We’ve been on a bit of a learning curve as a nation over the last few days, it seems to me.
On Thursday the headlines screamed “Archbishop of Canterbury says Sharia Law in UK is unavoidable”. The immediate image this conjures up - and was presumably meant to, by the headline-writers - was of a thousand years of English Law being swept aside for gratuitous beheadings and cuttings off of hands: Magna Carta out, Abu Hamza in.
It must be said that a second’s thought by anyone intelligent would have suggested that it was unlikely this was what the Archbishop of Canterbury was really suggesting - I think most people think he may be a bit academic, mystic and generally incomprehensible, but not completely barking.
Read the rest of this entry »
I see that if they can tear themselves away from the works of J K Rowling, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown, MPs will apparently be reading Richard Dawkins on the beach this summer.
I haven’t read Dawkins’ book, but I have been very impressed with a report “Doing God”, A Future for Faith in the Public Square that I’ve just discovered from a thinktank I hadn’t heard of before, Theos. It seems to me an extremely sensible and useful contribution to the debate about the proper role and contribution of faith to public debate (or the ‘public square’, as the paper calls it).
In particular, its exposing of the popular idea that a Bishop giving a view on anything affecting public life is somehow “extra-curricular”, and merely a “brief diversion from the clergy’s main roles of singing and wearing frocks in public” rather an expression of one of the core features of faith, is marvellously refreshing (and certainly far more effective than my own inadequate attempt to try and say something similar).
This is an issue which as the author, Nick Spencer, makes very clear, is not going away - indeed he argues convincingly, the very opposite.
I don’t agree with everything he says - particularly some of the questions he poses about the goal of freedom, and the relationship between the liberal state and the way individual citizens frame their own desires and goals.
However overall this report seems to me to put the general position on this important debate, as well as opening up some specific debates, very well and accessibly in today’s context, and I recommend it.
We are coming to know that new Lib Dem member Laurence Boyce has a pull-no-punches style of writing, but I think his latest opinion piece on Lib Dem Voice is a very regrettable attack on religion.
As it happens I don’t think I agree with a single one of the views that he attributes to Cardinal O’Brien - even the more widespread ones such as opposing abortion, let alone some of the more exotic ones. And I am not a Catholic.
So I don’t at all seek to defend those views - but what I find very regrettable is the attack on religion which his comments have prompted Laurence to launch.
It is very easy to say that religious people should not speak on matters which are part of public debate, but Christianity - and all other faith systems that spring readily to mind - are in fact precisely concerned with right and wrong. To argue that religious people should say nothing about moral matters of public interest, which abortion clearly is, is really to argue that religious people should not think or say anything at all. So although I don’t think this was Laurence’s intention, arguing that faith groups should keep silent on moral questions, is effectively arguing that they should not do anything.
Surely freedom of belief (whether religious, political, or anything else) is something I hope we all fundamentally believe in - especially Liberal Democrats.
Read the rest of this entry »
I went this evening to a very interesting lecture by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.
His title was ”˜the Church in public life’ and he used it to make a powerful claim for the right of people of faith to contribute to public debate.
He started by acknowledging that the Catholic church had had a far from innocent history in using the instruments of the state to enforce Catholicism and said he thought that the statement by the Vatican II Council in the 1960s that it would not do so again was one of the great steps forward in this area of the last century.
But he went on to make a very strong case for the problems of the trend towards enshrining secularism, which is in danger of being what he called ”˜the new intolerance’. British public debate likes to be ”˜neutral’ on the question of religion in public life - but that too often that means excluding a religious view, which is not neutral but aggressively secularist - and so denies the rights of religious people to have their views as much as it does the right of anyone else to be non-religious. And as he pointed out, freedom of religion doesn’t just mean the right not to be persecuted for your religion (which as he pointed out, Catholics and Jews were in Britain until remarkably recently), but the freedom to live out those principles in your life - as long as it doesn’t harm others. And he was right too that British Christians are often somewhat shy and, well, British in asserting that right - in comparison to the ”˜rigeur’ of French Catholicism he thought the British version somewhat ”˜mushy’!
Read the rest of this entry »