for instance, if certain groups refused on ideological grounds to do business with black people, any laws that mandated equal treatment of all ethnicities would in effect be indirect discrimination against these racists and therefore wrong – you see?

Hold on a minute – it wouldn’t be wrong at all! It’s the racism that’s wrong!

So maybe it’s the homophobia (polite, genteel and sympathetic, to be sure, but very much there) inherent in these Catholic teachings that’s wrong, rather than the discrimination against homophobes?

If the Archbishop and his fellow opponents of gay adoption (not just the Catholics, to be fair) can demonstrate why it is that being in a same-sex relationship makes you an unfit parent, then that would be well worth listening to. But in the absence of such arguments that go beyond just waving the Bible around or blathering about the “essential complementarity of male and female”, the presumption has to be that being gay is OK – and therefore that discriminating against gay people isn’t OK.

Martin Newland gets the wrong end of the stick:

“In an age of rampant relativism, secular society cannot understand the notion of an objective moral absolute and its deep claims upon the religious individual.”

It would be rampant relativism indeed if we allowed homophobia within certain sections of society but not others. ‘But look, it’s me! I believe in ghosts! Can I bash the gays now please? I promise to do it while feeling very sorry for them.’ The desire to prevent discrimination on grounds of sexuality is motivated by deep morality rather than modern expedient offence-avoidance.

And the Telegraph is characteristically demented:

“A simple amendment to the regulations has been proposed to stop adherents of Christianity, Judaism and Islam being forced to ‘assist, encourage or facilitate homosexual practices’.”

Aside from the fact that this phrasing prompts images of god-fearing folk being rounded up by the police and marched down to Clapham Common at night to hand out free Vaseline and Viagra, it’s a ridiculous lie. The regulations don’t force anybody to do anything. What they do is to prevent people from discriminating.

The issue here is dishonest moral blackmail: what the Catholic adoption agencies are doing is, to their credit, largely good (helping needy children find loving homes) – but also partly bad (insisting that no gay couple can possibly provide a good home). The insistence that if they can’t do the bad bits then they’ll be ‘forced’ to stop doing the good bits as well is disingenuous responsibility-dodging: they’re free to start treating gay people decently if they want to.

As the Independent says (and everyone claims to agree with the first sentence):

“The welfare of the child is paramount in adoption. If parents can be found who offer a child in care a secure and loving home, then considerations of race, religion, or sexual orientation must not interfere. Gay couples have proved that they are the equal of heterosexual couples when it comes to parenting. Ministers must call the Catholic bishops' bluff - and stand their ground.”

Yes, everyone claims to agree with the first sentence. But some of them go on to play religion with these children’s lives, and then accuse their detractors this of playing politics.

[Update: more blogging on this from Andrew at B4L, Andrew at wongaBlog, Ophelia, Scribbles, Tom H, Neil H, Matt M and very probably a whole bunch of other people as well. Tuck in.]

A nation of humanists

In light of this wittering (which is too tediously dire to even be worth fisking), it’s great to see this poll:

Respondents were asked: ‘If you had to choose just one of the statements which one best matches your view?’

Scientific and other evidence provides the best way to understand the universe. (62%)
Religious beliefs are needed for a complete understanding of the universe. (22%)

Human nature by itself gives us an understanding of what is right and wrong (62%)
People need religious teachings in order to understand what is right and wrong (27%)

What is right and wrong depends on the effects on people and the consequences for society and the world (65%)
What is right and wrong is basically just a matter of personal preference (15%)
What is right and wrong is unchanging and should never be challenged (13%)

What a delight to find myself, proudly, in the moral majority.

(Hat tip: Humanists for Labour.)

‘Doing God’ – er, doing what?

After AC Grayling’s elegant trashing of it, I almost decided to ignore Theos, the new “public theology think tank” and its report, ‘Doing God’ [PDF]. But Grayling’s piece, good as it is, only relates to the report’s foreword, penned by a brace of archbishops. And the response from the National Secular Society is really very knee-jerk, consisting mostly of a general diatribe against religion and not quoting the report once. So I thought I’d have a read.

The report is seriously let down by inclarity. The lack of a summary and a conclusion make it harder to discern what it is actually arguing for (or against), and its failure to define terms is also a self-inflicted handicap.

Its title alludes to Alastair Campbell’s response to a question about Tony Blair’s religion: “We don’t do god.” The report uses this phrase, “doing god” (also “do god”) dozens of times, every single time within scare-quotes. No definition is offered, and so the overall impression is that the author, Nick Spencer, has allowed his thinking to become captured by this soundbite even as he rejects it. A catchy phrase is fine for a throwaway remark, but to make it the foundation of a think tank’s philosophy without fleshing it out is pretty shoddy.

The report does say at the start that the overall aim of “public theology” is “putting God ‘back’ into the public domain”. Theos “seek[s] to demonstrate that religion in public debate is not dangerous or plain irrelevant, but that it is crucial to enable such public debate to connect with the communities it seeks to serve”. It adds: “We… reject notions of a sacred/secular divide.”

This last is a little puzzling, as secularism is about promoting a sacred/public divide. What it presumably means is that Theos rejects this latter division – i.e., it rejects secularism. But it’s not arguing for theocracy. Rather, the most tangible proposal I can discern is that religious people should be allowed to be part of political life and make public comment – directly referencing religion, if they wish, and in their capacity as representatives of religious organizations, if they are.

A modest aim; I believe it was achieved long ago. Perhaps, then, the aim is merely persuasive: to encourage those secularists who scorn explicit religion in politics to calm down, and to encourage those religious believers who fear such scorn to take heart.

This is only my best judgement about what the report might be trying to say, though. The report doesn’t, for instance, say what it means by ‘secular’ or ‘secularism’. The closest it comes is on page 37:

“The word ‘secular’… was adopted in early Christian writings to mean ‘this age’ or, more precisely, ‘confined to this present age that is passing away’. The secular was Christianity’s gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected but could legitimately be challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance.”

Disregarding the etymologically based bait-and-switch that predictably follows (“the secular public square, properly understood… requires an ongoing Christian presence”), we can see that indeed, theocracy is being rejected here. The “authorities” Spencer mentions as legitimately challengeable are the worldly, political ones, not Church leaders. But he does go on to state that “treating religious groups as valid participants within the identity debates to which modern politics is gravitating does not mean failing to scrutinise or criticise them” – so this challengeability will apply to all perspectives, with no one religion being favoured.

This sits very comfortably with secularism – indeed, the refusal to privilege one religion within the public sphere has been a key historical driver of secularism. Perhaps Spencer is really arguing against a Dawkins-style militant atheism, but confusing his terms. He wouldn’t be the first.

But there is a real problem about what Spencer actually means when he supports “religious engagement in public debates”. This arises because he rejects such engagement taking the narrow, sectarian, exclusive approach that it sometimes can. Say that a Catholic is asked to justify her proposals on abortion law reform. “If the answer is the ‘Holy Scriptures’ or ‘the Pope says so’, further public debate is stymied and the public square is divided.”

He endorses Julian Baggini’s view that religious contributions to public debate should be expressed “in universalist and not particularist terms”, arguing that “participation in the public square requires publicly accessible thinking”. In this context, that means that “religious groups… must be willing to defend themselves without recourse to sectarian or inscrutable reasons”.

Well… hear, hear, I think. But I’m a secularist and an atheist; my agreement should give pause for thought. Am I missing something? Is Spencer? Are his clerical backers?

He argues that religious participation in public debate should be publicly accessible, using terminology and indeed reasoning that does not create a divide between the exponent and other participants. But the logic of this is that we replace one form of secularism with another. Spencer opposes the view that people should leave their religious identification at the entrance to the public square, so that debate can take place between secular participants. He proposes instead a view that religious groups should be allowed to flaunt their allegiance in the public square, but before entering it they should, in effect, secularise their own political thinking. Religion can discuss public policy – but not religiously.

If this is really what is meant, then the proposal is a (presumably unwitting) Trojan horse that takes the principles of secularism into religion itself, while putting on a show of making the public square look more religious. On the other hand, if there is disingenuousness afoot, then this all amounts to a PR trick – a way of getting religious groups to make their demands in secular-sounding ways – and the Trojan horse is in fact trotting in the other direction. Stealth theocracy, if you like.

Given the inclarity of the report and its difficulties with terminology, I’m more inclined to think that Spencer simply doesn’t appreciate where his argument leads than to think that this is some sort of sinister, deliberate obfuscation. But that’s just my personal faith position.

Secularism and the good fight

I’m adding my tuppence worth to the discussion involving Shuggy, Norm Geras, David T, Chris Dillow and Matt C, who have made good criticisms of Melanie Phillips’s latest philippic against secularism. She writes:

“[O]nly a strong indigenous faith has the capacity to resist Islamisation. That is why the collapse of Christianity in Britain and Europe and its steady replacement by secularisation is so catastrophic for the defence of the west. The useful idiots who believe that only a secular society can hold off the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad have got this diametrically the wrong way round. Secularisation produces cultural enfeeblement, because the pursuit of personal happiness trumps absolutely everything else. The here and now is all that matters. Dying for a cause, however noble, becomes an absolute no-no.”

I can think of no greater intellectual decadence and moral cowardice than to advocate the state-backed spread of a religion that one believes to be false in order to reap its supposed sociological effects.

If the aim is to avoid falling under the control of “the forces of irrational belief” inherent in Islam, it is an equal and abject surrender to throw ourselves at the feet of another religion on the grounds that its particular doctrinal features are less bad. If human nature were so contemptible that it needed to be controlled by high priests, and mobilised in their war against rival preachers, then why on Earth would anybody think it worth saving?

Phillips approvingly quotes Paul Belien: “Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight.” But this confuses secularism first with atheism and then with a selfish, hedonistic individualism – also slipping amoral relativism into the mix.

To believe that this life in this world is all that there is does not in any way obviate or undermine moral principle, personal virtue and good behaviour.

A godless morality asserts that we matter and that we must treat each other well – not because a supernatural superpower has decreed it so, not because of reward or punishment after death, not because our lives are the property of a creator whose rights must be respected. Our moral worth is inherent and not the sort of thing that could be bestowed or annulled in the name of a deity.

(If you want to raise philosophical quibbles about where right and wrong then come from, then these apply equally to religious moralities. Deities aren’t a secure foundation for morality, as we’ve known since Plato. And we’ve all know since childhood that one can ask “But whyyyy?” until hitting a wall. If we’re talking morality rather than obedience, then theists and atheists are in much the same boat here.)

To say that humanity is metaphysically alone is not to endorse the fiction that each human is socially alone. That we are psychologically bound to each other is deeply entrenched in our evolved nature. And it’s beyond factual dispute that we can and do morally value each other, and stand up to challenge cruelty or alleviate disaster, with or without the dubious benefit of religion. Those of us who know this mustn’t be afraid to shout it out, to give each other moral support that is universal and human; those who try to deny it as a means of promoting their sectarian politics must be exposed.

The fact that this life is my only life means that it’s also the only life of my friends, my family and all the people across the world whose mere existence grants them the right to live it as healthily, securely and happily as is feasible. The understanding that we all matter means that an atheist has much more than their own individual life to value and, if necessary, to fight for.

Norm thinks that the Phillips/Belien claim that secularists would rather submit than fight does at least gesture in the direction of a legitimate concern, that “there seem to be many citizens of liberal societies who can't imagine any serious threat to them, or that these societies may need to be fought for – literally. And that is a mistake.”

It strikes me that Norm’s point is right, but in a way that undermines the argumentative use to which Belien and Phillips wish to put it. Yes, there is a real challenge to tolerant, liberal secularism from militant Islamism, and this surely has been under-appreciated by much of the liberal left. And furthermore, there are some cases in which Islamists will have to be fought, literally, with the use of force.

But these are cases involving groups of jihadi terrorists (themselves a small subset of Islamists) and/or fundamentalist theocratic movements trying to tyrannise whole populations. Given the small scale of individual groups of the former sort, and the overwhelming likelihood that the latter threat will not arise in militaristic form in Western countries, the appropriate defence is immune to any cowardly hedonism among the public. Even if it is true that individual secularists/humanists/atheists are loath to go to war themselves to defend their way of life, this is beside the point. The nature of the threat is not such that Western societies will be engaged in a total war. There won’t be mass mobilisation and conscription. The fighting that does need to be done will be carried out by the professional armed forces, who are quite capable and courageous enough.

As for the more mundane (but still important) cultural challenge posed to secular societies by strident Islamism, the right response will be social and political rather than street-to-street combat. Perhaps I would indeed be defeated by my own fear in the face of physical violence, but – to mix clichés – in the battle for hearts and minds, the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a campaign of ideas and arguments.

Secularism is not about hating religion, nor even about promoting atheism; it’s about freedom. It comes from a recognition that religious diversity (which is inevitable) leads to either massacre and persecution or peaceful agreement to disagree. If we act as though we’re itching for a fight, then that’s what we’ll get. If we try to persuade others that tolerating difference is the only way to avoid a mutual bloodbath, then we can isolate and weaken those who really do want the fight. Phillips uses the fine phrase “the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad”. And yet she tries to make all of Islam the enemy. In doing so, she alienates potential support for tolerance and freedom.

It has struck me from time to time that when you try to draw a line aggressively, you’re likely end up on the wrong side of it. On 9/11, al-Qaeda repelled most Muslims into sympathising with the US. The Iraq war (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan), Bush and others helped make extremism a more attractive form of resistance.

Violent fights are sometimes necessary. But if you’re careless in the way you pick them, your enemies will multiply. The greatest threat to extremist Islamism will come not from atheists or Christian, but from Muslims who would rather just get on with their own lives than control those of others. For secularists to deprive ourselves of these allies by acquiescing to strident Islamophobia would be to make the mirror image of the fatal mistake that Phillips mistakenly diagnoses.

[Update: I've also just spotted this from the Ministry of Truth.]

25 to 0 in 8 days

A Friday question: would it be better to describe the government’s attitude to religious schools as craven or pusillanimous?

It’s a toughie. They both have a good ring to them, and semantically they’re pretty close. I think craven conveys contemptibility better, but then pusillanimous probably has more connotations of being self-serving.

Either way, pah.

This area of policy isn’t the government’s most serious failure, but it is the one that pisses me off the most. Especially as it’s my bloody party! Well done Alan Johnson, you’ve managed to make Kenneth Baker look good.

Indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination

Back at university, a couple of friends and I set a few cryptic crosswords for the student rag. One of my more awful clues was: God-fearing feline addict? (8)

Anyway, the chairman of the Catholic Education Service, Vincent Nichols, has come out fighting [free registration required] against the proposal for faith schools to have to give a quarter of places to children from other religions or none. (I’m sceptical of the idea myself, but for different reasons.)

Let me try to interpret the Archbishop’s argument as best I can, although I caution you that theological exegesis was never my strong point (I went to a brain-rotting secular comp, you see).

“The amendment is… deeply insulting of the reality and achievements of Catholic schools. … The intended amendment is based on the assumption that Catholic schools, as they stand, are socially divisive. The evidence is the opposite”

It’s not our fault. Any divisiveness must all be down to those other religions. Did you know that some of them aren’t even true? We obviously deserve special treatment.

“the coercive measures being proposed by the Government will not win co-operation.”

We will not tolerate the government telling us how to spend the taxpayers’ money it gives us. We will confront them over this.

“Confrontation will not build social cohesion.”

Ah. Um… But miiii-iiiiss, he started it…

“Those who understand Catholic education know very well that it is an integrated endeavour, centred on the person of Christ, whose Spirit informs the school and whose teaching is embraced and explored in every aspect of its life.”

Hello children. Let me tell you about Jesus – but I’ll do it through the medium of dance. And maths. And biology.

“The introduction of ‘admissions requirements’ is a Trojan horse, bringing into Catholic schools those who may not only reject its central vision but soon seek to oppose it.”

Fear the militant entryist heathens! They will sacrifice their own children’s education to destroy the ethos of my precious schools!

“Catholic schools, on average, already welcome 30 per cent of their pupils from other Churches, faiths or none.”

This in no way undermines the rest of my case.

“Is it really sensible to assume that a new Catholic school could be planned on the projected needs of the Catholic community – for that is what happens – only for a quarter of those places to be taken away from that group of parents?”

A school that only discriminates 75% in favour of Catholics would be discriminatory. Now, I understand there are some people who aren’t Catholics but think they still should be able to send their children to their local schools. What these people refuse to see is that Catholics are more important. Can we have some more money now?

Losing faith in schools

The proposal that new faith schools should admit a quarter of pupils from outside the school’s official religion means that things might get worse less quickly. It depends on how firm the rules turn out to be: if they’re just aspirational guidelines, then nothing much will happen; but if they’re rigid quotas that must be met, then they could well act as an obstacle to the creation of new faith schools.

Or we might be treated to the spectacle of religious families pretending to be atheists in order to sneak little Jimmy or Jamal into the godless 25% for schools that are over-subscribed. (How would you do that? Walk around carrying the latest Richard Dawkins under your arm? Set up a 24-hour Sabbath webcam, showing you lounging on the sofa and definitely not going out to pray? Take a bacon sarnie/can of lager/half-empty pack of condoms in when you go to meet the head?)

Certainly, taxpayer-funded schools should not close their doors to children from families lacking the right religion; that’s a fundamentally unfair piece of discrimination. To say that such children cannot go to their local state schools on these grounds shreds the principle of freedom of religion. Imagine if our taxes supported (for lack of a better phrase) ‘faith healers’ out of the NHS budget, who could turn away patients not holding the appropriate dogma. Not a great idea.

So if faith schools are publicly funded, they must be open to the public. Here, though, another question arises that can’t be answered by 25% infidel quotas. These schools are championed for their ‘ethos’: a character, attitude and outlook that draws on a school’s religion. But how do children not of that religion fit in? How do they understand their place in a school community whose defining feature excludes them? Now, I daresay talented and considerate staff can sensitively handle these cases, and students from the religious majority can be encouraged to accept the others as equals. And this may work, to a degree.

The question goes deeper, though. If a child need not partake of religion to benefit from and contribute to the school’s ethos and community, then what role is religion really playing? Is it necessary for instilling the common basics of right and wrong, social solidarity, responsibility and respect? The many successful secular comps give us the answer: of course not. Ethos and good education don’t require supernaturalism.

The role of religion in faith schools is primarily to produce believers – more specifically, to produce distinct groups of different believers.

But a case for allowing impressionable young minds to have an open, unbiased education can generalise beyond religion: I’d oppose atheist schools or Labour Party schools. While such institutions might share my beliefs, it’s simply not the job of a school to promote particular social, political or religious ideologies to children over and above a basic citizen’s ethic of common decency. The importance of teaching such an ethic is overwhelmingly agreed, but straying from it in any direction means that you’re no longer preparing children for leading their adult lives; you’re steering them towards leading lives like yours.

And then there’s the segregation issue. Outside Northern Ireland, this has only raised its head recently, with particular reference to Islamic schools. This can suggest that somehow Islam is ‘the problem’ here. But this is just an awkward fact of demographic change. In a relatively homogeneous society, some faith schools here and there are unlikely to cause many divisions. But nowadays, Britain is much more diverse – and better for it, I’d say. However, the very large overlap between religion and ethnicity means that faith schools are much more likely to be de facto race schools.

It’s true that people tend to cluster together on these grounds anyway, alas, and many comprehensives have become disproportionately mono-racial. But there’s no reason for education policy to push even harder in this direction. And this segregation isn’t specifically the fault of Muslims: ‘voluntary apartheid’ is a tango that takes two (or more).

People understand, I think, that when you build up your group as an ‘us’, there’s a risk that you turn others into a ‘them’. But what’s far less remarked-upon is that creating an ‘us’ makes you a ‘them’ in the eyes of others. The relevance here is that faith schools may well take care to educate their students in the ways of other religions and cultures; they may well strive to produce liberal, tolerant, open-minded children; they may even take a minority of children from outside the religion, so that the students can live diversity rather than just being told about it. But however such an individual school is run, its existence automatically affects other schools nearby.

Say a Sikh school is set up in a town with a significant Sikh minority, most of whom then decide to send their children there. Now, the neighbouring schools suddenly become almost completely Sikh-free. How can the pupils at those schools help but feel segregated from these children who would otherwise have been their classmates? The town’s Sikh community will come to be viewed from the outside as just that: a different community, separated by choice. They’ll become treated more and more as outsiders – a form of treatment that human nature will tend to reciprocate.

I think faith schools (state or private) are a bad thing, full stop – even if they gently promote rather than forcefully indoctrinate, even if they keep biology lessons based on science, even if they encourage pupils to find out about and respect other religions.

The idea that religious schooling is the best way to build communal spirit and inculcate good behaviour is really quite saddening. It shows a fundamental lack of faith in humanity: in our ability to accept and value each other without theological props, to build bonds of trust and respect without forming sectarian groups, to be, if you like, good for goodness’ sake.