NOBLE, BUT QUAINT

Religious activists deserve our respect (Janet Daley, The Telegraph, January 12th, 2005)

After all these years of fundamentalist apathy, religion has suddenly become a hot issue in British public life. We have the Muslims to thank for this, I suppose. They tend to see their faith as more than a social habit or a nominal adornment, and their ability to make politicians take notice of their sensitivities has made indigenous Christians (at least the more volatile of them) feel like mugs.

The people who allegedly made death threats against BBC executives for showing Jerry Springer: The Opera, are so far out on the evangelical fringe that they scarcely speak for anyone. Indeed, they may scarcely exist except in the mind of some clever BBC publicity manager. But, hyperbole apart, there is a real question being raised here that liberal society needs to answer if it is to survive in the form we know.

How much respect is owed to religious belief by a secular society? Or, to put it another way: is the belief in anything other than tolerance itself (which is to say, no-particular-belief) worthy of reverence? I use the word "reverence" advisedly. It may be true, as I tried to argue here a couple of weeks ago, that we have lost our sense of the sacred in any theological sense, but it is not true that we regard nothing as sacred at all.

Our education system and our human rights legislation are both dedicated to the proposition that toleration of differences - religious, racial and sexual - is the cardinal social virtue. It is more highly valued than being law-abiding (lapses of which may be forgiven on the grounds of social disadvantage), or being unselfish (a dubious inclination in an age when "self-fulfilment" is the aim of life). To fail in almost any area of personal responsibility, as a spouse or a parent or a neighbour, may be forgiven with extenuating circumstances, but a sin against tolerance is without excuse.[...]

...France, a traditionally Catholic country where selling contraceptives was illegal within living memory, has banned schoolgirls from wearing the hijab. Everyone in post-religious Europe is confused and disoriented by a phenomenon that hardly anyone anticipated: the reintroduction into society of people who take religious belief seriously. Not only have Muslims and Sikhs themselves entered into public discourse with a robustness that has caught our liberal institutions on the hop, but, even more surprisingly, they have brought out of hiding an activist Christianity which had been invisible.

To add to the mix, there may be a developing comradeship between these groups. In the demonstrations against the Jerry Springer opera at BBC Television Centre, Christian protesters were joined by Muslims who participated in the ceremonial burning of television licences. There was a fellow-feeling here, partly because Muslims regard Jesus as a prophet, but also perhaps through a shared sense that sincere religious faith was being treated callously by an institution that everyone must pay to support.

So, paradoxically, a form of illiberalism (the prohibition of a play) was actually conducive to a bonding between religious groups that most liberals would want to welcome. In modern Britain, even the sincerely devout are accustomed to making their peace with the secular state. Roman Catholics who oppose abortion recognise the rule of law and confine themselves to lobbying for a change in it, rather than shooting doctors at abortion clinics.

But there is a new kind of challenge here to complacent non-belief, and to anti-religious puerility. Perhaps it is time to accept that the peaceful settlement cuts both ways: if the religious subjugate their beliefs to the will of the majority, then that majority (and those who speak for it) must show them, if not reverence, at least civility.

Ms. Daley speaks for an old and honourable liberal tradition that equated tolerance with personal respect and thus sought to widen the scope of those welcome and equal in civil society. Such requires a clear, common understanding of the distinction between public and private life and a shared commitment not to allow the former to invade or degrade the latter. Sadly, the relentless diminishing of private life by the state, modern social science and a hostile animus towards religion that is growing in direct proportion to ignorance of it makes this notion of tolerance more than a little dated. Far from being a matter of civility and respect, tolerance is now the war cry of those determined to root faith right out of society.